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IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
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by Dave Hughes
It is easy to become blase about the significance of global 'personal' telecommunications after using it for a while. But over these past few days of the American Thanksgiving season when I have stood behind the chair at this computer in my study and gently given just a few hints on what keys to press to my new daughter-in-law as she telecommunicates with ease to Japan, to Norway, to Russia, to Saudia Arabia, the Deaf and Blind School across town - to thousands of people she will never meet face to face, I am struck by the miracle of it all.
For you see, Ha Ning is a young lady who had never met a foreigner in her 24 years growing up in China, much less a modem or a computer. Her mind was circumscribed by a remote, ancient and nearly closed culture of a billion people where my son went less than two years ago when things were calm, to taste the culture by teaching English at a small college. Carrying a 6 lb laptop Toshiba with Word Perfect, a modem with two alligator clips, with which to connect to an ancient Chinese rotary dial phone in his room, with exposed brown wires going to the wall. So he was able to reach half around the globe when Tiananmen Square erupted and he was cut off from critical sources of information.
While cataclysmic world events swirled around him, Ed hung onto his slender silver lifeline of modem communications to the outside world, and got information he could not learn from the inside. Thus, armed with vital information, and judgements from afar, he stayed. And fell in love with, and married, the lovely young Ha Ning and brought her to America. Aided all the way by a tiny computer and modem.
But already she, who loves her native country very much, is exercising the telecommunications and computer skills he taught her which I taught him - as well as reading and writing Chinese on that same tiny laptop - by which she will not only stay in touch with her family, but help her country move into the modern world. From afar.
And she teaches my young granddaughters, 1,500 miles away in another American city, by modem, about an ancient culture which they may never visit physically.
It may be enough. For by the time little Lindsey and Jennifer, who have begun to learn these skills by talking about what interests them at their age - Barbie Dolls and doting grandmothers - grow up and exercise their communications skills when they can exercise political, financial, educational clout on the world stage, it will be routine, and no longer news. They will not even need telephones, as digital radio devices today in the hands of hobbyists, and specialized companies become ubiquitous personal tools carried in the pocket or purse. My granddaughters will be able to reach virtually any person on the face of this globe with ease. And check any fact seen by media, personally and in their own way. It won't even be such a big deal.
I can't imagine what incredible devices Ed and Ha Ning's own children-to-be will learn on.
Multiply such stories as that of Ed and Ha Ning, Lindsey and Jennifer by hundreds, thousands, and millions - and a global revolution will have occured which will change the face of politics, business, education forever. No tyrant or ideology which seeks to maintain control by controlling all 'information' or 'communications' will long survive. And the power of 'selective media' which so very much shapes our view of the world according to the perspective of those who control mass information in democratic societies will diminish also.
The global Power Shift has begun.
And when everyone is able to determine their own version of Global Reality, instead of sharing those few symbols and impressions by which we perceive things from afar, will it be for better or for worse?
I am not prescient enough to know. For people will still be people. In all their individual stupidity, greed, cruelty and fear, and deceipt, as well as wisdom, generosity, benevolence, bravery, and candor. Whether new social systems organized around global-ranging minds moving instantly between virtual, as well as physical, communities, states and nations, will be able to handle such human weaknesses any better than the institutions we have now, is an open question.
All we know is the world will be very different when Man, who started out sharing with the animals the ability to communicate only out to the range of his voice and limits of his vision, is now beginning to share with the Gods, the ability to span the globe - yeah the universe - with the individual mind, and communicate intimately with whomever is there.
But if we are going to have the communicative power of the Gods, I guess we better start deciding what it is we are going to say. For the Medium is getting far, far ahead of the Message.