TECHNOLOGICAL SALVATION AND ELECTRONIC NETWORKING
Keynote Address to the ENA Conference - May, 1988
Part I
by Robert Lewis Shayon

In the 1950s, Lisa Kimball's family and mine were neighbors on
Meeker Road in Westport, Connecticut. Lisa and my daughter, Diana,
were schoolmates. In a letter inviting me to speak this morning at
this conference, Lisa recalled that she saw her first color
television on a set in my living room. I wrote a book in 1951,
TELEVISION AND OUR CHILDREN, and I dedicated it "To my daughter,
Diana, and the companion legions of her generation: the challenge
will be theirs, too."

Well, time has surprises for parental expectations. Now my
daughter, Diana, and Lisa are grown up. I doubt if either of them
are much concerned with television's challenge. In the so-called
advanced nations of the world the computer has replaced the
television set as the prime object of public attention. Diana is
president of her own company and is a strategic planning consultant
to major corporations. Her firm counsels clients on computer
hardware and software; and Lisa is one of the organizers of this
conference and a leader in computer conferencing. My daughter
travels on planes with a portable computer on her lap, and Lisa
talks about "people and organizations at work in a global economy."
My seven-year-old granddaughter has an Apple computer in her
bedroom. Would anyone venture to guess what new technology will
pre-occupy her attention twenty years from now?

Of one thing we can be certain: the pace of change is speeding up.
My grand-daughter will be confronting the new technologies of her
generation sooner than it took her mother to move from color
television in the living room to lap-top computers on planes. And
it's your generation, the people in this electronic conferencing
meeting, which stands between the past and that unknown future.
Electronic networking is your thing, the thing that you must do at
this historical moment. You are the actors at center stage, and it
is how you will play your roles that may affect the outcome: so for
a brief beginning I will play my role; I will do what Lisa Kimball
asked me to do, give you a glimpse of the past when old
telecommunications technologies were new.

Television today is very big business: that statement will surprise
no one in this audience. It is the cultural arm of the industrial
system. It is profit oriented and market targeted. It is
centralized, massified, controlled from the top down. It is
one-way, non-participatory communication dedicated to what J.K.
Galbraith, the noted economist, has called "the art of
bamboozlement." Its object is the cultivated sale of audiences to
advertisers, people in the guise of consumers and not citizens.

It was not always entirely so. Congress opted in 1934, when it
passed the Communications Act, for broadcasting as a business, but
it expressly added that it was a business "affected with the public
interest." Even some of the executives who controlled television in
its early days believed their rhetoric, when they talked of making
TV "a mature instrument for the public good." Pat Weaver, vice
president in charge of television for NBC in 1952, articulated a
policy of "enlightenment through exposure." "The purpose, in short,
of the communications media that reach the all-family audience from
coast-to-coast is the general self-realization of the public through
exposure and enlightenment -- not the special education of minor
groups with limited interests." But then came the 1970s when
deregulation fever set in.

Cable television followed with its promise of utopia for "minor
groups with limited interests." The band-width capacity of a wired
system seemed an answer to one-way centralized control of
television. Cable promised diversity, access to the system for
viewers to have input in programming. It was to be decentralized,
with town meetings on the air, with electronic polling, with a
variety of home services. The airwaves would crackle, envisioned
the cablecasters, with two-way dialogue, with genuine political
discourse. It was to be a wired, democratic nation with the citizen
once again in the driver's seat.

Well, the nation is half-wired today, and where is the citizen
participation, where is the genuine diversity of programming and
political viewpoints? We have a proliferation of channels but the
same old programming with some marginal differences and certainly no
decentralized communications.

Now, while mergers among the cable system operators centralize more
power in a few great conglomerations of control, we stand at the
threshold of computer networking, and we share the excitement of a
new technology. Once again we talk of decentralized communications,
of dialogue and conferencing, of participation, based not only on a
regional or national basis but with the expected coming of ISDN,
conceived in terms of a "global economy." With modems and telephone
lines at reasonable costs, we can reach{out and connect with vast
data bases, with people who think as we do and have common goals, we
can have communications power, as workers in corporations, as
members of special interest groups, and above all as citizens.

