News, death, speed

There is a semi-interesting little article in the business section of today's Times about NBC's attempt to try and delay the news of Tim Russert's death for about three hours until the family could be contacted and news pieces could be assembled for the network to air. And, of course, about the failure of these attempts: some low, low level NBC employee posted it upon Wikipedia about 45 minutes before NBC could make the announcement, and news outlets like the Times reported it shortly thereafter.
Now, the article laments this, of course: a new agency "traditionally" are allowed to announce the death of one of their staff before other agencies report or cover it. But besides the assumption that there is anything like a tradition in the media (in the sense of tradition that the article conjures up), or that there is only substantial grieving through something like a tradition, it implies that the speed with which information is disseminated now along something like the internet and its new, flexible social networks (like Wikipedia and MySpace) makes this substantial grieving less possible. It doesn't deny that there is grief able to be disseminated along these paths of information--to its credit, though it seems to do this only reluctantly. But what is crucial is that it assumes that the dissemination itself is not an act of grieving, which I think makes it impossible for it to think of a grief moving fast.
This is part of a larger assumption about the human registration of anything in general--let's call it an assumption about thought (though of course this thought is open to affects or attunements, as Heidegger would put it): thought only occurs when it moves over something slowly. Meditation, pondering--these words conjure up images of slowing down, of checking the haste with which we are going to grasp something.
But perhaps the quick registration of a fact on Wikipedia is precisely an act of thinking about the bereaved? People set up candles on their window or wear a pin, but the relative swiftness with which these acts are to be accomplished doesn't mean they aren't acts coming from a thinking about loss. This labeling, this noting, this marking is not necessarily disrespect. I would suggest it is merely another extension of technical thought--that is, thought thinking as technology, which means primarily as speed, haste, mere marking or registration. To deny it the status simply because of this speed does not seem to me to be either moral or accurate.
But this does not mean every registration of a bit of information (here, about the lost) is thinking (and, here, grieving). To be more precise, it means that the registration of something itself, even if it makes its way slowly through a process of what we normally call "pondering," is commensurate with thinking. Thinking, therefore, would be not commensurate with the act of thought, of a registering, a developing, a transforming, even, of what is registered. It is neither an internal process of complication and unravelling, or an external sort of epiphany, something commensurate with perception, a striking, a sudden grasping. A thought, for me, seems to take years, in which many other things happen. This does not mean that a thought like this is slow, precisely because it can be each time a return to something, to a mark, if only for a moment.
The development of a thought would be more like acquiring a habit, in this view, but it could be something achieved remarkably quickly as thinking. In this way, the efforts of people to spread this information would be beginnings in the process of grieving: not in the sense that the registrations have no meaning in themselves or are not themselves thoughts about the lost person, but in the sense that a full thought about the dead might require many quick actions of thinking, actions that do not make the thought itself take a long time but which develop its texture and its uniqueness. If he thought of grief this way--and it has an affinity with ritual, but not ritual as "what needs to be simply undergone" in order for grief to occur--there would not be such a lament here on the part of the writer of the story. The way we grieve now can be quick--and without being shallow.
I'll elaborate on this somewhat hastily written post perhaps later when I talk of close reading as something that can be done fast.