• by Tom Hespos , February 4, 2003

I was on a Jet Blue flight to Florida when I first learned that NASA had lost contact with the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Every seat on the flight had its own television screen and access to DirecTV. I was watching MSNBC when reporters broke the story. My seat was toward the rear of the plane, and people were lined up in the aisle next to me, waiting to use the lavatory. One gentleman, seeing the look of concern on my face as I watched the news, asked me what was going on. I told him about the loss of radio contact and he headed back to his seat to investigate things for himself.

Within a few minutes, the first tape of Columbia’s breakup over Texas was playing over and over in a loop on my screen. Needless to say, I was horrified.

I remember crying on that day in 1986 when instead of witnessing another triumphant Space Shuttle launch, we experienced a tragedy. When the Challenger exploded shortly after launch that day, I was watching it on a television monitor in my school’s library. It was a terrible experience, but a shared one. Most of my friends from my hometown remember being there and witnessing that tragedy together.

We all share experiences through the media. Just as almost everyone from my parents’ generation remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard that President Kennedy was shot, my generation has its own collection of shared experiences – the Challenger explosion, the outbreak of the Gulf War, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the return of the hostages from Iran. Whether we were celebrating or mourning, we followed these events via the mass media and knew that we were sharing an experience with millions of others.

Shortly after I witnessed the Columbia tragedy, I stood up in the aisle next to my seat and looked toward the front of the airplane. I expected to see every TV screen on the flight tuned to either MSNBC or CNN Headline News, the two major cable news networks available on Jet Blue’s channel lineup. Instead, I saw only about half of the passengers watching the news. The other passengers were watching entertainment programming - HGTV or the Game Show Network seemed to be popular at that particular moment. It probably shouldn’t have, but this really ticked me off. Maybe that’s an inaccurate description – I was awfully surprised and disgusted that in a moment of national tragedy where people were dying and the future of the space program was in jeopardy, some people would rather watch Paul Lynn on an old episode of Hollywood Squares than watch the coverage.

I began to think that maybe we simply don’t have shared mass media experiences anymore, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s desensitization due to 9/11 and the constant flow of bad news from the Middle East. Maybe it’s that we have so many media options open to us. Who knows?

Turns out I was wrong. The plane landed. The McHales picked me up at the airport. They hadn’t heard about the catastrophe yet. I filled them in. We drove to the hotel together. The first thing I did after check-in was to go up to my room and plug in my laptop. I hooked into the hotel’s LAN and got connected to the Internet. Within minutes, I had multiple browser windows open – CNN.com, NASA.gov, message boards at a few online communities to which I belong. I opened up Outlook and there was an email in my Inbox from Jim Meskauskas with a link to the Columbia story on NYTimes.com.

I spent the next few hours digesting information and interacting with people. I visited a favorite message board, where people were posting messages about their reactions to the disaster. Some posted prayers for the astronauts and their families. Others speculated about the cause of the explosion, or about the future of the space program. I joined them.

For the next few hours, I alternately worked on a project for a client and read postings on message boards and email discussion lists – communities to which I belong. And when I stopped to think about it for a minute, I realized that I was wrong about people in our country no longer sharing experiences through the mass media. The nature of the shared experience simply had changed.

It’s no longer about passively sitting in front of the TV and reacting as news comes to us. It’s about interacting - not only with the news media, but with people around the world. It’s not only about sharing information, but also about sharing opinions and feelings.

We do still share experiences through the media. It’s just that the nature of media has changed so significantly over the past few years. I can only hope that the next time we experience an event of worldly significance, it will be a celebration and not a time to mourn.

My thoughts and prayers go out to our brave astronauts and their families. God bless.