Probably not as spiritually fulfilling, but the stock market would be an example of that happening at sub-second latencies, every day, all day.
Versus how many people across the world are finding out about the new pope?
The point is how many people are actually receiving this information. Not "could look up on their phone if they wanted".
Nobody is claiming nobody follows stocks.
(very very rough numbers of course)
The comparison that I think matters is that the Pope and the Dalai Lama are the best-known religious leaders there are. I mean there used to be Billy Graham and the Ayatollah Khomeini but I think most people would struggle to name the leader of the Methodist church or Nichiren Buddhism or a rabbi of my than local importance.
This is about the huge number of people knowing about a single event right away.
* I say a thousand here because even someone glued to every number on CNBC is parsing nowhere near millions of numbers. A much smaller sliver of people will see each of those individual trades.
Stonks go up and down all time, it's not news, and people don't tune in mass from all around the world to watch sp500s chandelier bars.
Being on the street hearing the bells and recognizing what it meant while a huge number of people all around the globe have the same realization at the same time feels somehow incredibly connecting, and not even necessarily at a religious level.
And it happens every day, all day. It's not discrete information.