Steve Jobs and Osama bin Laden
After returning home to find my Twitter-stream choked with lamentations for Steve Jobs, I made a commentary-Tweet:
“I’m betting that Steve Jobs has to be the #1 most-Tweeted about death ever. ”
To which people replied, “What about Bin Laden?”
I dunno. I was more actively participating in Bin Laden’s death-reports, since I was at home watching the Tweet-stream fill up and commenting… But I also remember non-Laden things dispersed throughout. At one point, I was counting to see how high I could get before I found a non-Jobs-related Tweet, and got up to nineteen.
But maybe that’s me. Maybe I’d really like to believe that in the end, more people were touched by a man who made technology personal, a man who went out of his way to try to turn bits and bytes into art, than a guy who flew a plane into a building. Maybe I want to believe that while Bin Laden had a huge effect globally in the way the US overreacted to his terrorism, Steve Jobs had a more positive and intimate influence by making us happy every time we picked up our shiny new toys.
I don’t have any hard stats, and I’d still be curious to see who had more related Tweets overall. But in the end, it’d be nicer if people reacted with more dismay to the guy who touched their lives by showing them wonder instead of terror.
Stupid LJ is down – but I think the general geek makeup of your twitter feed will make a difference, too. Someone who follows fewer geeky people would probably have a different-looking twitter stream for both deaths. It’s an interesting thought, though.
Wonder instead of terror. That was beautiful. Somebody posted “iSad” I like that a lot.
Location of course, too — NY-centric lists might have had more Osama ones, stuff like that.