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Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation, by Ronald J. Deibert
5. Transformation in the Mode of Communication: The Emergence of the Hypermedia Environment
| A web of glass spans the globe. Through it, brief sparks of light incessantly fly, linking machines chip to chip and people face to face. |
| --Vinton G. Cerf, "Networks," Scientific American, (September 1991), p. 72. |
One morning, I awoke at 7:30 a.m. and turned on my personal computer. After issuing a few commands, I had connected myself remotely to the Internet and began reading the fifty-eight electronic mail messages that had collected overnight. The majority of the messages were "postings" from two of the six electronic discussion groups of which I am a member--the International Political Economy-NET and the Mediev-L medieval discussion group. On this particular day the content of the messages on the two discussion groups reflected a variety of ongoing discussion "threads" ranging from the relevance of Aristotle to the early modern state-building process, to Chomsky's views on the media, to the fate of the Chiapas Indians in Mexico. Twelve of the fifty-eight messages were personal: two from a colleague in Tokyo "forwarding" me articles he had recently "downloaded" from the "net" on Japanese studies of electronic communities; one from a colleague based in Taipei offering his reply to my last message on the topic of global consumer culture; three from a professor of psychology at Northwestern University with whom I engage regularly in "on-line" discussions; one from a colleague in Washington, D.C. providing me with details on an upcoming book project; one from a colleague in Pennsylvania outlining his views on the academic job market; two from a colleague in London, Ontario offering critical comments on my interpretation of Richard Rorty and philosophical realism; one from a colleague in San Rafael, Cali fornia confirming that he had received my last message; and one from a colleague across town asking when I would be next on campus. The day was not unusual.
From the perspective of an average person living fifteen, or even ten, years ago, such a morning routine would likely have been considered the stuff of science fiction. Yet today it is a routine that is carried out by millions of other individuals around the planet. It illustrates the extent to which the mode of communication has undergone dramatic and fundamental change in a very short period of time--a change that is leading to a new communications environment that I refer to as hypermedia.
The purpose of this chapter will be to map this emerging communications environment--to trace its sociological and technological roots and to provide an outline of its central properties, or "nature." More so, perhaps, than previous changes in modes of communication, no single technological innovation or instrument of technology signals this transformation. Rather, the emergence of the hypermedia environment reflects a complex melding and converging of distinct technologies into a single integrated web of digital-electronic-telecommunications--a process that has roots reaching back to the late nineteenth century, and that encompasses a series of technological innovations that continued through the twentieth century, culminating in the digital convergence that began in the late 1960s.
Perhaps because of this convergence of once-discrete technologies, many observers have tended to focus on various distinct parts of the communications environment rather than the environment itself. The result has been a proliferation of terms and labels that designate a particular component of the environment, none of which satisfactorily captures the new mode of communication as a whole. For example, while "information" is certainly more abundant in the new media environment, it is not unique to it, as all prior modes of communication have distributed information in some particular way--even primitive oral cultures. Likewise, "information superhighway" describes only one small aspect of the new communications environment--the transmission element. Similarly, the term "cyberspace" has taken on meaning as a reference to the artificial "space" one enters on computer networks, but it is not generally associated with television or faxes. 1 While not wishing to add unduly to academic and popular jargon, borrowing from Jean Baudrillard I have chosen the term hypermedia to designate the emerging communications environment. 2 This term not only captures the convergence of discrete technologies, it also suggests the massive penetration and ubiquity of electronic media characteristic of the new communications environment. Furthermore, the prefix "hyper" (meaning "over" or "above") emphasizes two central characteristics of this environment: the speed by which communications currently take place, and the intertextuality or interoperatibility of once-discrete media. As will be described below, the hypermedia environment is not just the television, the computer, the fax machine, the cellular phone, the satellite reconnaissance system, or the hand-held video camera--it is all of the above and more linked together into a single seamless web of digital-electronic-telecommunications.
