Stocks fall 1,000 points. What does it mean? (Update)

I can not panic due to the fact I do not know what it means. With all the media covered, someone should have told us that it means. Does it mean people are not ordering products or have withdrawn their orders or something? Maybe even telling us that each point equals one million dollars for something or other.

My comprehension of the issue is so limited I can not even articulate what it is I need to know to share the media’s panic. Sorry. If the media wants me scared, at least they should show me the bogeyman.
As always,
BB

Tech stocks sucked down by 1,000-point Dow drop
May 6, 2010 | Anthony Ha
Excerpt:
With uncertainty over the fate of the Greek economy, the US stock market took a steep dive today, and the big tech companies were not immune.
Read more at:
http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/06/tech-stocks-google-apple-microsoft/

(Update)
The (Almost) Crash of Wall Street
Robert Reich
Former Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley
Excerpt:
Regardless of why it happened, it's further evidence that the nation's and the world's capital markets have become a vast out-of-control casino in which fortunes can be made or lost in an instant -- which would be fine except for the fact that most of us have put our life savings there. Pension funds, mutual funds, school endowments -- the value of all of this depends on a mechanism that can lose a trillion dollars in minutes without anyone having a clear idea why.

And….
The luck or foolishness of a few traders, and inside knowledge and information that some possess and others don't, combined with ultra high-speed computers, put us all at the whim of a system whose risk is way out of proportion to any public benefits.
Read more at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-almost-crash-of-wall_b_567551.html