Media, Discourse, and the Public Sphere: Electronic Memorials to Diana, Princess of Wales

Abstract

before she married the Prince of Wales, Queen Elizabeth's son Charles, in 1982. The highly publicized wedding was called a fairy tale. Lady arrived at St. Paul's Cathedral in London in a golden coach. Her dress was a Victorian fantasy, yards of ivory silk billowing over crinolines. Charles wore ceremonial military regalia. The wedding catapulted her into international stardom. In the ensuing years, became a mother to the future king, William, and his brother, Harry, but following admissions of adultery by and Charles, the Prince and Princess separated in 1992 and their divorce was granted August 28, 1996. One year later, on August 31, 1997, was killed in a car crash in Paris. The public life of Spencer was bound at two ends by spectacle: her marriage and her funeral. Her marriage into the Royal Family of England made her into a celebrity, a princess who would be queen, and in the intervening seventeen years until her death, she lived a life in front of print and visual media as a humanitarian and fabulously coifed jet-setter. Her funeral attracted hundreds of mourners to London and was watched by millions on worldwide television. Because of the spectacular nature of her presentation to the public, accrued a public sphere about her presence, one that crossed class and national lines. The events of her life were eagerly watched and anticipated by an audience who initiated a partially fictional discourse about an ontological who eventually became Diana as character and icon.1 The ordinary person's experience of characters and events is mediated by electronic technology, which forms a popular memory. In a society of technological complexity, the difference