The Pre-history of Hypermedia: Technological and Sociological Roots
As with other innovations in communication technologies, the development of hypermedia did not occur de novo, but was contingent on a series of interdependent technological, sociological, and material factors. The "pre-history" of hypermedia thus dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century when social forces drove technological research and development (R&D) into ways to improve long-distance communications. Although smoke and fire signals had been employed by humans for centuries to communicate messages over distances, they were too simple to be employed for anything beyond the most basic of tactical communications. More complex communications, such as that found in spoken, written and printed words, had been constrained by the existing mode of transportation of the time. Thus, prior to 1840 complex communications could move only as fast as the swiftest of technologies--the train--which then had a speed of about 35 miles per hour. 3
It is entirely conceivable that such constraints would have remained constant had it not been for the development of social forces that focused attention on ways to overcome them. But such was clearly not the case in the latter half of the nineteenth century, during which a person born in 1830 might well have witnessed such communication innovations as photography and telegraphy (1830s), rotary power printing (1840s), the typewriter (1860s), the transatlantic cable (1866), the telephone (1876), motion pictures (1894), wireless telegraphy (1895), and magnetic tape recording (1899). That person might have marveled at the advent of radio (1906), or even television (1923). 4 As Beniger has described in The Control Revolution, these innovations can be seen as responses to "control" crises arising out of the Industrial Revolution: that is, attempts to coordinate and manage ever more complex and integrated systems of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. In the United States especially, these control crises were particularly acute given the vast spaces opened up by westward territorial expansion, and not surprisingly, it was in North America that most of these innovations originated. Beniger describes how the intensifying industrialization process focused attention on ways to improve communications in the service of managing production, distribution, and consumption:
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Suddenly, in a matter of decades, goods began to move faster than even the winds themselves, reliably and in mounting volume, through factories, across continents and around the world. For the first time in history, by the mid-nineteenth century the social processing of material flows threatened to exceed in both volume and speed the system's capacity to control them. Thus was born the crisis of control, one that would eventually reach, by the end of the century, the most aggregate levels of America's material economy. 5 |
Because transportation capabilities were improving at such a great pace and over such large distances, it became an imperative to establish more effective means of communicating information over these large distances. Safety problems were especially acute, particularly the coordination of train traffic. 6 Railroad companies had actually held back the development of planned new lines because of safety problems, a situation that was magnified by a series of spectacular accidents caused by poor communication and coordination. Commerce was being transported so swiftly that firms had difficulty keeping track of inventory and movements of distributed products over large distances, and were unable to track consumer demand effectively.
Samuel Morse focused his energy on the development of the telegraph in the 1830s largely in response to these converging pressures. To be sure, Morse was not alone in his experimentation; in the 1820s and 1830s scientists in France, Russia, Germany, and England worked feverishly to respond to the social needs for more efficient long-distance communication-- a reflection of converging social forces in this direction. 7 But it was Morse who constructed the first practical working electromagnetic telegraph in 1838, and demonstrated it to skeptical audiences for years thereafter. In fact, it was not until 1844 that Morse was given a grant by the Congress to construct an experimental line from Washington to Baltimore through which he transmitted the famous line, "What hath God wrought?" One day after Morse's public demonstration, the Baltimore Patriot newspaper employed the same Washington-to-Baltimore line to report on a vote in the House of Representatives, concluding that the telegraph represented "the annihilation of space." 8 For the first time, messages could travel faster than messengers. Although communication was no longer strictly tied to transportation, telegraph lines were installed in the right-of-ways of railway lines, and were used initially to coordinate rail traffic. 9 Not long afterward, however, the telegraph came to serve a more broad commercial and administrative function, greasing the wheels of commerce and unifying price and market systems across the continent. By 1862, 150,000 miles of telegraphic cable had been laid around the world, including 15,000 in Great Britain and 48,000 in the United States, spinning the first tentative webs in what would later become the wired world of the hypermedia environment. 10
The telephone followed soon in the wake of the telegraph, offering the additional advantage of simultaneous transmission of two-way communications. Invented, of course, by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, the telephone was introduced into a world already fired by the "lightning wires" of the telegraph. As a consequence, legal tussles ensued among the newly founded Bell corporation and the telegraphic monopoly Western Union over the rights and uses of the new device. 11 But the telephone spread rather quickly once the legal entanglements were settled. From 1880 to 1893 the number of telephones in the United States grew from about 60,000 to 260,000, with about two-thirds of those located in businesses. 12 By 1934, 33 million telephones were in operation worldwide. 13 Although initially confined to commercial enterprises and government offices, the telephone eventually provided two-way interactive voice links among individual households, a characteristic that would gradually become one of the central defining features of the hypermedia environment.