This is the mood in which this conference begins. It is
exhilarating and exciting, and I wish you the best. Perhaps I can
be of most help if I examine with you past patterns of
telecommunications which might guide us in the development of this
new technology of electronic networking. James Carey, a
communications scholar, has written eloquently about the "myth of
the technological sublime." It began in Europe, he tells us, before
Columbus discovered America. The continent's virgin wilderness was
to be the scene of a new Eden, the machines of the industrial
revolution were to be transplanted to this garden, which was to be
exempt from the factory system in Europe, with its "grime,
desolation, poverty, injustice and class struggle."

The machine in the garden did not produce the expected Utopia. But
then came the steam engine with its capacity to link the continent
with railroads and boats to create new commercial bonds. Once more
the rhetoric of salvation gushed forth in a typical passage from an
address of the period: "An agent was at hand," said the speaker, "to
bring everything into harmonious cooperation ... triumphing over
space and time ... to subdue prejudice and to unite every part of
our land in rapid and friendly communication; and that great motive
agent was steam."

Well, the railroads were built and the land united; but then came
the Civil War, and in its aftermath American cities were turned into
industrial slums, "class and race warfare were everyday features of
life," according to Carey. There were depressions, the scarring of
the countryside by coal and iron mining and the devastation of the
forests. But the myth of the technological sublime still lived,
only now it was turned from the machine to electricity. Electric
power was the new god. It promised, so it seemed, "the same
freedom, decentralization, ecological harmony and democratic
community that had hitherto been guaranteed but left undelivered by
mechanization."

It was the time of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Public
electric power and community planning were united to launch a "great
power crusade" to integrate the new technology with conservation and
democratic localism. Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania, sounded the
keynote for the power crusade: "Steam," said the Governor, "brought
about the centralization of industry, a decline in country life, the
decay of many small communities, and the weakening of family ties.
Giant Power may bring about the decentralization of industry, the
restoration of family ... If we control it, instead of permitting it
to control us, the coming electrical development will form the basis
of a civilization happier, freer, and fuller of opportunity than the
world has ever known..." But the real beneficiaries of the rhetoric
of the electronic sublime were the electric light and power
companies who presided over the new technologies.

In our own time, radio, television and cable have perpetuated the
myth of the electronic sublime. Large audiences receive but are
unable to make direct response or participate otherwise in vigorous
discussion. But the myth persists and has taken on new vitality
with the arrival of computers.

Here are some quotes by authors who have written about computers and
networks. "With powerful personal computers, transformation and
salvation are all to be carried out." "Computer-based
communications can be used to make human lives richer and freer, by
enabling persons to have access to vast stores of information, other
"human resources," and opportunities for work and socializing on a
more flexible, cheaper and convenient basis than ever before." "The
information revolution is bringing with it a key that may open the
door to a new era of involvement and participation."

Now what is the object of this very brief history lesson in the myth
of the technological sublime? You're probably leaping ahead of me
and saying to yourselves: "He's warning us that we're headed for
the same disillusionment as those enthusiasts who have gone before
us. BUT WHAT HE DOESN'T UNDERSTAND IS THAT WE'RE DIFFERENT! This
time we really have control. This time we can interact with each
other. This time there's a real chance for many-sided
communication, for exchange of views, for sharing of
decision-making, for arrival at democratic consensus.

Perhaps. I hope you can do it. I'm not a technological pessimist
nor a neo-Luddite. There have been such in past times and there are
many who look with deep suspicion at computers and the alleged
Information Age. But you can't succeed where others have failed
without knowing, without being aware of the forces arrayed against
you.

Power, the status quo, the centralization of trans-national
corporations, the government which is allied to those corporations,
and the social context in which self-aggrandizement and the profit
motive are bred into each and every one of us from the cradle to the
grave. Many of you are associated with major corporations, which
often encourage the rhetoric of electronic conferencing in order to
sell hardware and software.

In one such corporation, there was an initial enthusiasm for
network-conferencing with employees around the world. A chief
executive officer started his own network. He asked for input on
company policy from distant employees. He got it. There were forty
or so tied into the network, and they poured out suggestions.
Gradually the executive lost interest. He hadn't anticipated so
much democratic discussion. He couldn't handle it. He felt
threatened. Gradually he withdrew. The conferencing continues, but
it has lost all semblance of real input into policy-making.
Discussion may be decentralized, but power is centralized.

