THESE ARE TWACKO TIMES...

Jackson's death has powered his videos up the iTunes chart, crashed websites and jammed up Twitter. Jackson's is the first super-celebrity death since Twitter became a mainstream medium, and perhaps predictably, Twitter is all about MJ today (is it too soon to coin 'Twacko?').

Can a medium which hinges on brevity really help us to deal with grief? It works perfectly for live, granular reporting and raising awareness - as we've seen repeatedly with Middle Eastern politics - but how much catharsis can you achieve with 140 characters? Arguably, you can achieve quite a lot. For a start, you have to pare down your message to an economical minimum. There is no room for anything other than getting the most important stuff off your chest, saving us all from too much hyperbole. Moreover, by appending your tweet with a few choice hashtags, you connect with other people that you know feel the same way.

What's really interesting here is that while most networks are based on digital extensions of 'real' relationships, Twitter lets us connect on the basis of consensus or shared interest. The knowledge that people feel the same way as you is all the more resonant when you know nothing about those people (other than a nickname and a 150 x 112 thumbnail image). Achieving an emotional connection or a sense of shared conviction with our Weak Ties is all the more powerful because suddenly these people who seemed so indistinct and often so far away, are just like us. It's like a big hug, all around the world...

Already though we're getting unrelated posts using the Jackson hashtags to try and drive traffic. Perhaps not quite as shockingly ill conceived as Habitat's discounts riding to prominence on the coattails of Iranian unrest, but still disappointing to see.