After the monarch died, a monoculture once thought long dead rode up to meet her. Alongside it, the online beast consumed the news and spat it back out within seconds.

I woke up at 4am on September 9 to an email from Tova O’Brien’s executive producer Carol Hirschfeld. That was how I found out the Queen was gravely ill. The radio spot I usually do on a Friday was pending, because of “the situation with kuīni”, Hirschfeld wrote. There was a softness to the use of the word “kuīni”. A gentle settling of snow before the avalanche descended.

I checked Slack to find an update about the Queen’s health had been sent at 11.59pm the night before. I go to bed very early so slept soundly through the first lurches from the tomb labelled London Bridge.

I checked the Guardian, then the BBC, then the New Zealand media outlets. I checked the American ones too as if word from beyond the Commonwealth would somehow cement what I already knew to be big news. “I think the Queen is going to die,” I said to my husband, familiar enough with the reticence of Buckingham Palace to know that any statement was likely a forewarning. “I’m going to have to write that the Queen has died.”

I reread the 2017 Guardian article “London Bridge is down” which details what will happen when the Queen does die, like some kind of rule book. The BBC man will be in black. “I should watch that,” I thought as if witnessing history would somehow add colour to what I knew would be a carefully worded morning news email. I turned on the BBC, transported to a diorama with all the surprise factor of an animatronic puppet on a ride you’ve taken many times before. “Presenter Huw Edwards was dressed in a dark suit and black tie,” I wrote, monocolour detail dutifully added.

More messages came through. At 5.38am I posted “the queen has died” on Slack. Lower case queen. She’d forgive me, I thought, resisting the temptation to edit the message. Speed was of the essence.

I wrote what I thought was a reverent but straight account of the news that morning. That was the right thing to do. I quoted the prime minister. I added something about service, careful not to gush, aware many would not mourn her death in the way all of us were being instructed to. I gratefully accepted a look over from our editor-at-large Toby Manhire before hitting send on The Bulletin. I later thanked him for ensuring the news I sent that day wasn’t “whack”. It seemed important.

Job done, I cried.

I like to think I cried that morning because I am human. Someone told me later in the day that it was the reason and I felt reassured. Perhaps I cried because I am of the last generation to still be dragging around remnants of a monocultural media that was enthralled by the monarch. For half my life, knowing the Queen involved thumbing through pages of women’s magazines at my Nana’s house or watching her on the television news. Even when the women’s magazines covered her annus horribilis and the Murdoch-owned tabloids pursued the royal family like game, there was a kind of reverence to how she was portrayed. Her image was largely and comparatively controlled. There were conventions and rules, perhaps linked to the symbiotic nature of the relationship between the Crown and the British press.

Truthfully, I’m not sure if I was crying for Queen Elizabeth II or Queen Claire Foy and Queen Olivia Colman. “Did you weep?” Queen Colman asked Prince Tobias Menzies in an episode of The Crown about the Aberfan disaster. Colman’s voice was in my head, asking me the same question. I have come to “know the Queen” in recent years via a slavish devotion to prestige British television with great costumes and posh accents. Through the countless fictionalised and fetishised versions of her life. I know the crown through The Crown.

I remember reading a review of the Netflix smash-hit a few years ago that described the Queen as a vessel. A woman whose adherence to the conventions of monarchy were so rigidly observed that we could not possibly know her. That she was merely a container into which we poured meaning. A light-refracting vase who threw colour and prismic shapes that were entirely dependent on the angle at which you looked at it. I don’t think the description was meant to be complimentary of her or the show but I’ve thought about it a lot over the years.

For all that has been written, captured and said, and for every comparison with other familial franchises who prop up whole arms of the media and entertainment industries, she is really no more known to us in death than she was in life. Paris Hilton can posthumously anoint her “the original girl boss” on Twitter, and into the bottomless vessel it goes. We do not know how she died, other than that it was peaceful, surrounded by family and in the presence of her physicians. Precisely as it was written in the plan for her death. The people that actually knew her are bound by the same conventions and discretion that have protected the most powerful thing about the monarchy, its mystique. Even that characterisation comes from a collection of impressions I have gathered through the words put into the mouths of the women who have portrayed her on screen. Even in writing non-fiction, I only have the fictional impressions I have poured into the vessel to draw on.

