Technology and the Media
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William Mohawk
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A leading historian and expert on the BBC, and the author of numerous classic scholarly publications, Asa Briggs is Chancellor of the Open University, and Vice-President of the Historical Society. In this article, Asa Briggs talks about the issue of business conducted over the Internet, which raises important security issues. Companies doing business over the Internet must have very sophisticated security measures in place so that information such as credit card, bank account, and social security numbers cannot be accessed by unauthorized users. Similarly, government facilities, universities, and institutions must ensure that access to their computers over the Internet is strictly regulated.
Technology and the Media
Asa Briggs
The sense that the world is in the middle of a continuing communications revolution has been strong since the 1960s when television made its great breakthrough. It was then that the Canadian writer on communications, Marshall McLuhan, made his memorable statements that "the medium is the message" and that the world was becoming a global village. It was then too that the word "media" became part of daily speech, covering not only electronic media, live television, but older print media, particularly the press.
Comparisons were drawn between the progress and the development of television in the 20th century and the advent and diffusion of printing in the 15th and 16th centuries. Yet much had happened between. It was not until the 19th century that the newspaper became the dominant pre-electronic medium, following in the wake of the pamphlet and the book and in the company of the periodical. It was during the 19th century also that the communications revolution speeded up, beginning with transport, the railway, and leading on through the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and motion pictures into the 20th-century world of the motor car and the airplane. Not everyone sees that process in perspective. It is important to do so.
It is generally recognized, however, that the introduction of the computer in the 20th century, followed by the invention of the integrated circuit during the 1960s, radically changed the process, although its impact on the media was not immediately apparent. It now became possible to combine thousands, later millions, of individual transistors on a single chip. Computers became smaller and more powerful. They became "personal" too, as well as institutional, with memory and storage increasing and display becoming crisper. They were thought of, like people, in terms of generations, with the distance between generations much smaller.
It was within the computer age that the term "information society" acquired wide currency to describe the context within which we now live. Advanced countries, it was claimed, were evolving from an industrial to an information society. The term "industrial revolution" had been used before the term "communications revolution," and now these two "revolutions" were compared. They had each influenced both work and leisure and how we think and feel both about place and time, but in each case there had been controversies about their economic, political, social, and cultural implications. "Benefits" were weighed against "harmful" outcomes. Generalizations proved difficult. The press and the journalists who wrote for it had always had their critics. Television was attacked more comprehensively for "consuming much [time and] energy" while ignoring "the fundamentals of life."
Not everyone agreed—or agrees—about the "causes" of the communications revolution. Were there single causes of particular episodes in it? The words "cause" and "effect," which have been applied to each technological change in turn, from the steam engine to the computer, are quite inadequate. It has never been possible to isolate each single effect, big or small. Technology by itself does not explain. The same technology was used in quite different ways in different political and social contexts. In Britain, for example, the national broadcasting agency had a monopoly both of radio and television until 1955, and was financed by license fee, not by advertising. In the United States broadcasting from the beginning, radio and television, was dependent on advertising and on the business system. In some other countries, including the Soviet Union, all the media were viewed as instruments of propaganda. Such differences of purpose led to differences in programming, both news and entertainment. Only with satellite television and the prospects of "globalization" were national systems threatened and with them, it was often argued—the debate continues—"national cultures."
McLuhan, fascinated by the universal pervasiveness of television, thought of it as an effect, not as the cause of effects. Each medium, printed or electronic, had its own inherent characteristics, whatever its context. He had little to say about ownership or control of the media, an issue always in the forefront after the advent of satellite television. His views now seem dated, as does his language. Despite the popular use of the term global village, television did not create a new one. The words "network" and "web" seem far more appropriate. Another new phrase of the 1990s, "information superhighway," also demands critical attention. This raised the question of "access" to new technology just as the industrial revolution had raised questions of distribution of wealth as well as of its production. The aspiration, eloquently formulated in the United States, was to make the superhighway available to "as many voices, eyes and ears as possible."
