Several weeks after the death of Michael Jackson – the world is still a twitter with the news, especially after his memorial ceremony yesterday. Matter of fact – Twitter reported an increase of more than double the tweets per second it normally enjoys on the day he died. In the NY Times Bits blog, the author references a study by Compete, a Web analytics firm based in Boston, which crunched some numbers and came up with a few data points to help illustrate the surge.

• It found that there were 9.98 million queries for the terms “Michael” and “Jackson” across the top 25 search engines and news and social media sites in the week ended June 27. Compete said that was more than 24 times the number of queries for information using the terms “Iran” and “election” during the week before.
• Google, which said that its systems initially interpreted the spike in searches as an attack, fielded the most requests, handling 61 percent of the queries.
• During Jackson’s memorial over 9.7 million people watched CNN’s live stream, “Michael Jackson” took up all 10 of Twitter’s top trending topics with roughly 80,000 tweets per hour and Facebook recorded over 6,000 status updates with his name per minute.

Cnn.com enjoyed the second highest traffic of the year behind the inauguration, and Yahoo! news surpassed its inauguration coverage by over one million visitors. Am I the only one slightly appalled at this? In the interest of full disclosure I have read some of the stories of Michael Jackson’s death and I did watch the one minute video that was just released by the company promoting his upcoming tour. But, several weeks of nonstop coverage? Really? And it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop anytime soon. It really has cemented the fact that we are a society based on the entertainment value of things. That is what decides news and coverage.

I did a little research to try and put this in perspective for myself and this is what I found: an average of 6,744 people die in the U.S. every day. Worldwide, the number is approx. 153,400. Of those deaths, 24,000 people died of hunger (18,000 of those are children under age 5). In the U.S., approx. 1,540 people will die from cancer every day this year and five children die from abuse and neglect each day. The chances of each person dying in the world are 100 percent. It is going to happen. We don’t know when, where or how, but it will happen. Yet, the words that surrounded the death of Michael Jackson were “shocking” “tragic” “sudden death” and “cut short.”

I don’t know about you, but no one has guaranteed me any length of life. We are all one heartbeat away from eternity. Death is a mystery, but does the death of one person warrant three weeks of news coverage? In a society that is fascinated with Hollywood, the answer is clear.