For the past week, this image of a vessel keeps recurring for me. If the Queen was a precious, empty vessel, she is being held most carefully by institutional media, who are largely playing by the rules and rolling out iterations of their own plans and investments in this historic event. Social media, on the other hand, has crunched the Queen between a billion sharp teeth, only to open its mouth and regurgitate microscopic distortions of her image into the faces of anyone willing to watch, rendering her death meaningless in approximately two hours.

A few hours after sending my reverent missive on the morning of her death, I experienced what I can only describe as whiplash, a muscular and violent wrenching that at times felt physical. The beginning of feeling that I was, like van Damme, attempting to do the splits between two enormous trucks running on parallel tracks. Here was the biggest news story of the year being run out from an ancient playbook by traditional media, a monolith of correct collective behaviour. Right alongside it, the internet was barreling on, determined to break everything down to singular takes and memes. As the BBC set the tone for mourning across the realm, the realm was more determined than ever to prove, at the fastest possible rate, that the era of institutional broadcast was dead. You can spend what you like and send who you like to London but it costs nothing to meme freely, baby!

“Have you seen the video of the Irish dancers dancing to ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ outside Buckingham Palace?” someone asked me at about 10am. My matriarchal and patriarchal lines can be traced to Ireland. My ancestors have as much right to hate the Crown as anyone. I arguably have as much right to hate the Crown as anyone. I should not feel strange about the Irish dancers dancing.

A more Irish name could not be found than Patrick O’Dea. Sir Patrick O’Dea organised the Queen’s tours to New Zealand between 1953 and 1981. His name appears on a list of Gentleman Ushers to the British Royal household. He was also my great-uncle. I googled him that Friday, clutching at the idea that maybe I was genetically predisposed to feeling sad about the Queen dying. Great Uncle Patrick’s royal service has granted me no special association with Her Majesty here in New Zealand. Perhaps if we’d been English and lived in England, I might have been the great niece of Sir Patrick O’Dea in the pages of Tatler. I might have had large teeth and been photographed at Soho House in a Vampire’s Wife dress. I might have been called Arabella.

I am not Arabella though, I am Anna and I work in New Zealand compiling the news each morning and it has been a very strange 10 days. I have made line calls each day over the last week as cubic tonnes of royal coverage are poured into the vessel. What is actually news when it often literally consists of a procession of proclamations about processions and proclamations? What is gossip? What is newsy gossip or gossipy news?

I really haven’t been able to focus one eye or land one view on anything over the last week. I have felt exactly 96 years old as I’ve caught myself wondering when exactly reverence and respect died. I have felt like a non-woke traitor because I know any sadness I might feel is informed by the royal industrial complex. I have felt guilty about chuckling at every meme. About laughing at someone overdubbing a speech from King Charles with their own words saying he is going to turn Australia into a penal colony again and reinstate the rule of droit du seigneur. I also felt extremely not guilty about laughing at all of it. It’s been the only week in my life where I’ve looked at the most specious reports of how Meghan walked, how Harry held her hand and how the Montecito royals have been embraced and then snubbed and wondered if it was news.

I’ve spent 10 days tuned into two very different extremes in the reactions to the death of the Queen. One has been dedicated to witnessing a history that has already been written. Traditional media has been rolling out plans conceived in the time before the monoculture was blown apart. All of the New Zealand correspondents sent to London have been wearing black for days. Jenny Shipley was interviewed on the television last weekend for what felt like the length of the Queen’s reign as the state broadcaster tried to fill an endless amount of airtime. I don’t for a single second begrudge them for going all in on covering this event. Based on the “most popular” sections of the websites I look at every day, people are loving it. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all news. Normally, you’d see that clearly but it’s been blurry over the last week.

