Jakarta Java Kini - Jakarta's City Magazine

When famous people die, others try to ride their heaven-bound coattails

The morning that god died – I mean Steve Jobs of course – I felt disturbed. But it wasn’t the former Apple CEO’s actual death that worried me. The name Steve Jobs hadn’t meant much to me personally. I had never Googled his name, secretly kept his photos on my mobile phone or proclaimed to another human being that I was one of his fans. In fact, I had never even owned an Apple product until mid-2009. I had indeed known that he was a godlike figure to a lot of people and that his followers were almost as irritating as Lady Gaga’s. Up until the day he died in fact, Steve Jobs was little more to me than an annoying salesman whose face kept popping into my head every time the devil tried to seduce me into buying an iPhone. As soon as he died though, Mr Jobs became a more significant presence in my life.

As on most mornings – it pains and embarrasses me to say – the first thing I did was check both my Twitter and Facebook accounts via my mobile phone. I thus learned about Steve Jobs’ death via our all-powerful social media. I also quickly became aware that many were using this great man’s death for their own benefits.

Unsurprisingly, the main Twitter trending topics that morning were endless variations on the #stevejobsdied theme, and my Facebook newsfeed was also clogged with Jobs-related status updates. Some merely bid him farewell, some attempted a little levity and humour, while some disturbed individuals seemed to be almost suicidal as they believed that the iPhone 5 would now never materialise. In a nutshell, Mr Jobs’ death was a vastly bigger global event than Amy Winehouse’s fatal overdose (in fact, as the news about her death and the shooting in Norway had come at about the same time, I actually initially thought that she had been one of the victims of the shooting!). Steve Jobs’ death was such a huge event that many saw it as a marketing opportunity and a way to promote themselves.

Celebrities, politicians, religious leaders and mere mortals alike seized on Jobs’ worldwide popularity to market themselves. Obama paid his condolences in public, while Paulo Coelho, Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Simon Pegg, Anderson Cooper and Ellen DeGeneres all submitted their two-pence worth via various social-media sites. After his death, Time magazine printed a photo of Jobs on their cover, The New Yorker published Jobs-and-Apple-related features, and The Guardian also published plenty of stories about our man and Apple, and don’t get me started on Stephen Fry. I also quickly became aware that plenty of aspiring bloggers were posting their very own Jobs obituaries online.

I could understand that they were all sad and sorry that such a brilliant mind had passed away, but why did they have to show their remorse in public? Why tell the whole world how great you thought he was? Why did you need to tell your fans that you mourned the fact that the atoms that formed his body had started to say goodbye to each other? Why not offer your condolences to his family in private? After all, if you think about it, you and they were the only people who needed to know that you cared about his death.

I understand that posting about a famous person’s death, especially Steve Jobs, on your blog gets you the “clicks” you’ve been longing for and putting him on the cover and publishing stories about him do sell copies. How would you feel however if others used your death to increase their fame and wealth?

Two years ago, a friend of mine passed away. The news of his death came as a shock, not just to his close friends, but also to me, who had never really been that close to him. He simply went to bed at the weekend and never woke up. Thanks to Facebook, news of his death spread in no time at all. Also thanks to Facebook, I saw how his “friends” were saying their goodbyes to him on his wall – not in private or to his family – knowing full well that his other friends would see that they cared. My question is: were these ostentatious, online farewells purely for the person who died, or for the people who were still very much alive and seeking the acknowledgement of others?