Coincidental with these developments in telecommunications, another portentous innovation in communication technology was occurring that provided yet a further seed in the development of hypermedia: the daguerreotype, or the photograph, invented by Louis Daguerre in 1838. 14 In developing an instrument that serves not merely "to draw nature" but "gives her the power to reproduce herself," Daguerre was building on the ancient human practice to reproduce visually worlds of nature and imagination--a practice that is one of the earliest hallmarks of the species itself. 15 Photography, or "writing with light," was initially restricted to idle spectacles, but technological developments in the use of negatives improved the reproductive quality of photographs such that by the 1890s they had become a staple in commercial advertisements, especially in newspapers and magazines. 16 The technology was the first in a series of image spectacles running through the turn of the century, from silent moving pictures in nickelodeons, to the Balaban and Katz movie palaces, to large cinema houses. 17
From these three initial developments in telecommunications and photography, a spate of innovations in communication technologies followed. Of these, radio, and then later television were the most important. The former was an outgrowth of the wireless telegraph developed by Guglielmo Marconi, and did not really take off until after World War I with the gradual incorporation of hobby radio broadcasts into commercial enterprises. 18 While the television set was invented in 1923, and the first broadcasts were in 1939, it did not emerge as a popular medium until after World War II, a period that will be covered in more detail below. Although the telecommunication technologies built on similar basic scientific principles of electromagnetics, each of the media remained discrete: the television, the photograph, the radio, moving pictures, and the telegraph all clearly entailed separate communications components. One could watch television, or listen to the radio, or look at a photograph, but each involved a physically separate and distinct act.
The sudden sweep of communications innovation in such a short period of time had a significant impact on the prevailing cultural milieu. As many observers have pointed out, these changes reverberated throughout various counter-cultural and avant-garde spheres in the early part of the twentieth century, including art, poetry, and popular music. 19 At a more general level, the "mass" audience that was created with vernacular printing reached its apogee with these innovations, as government-regulated national monopolies were created across the industrialized countries to broadcast television and radio to mass audiences within sovereign-territorial jurisdictions. It was with this single-point/mass broadcast paradigm in mind that critical theorists would later ruminate on the rise of the "One-Dimensional Man" whose life was structured by pervasive mass propaganda--a model deeply informed by the ways in which totalitarian regimes were able to make effective use of mass media leading up to World War II. 20 Somewhat ironically, however, it was the imperatives of that war, and the Cold War that followed, that spurred on the next wave of technological innovations in communications that would lead gradually to the development of hypermedia, and to the eventual dissolution of the "mass" national audience.
The Cold War and Military Research and Development
While the technological innovations of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries were closely bound up with commerce and the imperatives of industrial production, it was World War II and the ensuing Cold War that fueled R&D into the next wave of technological change in communications. According to Molina, a complex of capital-government-military-science interests converged during and following World War II to become the dominant social constituency behind the development of microtechnology, particularly in the United States where the pressures of the Cold War were, of course, most acute. 21 While each of these social interests complemented and fed off each other, clearly it was the military interests that played the leading role in shaping and constraining the development of technologies at this time. Later, commercial interests both within and outside the United States would gradually overtake the U.S. military as the dominant social force behind microelectronic development, especially as the Cold War subsided. Out of this confluence of technological innovation, military re-structuring, commercial marketing, and consumer demand came the rapid explosion of the hypermedia environment in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
Military Sources of Technological Innovation
The convergence of interests among the groups forming the Cold War complex can be traced back to the onset of World War II. The harnessing of national energy toward the war effort brought together both private capital and government expenditures behind a common cause, and accelerated R&D of electronic communications within and often between the major industrialized countries. Prior to World War II, military research had primarily exploited civilian-commercial technologies to the needs of war. World War II reversed this relationship, placing military interests at the forefront of R&D--a relationship that was later buttressed by the well-known "spin-offs" argument, whereby military research was seen as useful insofar as civilian applications could be derived from militarily inspired technologies. 22 World War II research on radars, computers, miniaturization, and guided missiles transformed the electronics industry. The U.S. radar program in particular was a vast undertaking, employing the cooperative efforts of major R&D centers, such as Bell Labs and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radio Laboratory, and costing as much as $2.5 billion--more than the entire Manhattan "Atom Bomb" Project. 23 The vast research drive led to a large number of significant developments in electronics in a short period of time, all of which arose out of, and were shaped by, military interests. For example, the first digital computer, the ENIAC, was financed as a military- science project designed to calculate ballistic missile projections. 24 Taken as a whole, the research undertakings of World War II generated not only new technologies and a new complex of interests, but also a "greater understanding of electronic technology, and an army of electronic enthusiasts." 25
