Best of COM340 – Osama Bin Later

Well, he always said he wanted to go out with a BANG!

Undoubtedly, the biggest story of the last 12 months has been the capture and killing of the World’s Most Wanted Man, Hide & Seek Champion and All Round Bad Guy, Mr Osama Bin Laden on May 2nd, 2011.

Unlike many of my friends, who heard about it on Twitter, I first heard about Bin Laden’s death on the front page of Google News. The story had only been out about 20 mins, but there were plenty of people reporting it, even though Barack Obama had not yet made his speech to confirm it. It was immediately the talk of the office, with plenty of theories being thrown around. Google’s news feed had the story even before the radio station I was working at had it. (They networked their national news from Sydney, but it hadn’t even come over the air yet.) The speed with which the story hit the front of one of the biggest compilers of online news in the world is mind-blowing, especially when you think that less than a century ago, people would have had to wait at least 24 hours for it to be in the newspaper if it was a local story, possibly weeks or months if the information was coming from overseas.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that I was at work, I was unable to monitor the spread of the news through social media in the way that I had with other major passings, like Michael Jackson back in 2009, but the snippets I did manage to get were astounding. It felt like the whole world was waiting for 1pm AEST, when Obama finally confirmed the death of the World’s Most Wanted Man.

But the death of Bin Laden wasn’t the only thing to celebrate that day. Oh no, there was a new beginning stirring in the meme-melting pot of the internet.

You know the photo I’m talking about. It’s this one:

It’s a pretty awesome photo. It’s certainly one that is going to help define that day in history for the entire world, forever. And they all look so remarkably TENSE. It’s just a perfect representation of what it must have been like, knowing what was happening.

You can’t really improve on it, can you?

Well, the meme-machine did its very best. Here are some of my personal favourites. Unfortunately, due to the nature of posting and reposting, all of the authors of these photo manipulations are unknown.