Some of the coverage has demonstrated how porous the relationship between news and social media now is. King Charles and the saga of the pens would not have existed before social media. It simply would not have been filmed or broadcast, nor travelled far and wide enough to gain the cultural significance required to make the grade of being news. I can not imagine the state broadcaster covering it 20 years ago. It’s been a rare breakthrough. Sanctioned, memetic levity amongst an otherwise formulaic march through traditions conceived before the smartphone made everyone a correspondent.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the instinct to react instantly and still somehow appropriately online, has shown how ill-equipped social media is for these moments. There is little sublime, and a lot of ridiculous. Two and a half hours after the death of the Queen was announced, the tribute we’d all been waiting for arrived. Ann Summers, a website selling sex toys and lingerie popped a tribute to Her Majesty just above the fold on their website, the touching words and photo perched a top the dildos and the lube. It was screengrabbed and posted to Twitter. The Daily Telegraph alerted us to a photo of the Queen in the clouds that had gone viral. Even the sky was co-operating, providing more and more for the voraciously hungry.

It doesn’t matter what you wanted to think or feel as a three-dimensional being, it had been memed, shit-posted, rendered flat in minutes. Beneath the soles of the Irish dancers’ feet lie centuries of history that you might want to consider. The Queen wasn’t just someone’s grandmother, she was the head of a highly political institution. But instant reaction is now ubiquitous. It is how it will be forever more. It is not good or bad but a steamroller designed to flatten context, leaving only a universe of memetic stars in its wake.

At home, newer, online-only media platforms have tried to straddle the divide. “Why I’m respecting but not mourning Queen Elizabeth II’s death,” wrote Te Matahiapo Safari Hynes on Re:News. Saraid de Silva penned an instructive text for Ensemble titled “Decolonise your grief”. We have seen talk of a republic pop its head above the parapet. And yet somehow, the most of-the-moment conversations have still taken a backseat to the pageantry and ritualised mourning.

Some of what’s happened clangs with cultural foreboding about all forms of media – traditional and social. About changing demographics and modes of consumption. About our increasing inability to sit quietly with anything and wait before churning out our responses or creating meaning. About the crunching, grinding inevitability of a world where everyone is a broadcaster and a meme star in the making. About the veneer of democratised media while a hierarchy remains so very visible.

That resurfaced video of the Irish dancers actually proved to be at the more innocent end of the content spectrum on social media. I have seen far worse throughout the week. TikTok has gone bananas. I guess “worse” is in the eye of the beholder though. For plenty of people, this is precisely how you respond to a significant event. It is precisely how you undermine institutional obsession. It is precisely how you mark the death of a monarch who has no relevance to you, a pop cultural phenomenon with no greater standing than Kim Kardashian but more menace, if you’re indigenous to land colonised by the British.

“The Queen was someone’s grandmother!” people have insisted as if half the world coming to a stop is about that. Maybe that is why I cried on the day the Queen died but I haven’t cried for anyone else’s beloved grandmother this week. The insistence that everyone mourn, in the same way, according to plan, is as much a response to fame and the death of famous people as it is about an objectively important event. It is about what we have poured into the vessel and not what we have ever known about the woman who died. The magnitude, divergence and scale of responses is not so much a marker of the significance of the event but the means by which we can talk about it.

Back in 1997, when Princess Diana died, no divining rod was required to determine what was news or how we were meant to behave, because we only had one source of instruction. You could make your own judgments about the event in private, with no real right of response. Public sentiment was gauged by the physical presence of people outside Buckingham Palace, beamed into household television sets all over the world. I’ve just watched 57 TikTok videos about the queue to see the Queen’s casket. Some are respectful, some are not. None of them would not have existed 25 years ago. I will probably watch Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral tonight and dither about how to write about it this week. The collective and prescribed mourning on display, and solemn broadcasting of it, will be smashed to bits by millions of individuals posting memes online before Her Majesty is even laid to rest.

Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.