I was in the L.A. area, more specifically Pasadena, the day Michael Jackson was sent to the hospital and evidential died
. I was in Pasadena for the American Baptist Churches Biennial and I could not believe the outpouring of interested in MJ’s death. As I walked around the streets of Pasadena, I heard the restaurants, shops, and stores playing every Michael Jackson song her produced. Normally, people only played “Thriller” during Halloween, but in Pasadena I must have heard it about 96 times in 3 days. I was in a session at my conference where the speaker was using Twitter.com and it was not working because people were blogging about MJ on Twitter, which shut the site down. The internet slowed down the day MJ died. Everyone who was at a computer was googling MJ.
On the internet, on TV, and in the media, MJ’s death caused our culture to freak out. What is being called the “Michael Jackson Effect” has taken our culture over. For the internet and media, the MJ effect was the slow down of the internet and the ability for MJ news to take over every media story. Workplace productivity had to have drop to an all time low.
