Whitney Houston posts overrun sites

Like most Americans with Facebook accounts, every time I logged on to my page the day Whitney Houston died, the top of my news feed looked like this:

"Neb Asfaw and 32 other friends posted about Whitney Houston."

Reactions to Houston's passing (expressions of shock and sadness, remembrances, videos of her performances) overran social media sites. An hour after Houston's death was first reported (on Twitter), 18 percent of all Twitter posts mentioned "Whitney."

"I grew up listening to her, and a lot of my friends on Facebook share that memory, so it's kind of mourning with the community," said Asfaw, 36. "This is big, worldwide news, and I want to be part of that in my own little way."

Everyone else wanted to be part of this collective mourning as well, even those who had no words of their own to offer. Twitter quickly became an echo chamber, reverberating with retweets from news organizations and celebrities who had acknowledged Houston's death. (A tweet from the rapper Lil Wayne, "R.I.P. Whitney Houston. #Retweet for Respect," was retweeted 58,000 times over the next few days.)

This compulsion to weigh in on a news event, even one with only a tangential relationship to one's own life, is endemic among people who use social media, according to Jonathan Taplin, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California who has studied sentiment on Twitter.

"Once people embrace Twitter, they feel some kind of addiction to being public," Taplin said. "They almost feel like they have to express an opinion about everything."

It was not always thus. For much of the 20th century, this type of public mourning, even for loved ones, was frowned on in Western culture, said Katherine Ashenburg, author of "The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die." But toward the end of the last century, as celebrity culture rose, people began mourning for famous people whom they did not know, like John Lennon or Princess Diana, more expressively than they grieved for their own family members.

"Social media has given people a kind of community to mourn in," Ashenburg said.

But if Twitter and Facebook have offered fans a community in which to grieve, they have also accelerated the pace of mourning many times over.

Within 24 hours, the cacophony of Whitney Houston posts on Twitter had hushed to a dull murmur.