Just Who Was Paul Walker?
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Paul William Walker IV was born on 12th September 1973. He gained fame in 1999 with the film Varsity Blues, but became truly famous with his starring role in The Fast and The Furious, now in the midst of its seventh film.
At around 3:30pm PST on November 30th, Walker and Roger Rodas (Walker’s financial consultant) left a charity event for victims of Typhoon Haiyan. The car carrying them lost control, careened into a lamp-post, and burst into flames. Both Walker and Rodas were pronounced dead on the scene.
Within the day, social media had erupted with tributes to Walker. Various Facebook pages have received over one million likes. Celebrities including Miley Cyrus, Paris Hilton, 50 Cent, MC Hammer and Justin Bieber have posted on Twitter with condolences. In thirty seconds of waiting, more than sixty new posts on Twitter were made with the Hashtag ‘RIPpaulwalker’. Within twenty-four hours, Britain and America (as well as most of the world) have jumped on the celebrity death bandwagon. This is viral on a new scale. Nothing like this happened upon the death of Amy Winehouse, or Whitney Houston, which can only tell us how far we’ve come since then. What can we expect with the next unprecedented celebrity death? Forget global warming: we’ll have global mourning.