The intense focusing of research interests on military projects that was sustained through the war tailed off sharply immediately following the allied victory. In the United States, government shares of electronic industry sales declined to only about 25 percent of the total. 26 But the decline was short-lived. The onset of the Cold War rebooted the complex of interests that had been moribund since the war, once again focusing R&D on military-related projects. By 1953, government shares of electronic industry sales had risen to more than 60 percent of the total. 27 According to Molina, the influence was far-reaching, affecting all sectors of the electronics industry with the partial exception of telecommunications, which had already established a formidable private monopoly research and development enterprise under the Bell System. Even so, the Bell Labs were often closely intertwined with, and thrived on, military-sponsored contracts for new research and development. "Nowhere was this influence more decisive," writes Molina, "than on the development of the emerging technologies and industries of computers, industrial control systems and, above all, semiconductors." 28 Through the 1950s and 1960s, the Cold War hostility fueled the demand for more efficient, smaller, and speedier communication technologies. One of the more decisive influences on electronic developments was the so-called "space race," unleashed with the successful launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957. Not only did the "space race" breed a well-funded civilian program in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, but also a tightly controlled, top-secret complex of space-based intelligence programs, initiating top-secret research into optics, electronics, and computers primarily designed for space-based reconnaissance. 29 The perceived "zero-sum" nature of the Cold War conflict added an urgency to the research into more advanced communication technologies, particularly as the Soviet Union was widely perceived as taking the lead.
During this period, military-funded research brought about such crucial electronic advances as the transistor, the silicon transistor, and the integrated circuit. The latter was an important stepping-stone to the development of the hypermedia environment, allowing the manufacture of multiple electronic functions and components on a single microchip. 30 Closely intertwined with these innovations in components technologies was the evolution of the computer, beginning with the already mentioned ENIAC. Although the designers of the ENIAC, Mauchly and Eckert, had created a commercial enterprise in 1951 to market their own computer, the UNIVAC 1, "there was little commercial recognition of the potential of computers." 31 As Sharpe notes:
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Until 1951, the computer industry was essentially non-commercial: each machine was one of a kind, and support came primarily from universities and government. In fact, it can be plausibly argued that without government (and particularly military) backing, there might be no computer industry today. 32 |
During the height of the Cold War, the military remained the primary driving force behind the most significant developments in electronic computing and communications. In 1959--1960, the U.S. space-defense sectors still accounted for more than 70 percent of all computer sales. 33 This dominant social force driving the research and development of electronic communications had an important shaping influence on the nature and direction of technological innovation. Many of today's more consumer-oriented electronic products--such as virtual reality systems or computer games--are direct outgrowths of military technologies (e.g., air force flight simulators). 34 But the secrecy by which such research and development was carried out limited the extent of commercial applications, and the most sophisticated of communication technologies were typically confined to the military because of classification procedures.
Commercial Sources of Technological Innovation
By the late 1960s, however, the influence of the military in this complex began to decline and corporate-commercial interests began to rise. According to Molina, "The relative influence of government-military constituents waned as the emerging technologies and industries matured and corporate capital was able to exploit the vast opportunities offered by the commercial sector." 35 In the United States, the government purchase of semiconductors dropped from 50 percent of the total in 1960 to a low of 6 percent in 1973. 36 Perhaps the best illustration of the shift is in the area of personal computing. The microprocessor, which was probably the single most significant technological innovation in the development of hypermedia, was produced entirely for commercial applications by the U.S. company Intel in the early 1970s. 37 By integrating components needed for the central processing unit of a computer onto a single microchip, the microprocessor dramatically reduced the costs of computer hardware. 38 As a result, a wide variety of small commercial computer enterprises arose to build a market in personal computing--a strategy that initially was smugly dismissed as futile by larger corporate giants, like IBM. 39 Of course, the outstanding example in this respect is the Apple Corporation, founded by college dropouts Stephen Wozniak and Steven Jobs, but many similar fast-rising enterprises capitalized on the burgeoning home computer market beginning in the late 1970s.
