Amy Winehouse and Our Web-Linked World Two things strike me about Amy Winehouse’s toxicology report, which showed extreme blood alcohol levels. One, how it’s a shame. Two, how we all know about it. First, it’s a tragedy. I won’t say much about that because loads of people have written about it. I’ll just say I think it’s tragic any time someone dies when they’re still young, and it’s hard to keep watching all these talented young artists (musicians, actors, writers, artists) lose their lives from alcohol and drugs. Second, I’m divided about whether our instant access to information over the Internet is a positive thing or a negative thing. It seems like both. Positive— Instant access to news and information from all over the globe is really hard to argue against. And it’s getting more available and more reliable all the time. When the Internet was still young, there was a lot of information on it, but most of that information was fodder (most of it still is, but there’s more good information now). Remember Wikipedia when it first came out and how unreliable it was? It’s kind of a microcosm of the whole thing… While I wouldn’t say that Wikipedia is now an academic-level resource, it’s a whole lot more legit than it used to be. In fact, Google’s algorithm gives it a really high domain authority these days. Negative— Do we really need every college kid in America reading about Amy Winehouse’s blood alcohol level and using that as a gauge for their own drinking? “Dude, you can get way more wasted than .08. Amy Winehouse was like .4 or something ridiculous.” In fact, Winehouse’s blood alcohol level was .416, according to the BBC. It’s an astounding figure, actually—the pathologist who performed her post-mortem told the BBC that .350 could have killed her. Supposedly, there were three empty bottles of vodka in her apartment. Looking back at my own college days, I remember thinking it was romantic or something when I saw The Doors and how Jim Morrison had supposedly died in the bathtub of an apartment in Paris. Stupid but true. And I imagine I would have thought Amy Winehouse’s death was somehow tragically romantic. And I might have even stopped worrying about
drinking too much, knowing it would take a ton (.350, or like 17 drinks) to really hurt me. Again, stupid. Of course, when I was still in school, we didn’t have the Internet really, so I would have had to read a newspaper to hear about Winehouse’s toxicology report. When I was still in high school or younger, I probably wouldn’t have heard about it at all. Not so now. Every kid in the world with Internet access knows exactly how much alcohol it took to take Amy Winehouse’s life. That’s just our world today, good or bad. Or good and bad.