Meanwhile, within the changing communications pattern, the Internet, with less rhetoric, has been perhaps the most interesting development and has certainly most captured the imagination. At first, in the 1960s, the purposes of the Internet were limited, as were its users. The "web," as it came to be called, was designed to serve military and academic needs. Soon, however, as a "world web," it attracted a wide range of participants, becoming an electronic exchange system, operating from below. Accessed, often graphical, "pages" of information with embedded addresses, allowed users of all ages and types to link to other sites at the click of a "mouse" button. The "pages" created constituted "hypertext," allowing compilation of pictures and words. There was scope for the exchange not only of information (with varying degrees of authenticity) but of ideas and creativity. The distinction between "producers" and "consumers" of content lost much of its point. For a time they had seemed—and still seem—like high priests of the media.
The most important technological changes in communications since the 1960s, apparent in the way that both the Internet and the media have developed, have all involved what has been called "convergence" or what in France has been described more poetically as "the ballet of the electrons." Digital technology, bringing together computing and solid-state electronics, certainly revolutionizes (this time the word cannot be argued about) telecommunications and the media. Binary digit signals enable language, numbers, images, patterns, and music to be communicated through a common technology. The possibilities seem almost limitless. They would have seemed in the past to have belonged not to science but to science fiction. The word "information" itself seems to be inadequate. It covers "entertainment," as it did in the McLuhanesque period, raising different issues, and it encompasses ways of learning as well as of communicating. It is difficult to keep a sense of perspective given the rate and scale of change.
Because of the scale, it is now as necessary to look at the 1960s in perspective as it is to look at the invention of printing or the railway in perspective. One thing is as beyond doubt as the relevance of the word "revolutionary." The continuing communications revolution has brought the media not only into the library or the office but into the home. The modern home has been a place of entry not only for books, magazines, newspapers, cassettes, discs, and videos but for "hardware," including radio and television sets, record players, telephones, typewriters, cameras, projectors, calculators, and computers. Each has its own history: each poses distinct questions about technology and use. And even if it is difficult to establish perspectives, it is essential to identify the linkages that exist—or can exist—between all these gadgets. They are all products, hardware or software, of the continuing communications revolution. Each one, of course, has had its effect on the particular home, and not all modern homes include these gadgets, many of them much advertised. Their physical presence and access to them depends on family income and choice. Nonetheless, what were once thought of as luxuries—television sets, for example—become to be thought of as necessities, and what were once thought of as "novelties" (with an element of miracle about them) begin to be taken for granted. It is tempting, indeed, to believe that the "technology of tomorrow" is already here.
The questions multiply. What will be the next stages? Will old media disappear? For example, what will happen to the book or to the compact disc? How will the newspaper change? Will it ever become completely electronic? Can public broadcasting survive? What is the future of digital terrestrial television? Will we have new business alliances and consortia? They are already forming. At the individual level will E-mail displace letters or fax? Will the relationship between media producers and editors and users (or customers) become more interactive?
At the more fundamental level will digitalization divide the world even more than at present into "haves" and "have nots"—those countries that have the capacity and ability to develop new digitalized networks and those that do not? Will the concentration of economic power in the hands of those who now own quite different segments of media—from books to motion pictures and from cable to satellite—endanger individual freedom? Will the opportunity of choice, offered to individuals, mean that the field of choice will be genuinely widened? May we not have more and more of the same thing?
It is logical to separate out questions relating to technological developments from questions relating to ownership and control, but, in practice, visions of the future world involve bringing them together. It is difficult in present circumstances to avoid the blurring of "image" (seeing the world as it is presented to us or as we present it to ourselves) and "reality." Can "truth" survive? The media in their mediation can create what has come to be called "virtual reality"; and Internet can offer fantasy ways of escaping from the restraints of life as it is lived to a world of cyberspace. Cyber words have multiplied during the 1980s and 1990s—from "cybernaut" to "cyborg" through a whole new vocabulary.
It may well be that through an effort to chart the words that we use, and the dates when they were first used, we can achieve a greater understanding of a continuing historical process that encompasses the future as well as the past.
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