At the same time the home computer market was blossoming, companies based in Japan and Europe were tapping into the home electronics market, particularly in the markets for color television and stereo components. 40 U.S. corporations that had traditionally thrived on regular defense outlays began to face stiff competition from these overseas firms at the same time as defense procurements were falling sharply in the 1970s. The result was that a wedge was inserted into the capital-science-government-military complex that had sustained military-oriented R&D into electronic communications through the Cold War. 41 While the so-called "second" Cold War of the early 1980s was able to resurrect the complex partially, through such high-financed military projects as the Strategic Defense Initiative, the momentum had clearly swung to the commercial sector, as private corporations began to engage in transnational joint ventures and strategic alliances to spread the costs of R&D and to gain entry into foreign markets for consumer electronic applications. 42
The death-knell to the complex has been the abrupt end to the Cold War. Corporations that were once able to rely on military R&D contracts have now been forced into "restructuring" schemes to adapt to new conditions. 43 A new complex has formed as communications-related industries and corporations from around the world, encouraged by national governments, are now focusing on the largely untapped "home" or private market. Corporate-funded research centers, such as the MediaLab at MIT and the Palo Alto Research Center in California, are beginning to replace military-funded research centers as the drivers and shapers of technological innovation. 44 Their explicit goal, as stated by the directors and top researchers of both companies: ubiquitous computing, or an infusion of communication technologies so deeply into everyday life that they become virtually invisible--a new environment. 45 This confluence of seemingly unending dramatic and revolutionary changes in communication technologies, coupled with a desperate search for new markets unleashed by the end of the Cold War, and colored by a pervasive "hype" about a coming communicopia, has led by the 1990s to a virtual stampede of interests focused on developing consumer and business applications of sophisticated electronic technologies. As Grossman aptly put it: "Driving it all is one simple, irresistible money-making idea--the prospect of converting every home and workplace into a computerized box office, shopping mall, video arcade and slot machine, open for business all day long, every day of the week." 46
Today, the shift in orientation is noticeable in a variety of subtle ways. New products have been tailored to make sophisticated technologies more practical, or "user-friendly." Icons, or images, have replaced text-based controls as computer operating tools--an interface pioneered by the Apple Macintosh computer systems, but one that has been adopted by the extremely popular Microsoft Windows95 operating system. Advertisements for multimedia applications now prominently feature small children, the elderly--even nuns! All of these changes represent a shift in corporate strategies from military to consumer/business applications.
Complementing this corporate drive has been a push "from above" so to speak, as governments around the world have sought to reap the benefits of the "information revolution." Almost every major state has undertaken government-sponsored studies on the impact of new communication technologies, perceiving in an almost quasi-mythical way the economic possibilities inherent in the hypermedia environment. In Singapore, it is the "Vision of an Intelligent Island"; in South Korea, it is the "Initiative for Building the Korea Information Infrastructure"; in the European Community, it is "Europe and the Global Information Society"; in Canada, it is "The Canadian Information Highway." 47 Most prominent in this respect has been the Clinton Administration, and in particular, Vice President Al Gore, who has been a relentless advocate of what has been popularly called "the information superhighway." 48 Out of this fusion of revolutionary technological innovations and a new corporate-government complex of social forces has come the change in the communications environment to hypermedia.
The Properties of the Hypermedia Environment
As alluded to above, no single technological innovation or instrument of technology signals the development of the hypermedia environment. Instead, technological developments in three areas have been particularly crucial: digitization; computerization; and improvements in transmission capabilities, particularly fiber optic cables and wireless.
