What's the Big Deal?

Everyone I know cared about Michael Jackson's death. He was one of those stars who somehow managed to just totally transcend the little niches that now make up our lives. But our lives used to have many more stars as bright as Jackson. That star system is now dying, if not dead.

This article from the New York Times discusses how Jackson might be the last universal pop star. Why? Our niche-filled, fragmented, personalized new society just doesn't have room for people as big as Jackson any longer:

The pop-idol field — like every field that can lead to super-fame — is more crowded than it has ever been, and the variety of routes to stardom keep growing. When the Beatles were on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, more than 70 million people watched, that is, more than one-third of the entire population of the United States. Yes, the Beatles were that good. But at the time, there were three networks and the radio. No Facebook, Twitter, video games, movie multiplexes, Sirius radio, malls or a dozen other potential drains on an audience.

I've personally noticed that the definition of a "big deal" is now unbelievably varied. The World Series used to be a big deal. Now it's just something that baseball fans pay attention to. The NBC Thursday night lineup used to be a big deal. Now I have no idea what's on that lineup.

For some people, you are crazy if you haven't seen the latest episode of The Bachelorette. To others, you're insane if you've never seen Conan O'Brien. For others, you're nuts if you can't name two Lady Gaga songs. But I'd guess that the majority of Americans have never watched The Bachelorette, never watched a full episode of Conan O'Brien, and can't name two Lady Gaga songs. And while YouTube makes previously unseen videos big, it doesn't make them huge. How many times has someone said to you in the past three years, "wait, you still haven't seen that YouTube clip?" But the fact is, there's no single YouTube clip that most people have seen.

Our shared, universal experiences are almost non-existent at this point. And it's easier and easier for us to get caught up in little communities where our personal view of a Big Deal is just reinforced. We mostly surround ourselves with people who have similar interests and get shocked when we realize that they aren't full-fledged members of our niches. If you read Andrew Sullivan's blog or the Huffington Post, you would have thought that the Iranian protests were the second-coming of the French Revolution. If you read US Weekly or other gossip mags, you'd think that Jon and Kate Plus Eight is now the biggest TV show of the decade. If you follow tech, you might think that the latest iPhone is second only to the wheel in terms of important human inventions. If you're a male in your twenties, you might think that everyone fills out a March Madness bracket.

With MJ's death, I think that we instinctively felt a surge in our sense of kinship with each other. We no longer had to worry whether our news was Big News or whether anyone cared about this particular man who we cared about. We could talk to anyone, rich or poor, young or old, in any niche, about this one man and finally be confident that we weren't speaking a different language. For a few days, we came out of our little perfectly-personalized holes and celebrated the life of one of the few men who we all still care about.