Neil Armstrong passed away yesterday, the First Man to Walk on the Moon. Armstrong was very much a cultural icon, issuing his “That’s one small step for ( a ) man, one giant leap for mankind” on July 20th 1969 as he stepped onto the Moon’s surface and at the same time becoming a cultural touchstone for generations.
People remember things that are significant to our culture by remembering where we were or what we were doing when the events, people or things happened that become cultural icons in varying degrees. Speaking only for my approximate age group, our media was not nearly as immediate or all-encompassing as today’s fire hose of “news” Our media was less instantaneous and, we think, less fraught with instant uninformed analysis.
True, the actual Apollo 11 landing and eventual walk on the Moon was carried live, (truth be told 2.5 seconds delayed) but there wasn’t much more analysis than Walter Cronkite’s “Well, phew…Man walks on the Moon” as he mopped his brow and let the grainy black and white pictures speak for themselves. We knew in our souls that something important happened to our culture. Humans had walked on another planet and we all got to see it happen at the same time and that is the important part: The instantaneous shared mass-cultural experience.
Previous explorers went to new lands, found them and came back by sailing ship or over land. The lag between the actual event and the masses hearing about it was months, if not years. At first it was the Kings who heard about the New Worlds, as they put up the cash and got to see the treasures first, then it percolated down the cultural food chain. Wars, before the named ones, were only heard of faintly, a small line of newspaper type (Napoleon Defeated at Waterloo) weeks after the event with little more detail than the bare bones. Even during WWII there was an appreciable lag due to censorship and the mechanics of getting pictures, sound and words across the oceans.
Perhaps one of the first mass-cultural events, a disaster of course, was the sinking of the Titanic. However, being a newspaper-mediated event, it was by necessity, delayed, even with the instantaneous communications of that newfangled wireless and Morse code thing, reporting from sea. Another of the first mass-cultural shared events might have been the Hindenburg explosion (May 6, 1937) a combination of newsreel and radio coverage, but the audiences at the time were small, barely international and not nearly global in scope.
Apollo 11 was global and instantaneous in scope, fully mediated by television with true, intercontinental reach. We all watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon at the same time, and made up our own opinions at the same time.
Armstrong had the grace to recognize his role as the First Man on the Moon and kept an appropriate profile. Others might have tried to parlay their fame into celebrity and endorsement deals. Armstrong didn’t sign autographs after 1994 for example, as he found that signed items were reselling for huge sums. It wasn’t right, to him, for people to profit from a job he did as part of his training as an astronaut, representing all of us.
Today, mass-cultural events are almost commonplace, to the point that we ignore them: Our perspective has changed.
RoadDave 
I think you hit it on the head – it’s the overload mentality of news these days that reduces the impact of modern day events. And let’s face it, whether it’s our attention span or our severely wanting politicians, we all seem to dream smaller these days. We study, we review, we come up with all the reasons why something SHOULDN’T work, and thus we find ourselves hitching rides on antique rockets with the Russians. We’ve forgotten about a moonbase by 1999, or a flight to Jupiter in 2001 and 2010. We laugh at politicians who talk about lunar cities.
Sure, we have problems. The US is still working two wars, and diddling in the occasional civil war here and there. The economy isn’t great. But that didn’t stop a young President committing the country to landing a man on the moon in 9 years, without any detailed pre-planning. We did it, while running a large war in SE Asia, and we did it with computers that couldn’t do a fraction of what the average cellphone does today.
We need the dreams. We need the vision. But most of all, we need to make sure that Neil Armstrong’s death isn’t remembered as the start of NASA’s decline and the end of manned spaceflight.
We owe Neil nothing less.