Email September 7, 1997

It's almost impossible to get to where you're going, unless you know where you're been. So, the events of the past few days have challenged me to pass on some viewpoints to you, in hopes they may give you a clearer perspective of our life and times – of where you've been.

Your lifetimes have already witnessed at least a few spectacular events in our modern culture's history.

First, the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam. The world's strongest military force abandoned the battlefield in a country it could have turned to dust.

Second, the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We may have lost the battle in Vietnam, but we won the war.

You have been witnesses to both. I'm ready to add the death of Diana and the ensuing events to rank with them. It has been an extraordinary week of worldwide shared emotions, perceptions, and -- most of all -­ communications.

NEVER before have so many humans shared the information so thoroughly of a singular event as in the week past. I've not read any reports of man-of-the-street interviews with Chinese rice pickers about their reaction to Diana's death, but I am quite confident the population of the world's largest closed-door country has been well-informed about the scenario since a few moments after the auto crash happened.

As an ABC News correspondent was wandering through the crowd outside Westminster Abbey, looking for comments from members of the crowd at Diana's funeral, she happened upon a guy (unidentified) from Colorado Springs. He commented something appropriate -- but what fascinated me was the enormity of the information exchange that had to occur commonplace for such an interview to ever occur and to be broadcast to the world.

I watched much of the funeral procession on my computer screen, via the Internet, using hardware and linkages that are commonly available. I also observed briefly a worldwide (literally) chat session occurring simultaneously with the funeral (both ABC and MSNBC hosted such sessions). There was too much babble for me -- but I was awed that such worldwide babble can even occur. It certainly could not have, as recently as five years ago.

It's not Diana's death that was the major event,   but the proof of the ability of the world to communicate person-to-person, which her death sparked. No politics, no agendas, no orchestration, no scripts- just person-to-person. 

All my adult life has been involved in communications of some form. In 1958, I had difficulty simply getting day-to-day U.S. news to my AFRS listeners in Iceland, because of erratic shortwave signals from New Jersey. When we were in the Philippines, in the 60s, all U.S. videos came from mail-shipped film. Yesterday, I watched live messages flash by me onscreen as a guy in Australia and a gal in California, and others shared their bitterness toward paparazzi and the media lords who finance them. MSNBC displayed, several times, the convergence of television and Internet technologies during the period, with onscreen TV commentators responding to Internet email messages.

No, this is not intended to be a paean to the Internet. Only to recognize that it, plugged into our more traditional media, now provides a person-to-person shared communication ability that is new to mankind. I have to believe that such ability is beneficial.

All of which, prompts me to say that Diana's death and funeral is the largest shared cultural event in mankind's history. It is a certainty that there will be larger events. But I think this one deserves remembrance. Never before.