- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

I have a confession to make: I'm not a huge Michael Jackson fan.

Blasphemous, I know. But somehow I kind of missed it... too young, maybe? Thriller did come out the year that I was born. But that doesn't seem to have made a difference to most of my peers, who know all the words to every song and still adore him unconditionally in spite of his later, ahem, quirks. Me, I could probably hum the choruses to 3, maybe 4 songs (you don't want to hear me sing.) That's about it. I don't dislike the music, nor am I particularly judgmental of the man... I guess I've always just been somewhat indifferent.

Which is why my reaction to the news of his death yesterday really surprised me.

I was innocently browsing CNN.com and came across the initial report that he had been hospitalized for cardiac arrest. It didn't provide much info, so I did a quick Twitter search- and woah. According to the Twitterverse, the man was dead. And it wasn't just one or two or a hundred suspicious-sounding reports, hundreds of thousands of people were talking about it and tweeting the same news. By the time I scanned to the bottom of the search page- maybe 30 seconds?-  the little yellow bar at the top of the page told me that there were 154,386 results since I started searching. Woah again. Suddenly, for some reason, I really really cared about Michael Jackson.

So I was completely taken aback and quickly came to the conclusion that the news was true. I felt sad and shocked and somewhat out-of-body... that weird sensation when you know that people will talk about this incident on this day for years to come, and I'll find myself saying, "yeah, you know, I was just working at home, browsing around, and saw the news online..." I don't think it's an exaggeration to compare yesterday's events to the day that Elvis died, especially for my generation. If we're defining Gen Y as the folks born between 1974 and 1983, then our formative years were the '80s- MJ's heyday. For Gen Y, he was THE entertainment icon.

But let me repeat: I am a Gen Y anomaly. I'm just not that into the King of Pop. So what was my deal? Why was I suddenly glued to my Twitter feed?

I believe it was the buzz. Call it what you will: UGC, mass reporting, power of the people- whatever. What completely engaged me about yesterday's events was the feeling of real-time communication, of worldwide community, of breaking news and breaking free from traditional news outlets. It was electric. It was something that I wanted to be a part of. I even felt a guilty twinge of pride when I was the first person to break the news on my facebook feed. It was this feeling of coming together with people from all over the world, sharing emotions and information as we watched things develop. It was fascinating and incredible and somehow made the loss seem less sad, because we were all going through it together. It was a real example of how the Net Generation finds, consumes and reacts to current events.

That's social media. That's the soul of online communities.

Don't get me wrong: the tragic human implications of his death, his family and children, completely outweigh any sort of detached analysis on the state of emerging media. My heart is with them. But as Gen Y lost a part of our cultural history, we simultaneously embraced the new roads on our cultural map. I think it's been some pretty amazing synergy.

In the spirit of remembering the music, check out this video. RIP MJ.