Chris Penned. (And Penned Again and Again).

Tags: Chris Penn | Actors | Hollywood | Deaths

Another bummer from the world of entertainment—Chris Penn dead at forty. No cause of death as of yet, but he did weigh 300 pounds and had done his Hollywood fill of drugs.

I've only ever seen about 15 minutes of Footloose so I was surprised to find out that he was in it. However, I loved The Wild Life when I saw it on video as a kid.

However, what surprised me most was his wiki. The Chris Penn page on Wikipedia was created on January 16th 2006. During just over a year (374 days to be precise) between then and his death, his page was edited 20 times. In the two days since his death? 184! Nearly two hundred revisions were made between 2:08am January 25th and 3:02pm January 26th. In just 37 hours his page was subjected to 184 revisions.

People are rushing to be the first (or among the earliest) to provide "breaking news" and "critical updates" to sites—be them blogs, wikis, or whatever. I checked out his Wikipedia page as it's usually my first stop when verifying information—one article I read claimed that he was 43 while the other pegged him at 40.

I was not overly surprised to see that his date of death had already been added to the page. However, both of his brothers' pages had also been updated. So then I decided to check out his page's history of revisions. I couldn't believe it when I saw the amount of activity. People were in a mad rush to get any piece of the page they could grab—everything from expanding his filmography to correcting spelling mistakes and adding commas.

Long gone are the days when you'd read a story in the paper or hear on the radio or catch it on TV and that was the extent of the information you received.

Or are they? Hasn't it always like this? Before blogs and wikis and tags and 24/7 information, a guy named John Belushi died. And people heard about it on the radio or read it in the paper or saw it on TV. And then they went to work or went for drinks or took the subway or went shopping. And with their coworkers, friends, fellow passengers or shoppers, they talked about the tragic death of John Belushi. And each person had a tidbit of info the others didn't know. And those people couldn't wait to get home or get to work or get to the bar or get on the train to be the first to share their new tidbits with anyone they could. So it looks like I'll have to depart company with Mr. Mcluhan here—the medium's isn't the message, the message is the message.