Technology
Rings Up the World: New communications services bring social,
political changes.
John M. Eger, The San Diego Union-Tribune, June 14,
1992
Capitalism is in triumph. Everywhere in the world state-run telephone monopolies are being privatized and commercialized, and new communications services are being offered by a growing number of suppliers. Even in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries there is an understanding that robust telecommunications infrastructures are essential ingredients to national wealth and individual well-being . . . and marketplace economics are fast replacing the heavy hand of demand economies.
Among participants in BusinessWeek Magazine's third annual symposium on "The Future of World Telecommunications" held recently in New York, the mood was decidedly upbeat. For the global corporation, vitally dependent upon the free, relatively unfettered flow of information in the world, the idea of tying together its far-flung subsidiaries, suppliers and consumers in a borderless world of communications, was tidal wave of good news.
But the sense that what we were talking about represented just the first wave of change, with much more change and disorder to follow, was pervasive. For what we are dealing with is a technology involving social and political change on a scale and at a speed never before experienced by human beings or their institutions.
Thanks to a vast and complex network of underseas cables, satellites orbiting the earth, as well as readily available and affordable receiving and sending equipment, the world is now drawn together by an electronic nerve system -- carrying news, money, data and information almost anywhere in the world in microseconds.
This steady stream of news and information is increasing at an unparalleled rate. As Al Sikes, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission only half jokingly put it, "the Cold War is over and television won."
Yes, the Cold War is over, but one of the intriguing, perhaps ironic facts of world peace is the obvious and troubling presence of national, racial, ethnic and religious bias. As Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell observed at last year's conference, "in almost every political arena in the world you'll find factors of disintegration. In Northern Ireland it is religious, in Canada it is linguistic . . . and in Nigeria it is tribal. These follow the fault lines of history and culture and therefore express themselves in these ways. If you look around the world . . . you find a situation in which loss of control and pressures for protection begin to multiply, so there is a sudden growth of bilateralism and pressures for multilateralism."
"What is emerging," Bell argued, "is the growth of new devices for adaptation. But why is it," he asked, "in the last five or six years that you got this acceleration of pressure for a unified European community, even before the cracks in Eastern Europe?" The answer of course is telecommunications. For continued advances in telecommunications both accentuate the problems in the world, and offer solutions to deal with the underlying concerns.
Singapore's minister of communications and information, Mah Bow Tan, acknowledged as much by stressing the need for a Pacific Community -- not unlike the European community -- with its efforts to bring 12 nations together in a sort of common European home, eliminating barriers to trade and commerce, travel, broadcasting or any other endeavor by year's end. The need for harmonization of laws and policies regarding telecommunications in the Pacific, and the benefits of such acts to growth and development of the entire region, cannot be over-estimated.
Some progress appears to be on the horizon. Bradley Holmes, U.S. ambassador responsible for telecommunications, observed that there seemed to be agreement among the four China's -- the People's Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore -- for such an accord, at least for telecommunications.
Announcements of corporate alliances are happening too. Gerald Thames, CEO of British Telecom's Atlanta-based subsidiary, Syncordia, talked of "one-stop shopping" for the global corporation. "No longer was there a need to deal with 10 or 20 or 50 telephone companies in the world," he said.
Motorola was on hand too, to offer new and exciting visions of seamless global information highways, where barriers, at least technical ones, disappeared. Motorola described its Iridium project, in which it will launch hundreds of low earth orbiting satellites -- a concept approved in principle by the United Nations International Telecommunications Union earlier this year -- and offer wireless communications service worldwide. Through joint agreements with wired and wireless suppliers across the globe, an Iridium user could literally place a call from any place -- at sea, in the air, or walking through the woods -- to any other place anywhere in the world.
NCR, Deloitte and Touche, France Telecom, National Semiconductor, and Digital Equipment were in agreement too: the information highways can and must be built, the worldwide shortage of capital demanded that companies work together; governments must keep the movement towards privatization and deregulation going full steam ahead.
It's a brave new world. A world where new alliances are being made, old ones changed or altered dramatically. We are on the path to a new world order girded by a new global communications infrastructure.
The global corporation has proved itself as the single best engine for creating wealth and jobs. It is entering a whole new era, however. It must persuade national governments that lifting all the barriers to communications is in everyone's best interest. It must also prove its ability to serve communities and individual citizens in a very different way, to give meaning and value to their lives if it wishes to continue to be the engine -- and the chosen instrument -- of governments and their people.
As governments and business pursue their separate efforts at the integration of markets and the integration of telecommunications systems, it will certainly be helpful, and it may be critical, that they join forces in a new powerful alliance for the development of world communications.