Global sorrow

I recentlly met a nice couple from Cornwall. We came to discuss the death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. It turned out that the man had been at the music festival in Glastonbury as the news broke. He recounted how he was watching a veritable blast, where waves of people in the crowd got to hear about the tragic event. He said it was astonishing to see in actual life how news travelled through a crowd like that, with facial expressions and bodily movements indicating that the news had sunk in. He commented that although the online manifestations after the death of the singer had been astonishing, the sense of sharing an important experience such as that on the festival was something completely different. The net thus creates communities of different scales, which complement each other, but are not interchangeable. The global scale eruptions of emotion after the singers death had their counterparts in spontaneous and local flower arrangements and memorial shrines. In that way the net links the local with the global.