Girls’ rescue, doctor’s lament bigger draws than Klein coverage
The Journal witnessed the fallouts from the deaths of a pair of public figures last week.
High-profile movie critic Roger Ebert’s death on April 4 took the Internet by surprise; tributes, essays, and commentaries poured in on all fronts.
Of more local interest, however, was former premier Ralph Klein, who died March 29.
Following the death of a public figure, online communities begin to form their own collective version of an epitaph. Commemorating a loss can be difficult enough personally; in a crowded virtual echo chamber of friends and strangers alike, it’s downright surreal.
Social media becomes a strange cross between a funeral’s registry book (“I was here, I was witness to this”) and an unending wake where everyone is crammed into a single room and constantly speaking at the same volume.
Locally, this happened two Fridays in a row: March 29, following Klein’s death, and to a lesser extent on April 5, during his memorial service in Calgary.
The Journal and the Calgary Herald reported on the hundreds of Albertans who lined up five hours before the noon memorial, and countless others who followed the live blog or stream from journalists attending the ceremony.
Reaction to the death of someone like Klein — a polarizing figure, to say the least — on the Internet can be jarring in a society that tends to avoid making negative comments about the dead. Online, short, pithy remarks tend to be the norm, and the sarcasm that underlies a fair amount of digital discussion is often at odds with the genuine grief that many people felt at Klein’s death.
Klein’s death wasn’t the biggest story of the week, though. Both the dramatic rescue of a pair of girls from the North Saskatchewan River and an opinion article by an Edmonton doctor on the state of the health-care system topped the charts on April 1.
Klein’s demise did not qualify as the biggest political story of the week, either. On April 3, Mayor Stephen Mandel’s annual state of the city speech, which eviscerated some aspects of the provincial budget, easily topped the Klein story in terms of page views.
As for the most discussed narrative of the week, that was still the Edmonton Oilers. It was, after all, the first time this season the Oilers won five games in a row, and the first time in recent weeks they stepped briefly into a playoff spot.
In fact, the Klein memorial service wasn’t even the top social media story of the day last Friday: chatter about an ammonia surge causing a strong chlorine scent in Edmonton’s tap water was the most talkedabout subject.
Unlike the ammonia surge, which is a fleeting phenomenon, the death of a public figure resurrects and condenses every piece of online discussion and debate that has ever been raised about the subject. In the case of Klein, those who loved him and those who hated him all came out of the woodwork and reiterated their opinions about a man who hasn’t made a political move in more than half a decade.
Whether you agreed with or disagreed with his politics, if you were connected to the web last week, odds are good you had something to say about Klein. And it’s the vast spectrum of responses that made the local Internet so fascinating to watch.