The computer industry faces a paradox. On the one hand they seek to
enlarge the market for the sale of products: but as the market
enlarges and more and more people seek access to democratic
policy-making, to social change, the more the power structure is
threatened. Power will seek to maintain control.

One way to do that is surveillance. Every message sent, every
digitized code put into the system, is capable of being stored,
retrieved, and used to curtail the privacy and political liberty of
the senders. They may back off and declare: "I don't want to get
involved." This has a chilling effect on the willingness of people
to advance dissenting ideas.

Political liberty is only one half of democracy; the other half is
economic equality: and that may be adversely affected by the
promised decentralization or segmentation of the market. This may
lead to social stratification or a widening of the gap between the
information rich and the information poor. ClusterPlus (sm) is a
system developed by Donnelly Marketing Information Services and
Simmons Market Research Bureau. It divides the mass market into 47
distinct lifestyle clusters. There is a cluster for Top Income, Well
Educated, Professionals, Prestige Homes, and another cluster for
Poorly Educated, Unskilled, Rural, Southern Blacks. Another cluster
is called "Dixie-Style Tenements," residents of lowest-class city
neighborhoods, mixed Black and Hispanic, families and singles with
some high-school education and very low socioeconomic status. There
is also a cluster called Blue Blood Estates, a suburban community
consisting of the highest-class, predominantly white-college
graduates with families.

The significance of this clustering of classes or castes, if you
will, could dry up the very outreach of people to people in
electronic networking. The networkers, computer literate and
economically privileges, could become "electronic elites" talking
only among themselves.

Used for commercial marketing, people in such clusters could
identify themselves with such peer groups and reinforce the drift to
a permanent underclass in our nation, without history, without hope.
Electronic networkers seeking social change should consider another
obstacle they would face, the unequal balance with large government
agencies. Personal computers conferencing with each other are no
match for the computers of the U.S. National Security Agency. In
short, technology is no substitute for politics in bringing about
social change. Langdon Winner, of the University of California at
Santa Cruz has written: "Information in data banks does not replace
understanding, enlightenment, timeless wisdom or the content of the
well-educated mind."

If electronic networking is to contribute to a more humane society,
it must keep those values uppermost in mind. On-line and off, don't
forget that reflection, debate and public choice are rare
opportunities in our nation. These are best done by face-to-face
contact. Decentralization will not be accomplished without
reference to content or to the facilities over which content is
transmitted. Control of content must be kept separate from
transmission facilities or the right to freedom of speech and press
under our First Amendment may be abridged.

A New York Times news report from Washington, D.C. today (May 12,
1988, p. 20) is relevant in this connection. Here are excerpts from
that news story:

Technological advances may eventually dictate that a
single entity provide cable television services
nationwide. The President of the nation's largest
cable system operator ... John Malone of
Telecommunications Inc., told the House
Telecommunications Subcommittee that "a super-monopoly"
might be the most efficient way to serve viewers ...
New technologies like fibre-optic cable, are much more
efficient than co-axial cable, at transmitting images,
he said, but only a regulated network ... The
super-monopoly might take the form of a joint venture
between cable companies and telephone companies, a
spokesman for the National Cable Television Association
said.

The Times report ends with the statement that Telecommunications,
Inc., has expressed interest in the telephone business, and its
holdings include movie theatres, satellite dish systems and other
things.

It is significant that "other things" include cable programming
networks and minority interests in broadcasting stations. Cable
systems control content and telephone companies control
transmission. To merge the two in a "super-monopoly" would mean the
retention of all entry into the providing of content, the control of
content and the cost of content. Such a merger constitutes a major
threat to freedom of speech and press.

Like the Ancient Mariner at the Wedding in Coloridge's poem, "The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner," I fear I keep you too long from the
wedding feast. Perhaps a few may remember from your high-school
days, that the Ancient Mariner stopped the wedding guest on his way
to the feast and kept him with his glittering eye, while he told him
a strange and terrible tale, which left the wedding guest more
solemn and sober. You are on your way to the feast provided by Lisa
Kimball and her associates. Enjoy it, but remember also that for my
granddaughter, seven years old a week ago, you are the keepers of
the flame.

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author's note: Robert Lewis Shayon is Professor of
Communications at The Annenberg School of Communications,
University of Pennsylvania.