Digitization: Digitization refers to the encoding, transformation, and transmission of all information--whether audio, video, graphics or text--into a series of binary numbers--i.e., 1s and 0s. 49 This revolutionary means of translating information is superior to older (analog) systems primarily because when information is translated into binary numbers, an infinite number of copies can be made without any degradation having occurred. Likewise, unlike analog signals, digital information is more reliable over longer distances since only an on/off configuration requires translation rather than a continuously modulating frequency. Furthermore, digitization allows the integration of previously distinct media in the same system. All information once digitized becomes potentially intertranslatable regardless of whether it is audio, video, or text. As Brand notes, "with digitization the content becomes totally plastic--any message, sound, or image may be edited from anything into anything else." 50 The universal character of the digital signal is thus especially important for transmitting different media along the same communication channels. According to Saxby:
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In the case of analogue channels, the signal varied continuously according to the information in transmission, which meant in practice a different channel for each type of signal--for example telephone or radio broadcast. With digital channels, the only difference to be considered was the binary transmission speed necessary to transmit the information, whether it took the form of data, image or the human voice. 51 |
Computerization: The digital "revolution" would not have had such a significant impact, however, had not computing technologies eventually been developed to exploit its potential. 52 Some of the crucial innovations in computing technologies were outlined above, but the critical one was the development of the microprocessor, or what has been called the "computer-on-a-chip," in 1969, and which was marketed in 1971 for US $200. 53 These first silicon-based microprocessors included about 2,300 transistors on each chip, and could perform 60,000 operations per second. The microprocessor revolutionized electronic communications by speeding up computation time with increasing capacity all the while shrinking the size of equipment. As Augarten commented:
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Although Intel did not realize it at first, the company was sitting on the device that would become the universal motor of electronics, a miniature analytical engine that could take the place of gears and axles and other forms of mechanical control. It could be placed inexpensively and unobtrusively in all sorts of devices--a washing machine, a gas pump, a butcher's scale, a juke box, a typewriter, a doorbell, a thermostat, even, if there was a reason, a rock. Almost any machine that manipulated information or controlled a process could benefit from a micro-processor. 54 |
Since then, the performance levels and capabilities of computer chips have continued to make dramatic improvements, generally following what has been referred to as Moore's Law (after the former head of Intel, Gordon Moore): the number of transistors stored on a silicon chip will double each year following its inception. To be precise, the number of transistors fabricated on a silicon chip has proceeded through eight orders of magnitude since the transistor was first invented in 1948. 55 Today, the most advanced commercial silicon chips are manufactured with ultraviolet light, further increasing the computing power on ever-more tiny chips. Transistors having dimensions smaller than a micron (a millionth of a meter) are now routinely fabricated in numbers approaching tens of millions on a single semiconductor chip. 56 Although there are physical limits to such trends, researchers believe that the progression will continue into the next century. 57 The resulting expansion of computing capabilities and storage capacities has been enormous. In 1961 the most sophisticated computer could handle 34,000 arithmetic operations per second; in 1981 800,000 arithmetic operations could be handled by a single computer; today, each microprocessor (and not an entire computer) can handle up to a billion instructions per second. 58 In 1970, a disk pack the size of a birthday cake was required to store in immediately accessible form a million characters of text; by the 1980s that many data could be stored on a 3.5 inch diskette; today, it can be stored on a semiconductor device no larger than a credit card. 59
Transmission capabilities: The third area in which technological developments have been crucial to the emergence of the hypermedia environment is innovations in transmission capabilities. In the hypermedia environment, digital information can now move through a variety of physical media, including fiber optic cables, coaxial cables, and copper wires, or through the electromagnetic spectrum in the case of wireless communications. 60 Of these various transmission channels, without a doubt the most significant development is fiber optics cables, which are composed of multiple fine glass wires that vastly augment the relative carrying capacity of cables. 61 In comparison to traditional copper-wire telephone lines, which have a maximum carrying capacity of about one million bits per second, optical fiber carrying lightwaves is now able to handle about a billion bits per second. 62 No practical upper limit on this capacity has yet been determined. 63 Since 1975, the transmission capabilities of optical fiber has increased ten-fold every four years. 64 Today, even though fiber uses less than 1 percent of its theoretical carrying capacity, it can still transmit the contents of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica every second. 65 Moreover, fiber optic lines are much smaller than traditional coaxial and copper-wire lines, enabling many more physical transmission channels in the same space. 66
One limitation to fiber optic lines, however, is the installation expenses associated with replacing existing copper-wire and coaxial cables--especially to individual households and businesses. As a consequence, most of the fiber optic lines that have now been installed in the major industrialized countries act as connections between individual "nodes" or cities, with the final "drop" to homes and some businesses still being copper-wire in the case of telephone and coaxial in the case of cable television. However, further innovations in transmission capabilities, particularly asymmetric digital subscriber loop (ADSL) technologies, are enhancing the bandwidth capacity of existing copper-wire and coaxial cables such that high-speed digital links are available for the so-called "last mile" link. 67 The result is that individual homes can bypass direct fiber optic links while still being able to link into the high-speed digital environment of hypermedia. 68 For example, while 98 percent of Canadian households still have copper-wire telephone connections, the intercity network is entirely digital (including fiber optic cables, satellites, and microwave transmissions) carrying traffic at speeds up to 2.5 Gigabits per second (the equivalent of 32,000 simultaneous voice conversations). 69
Fiber optics, and traditional copper and cable wires, are not the only means by which information is transmitted today; wireless transmissions, via both microwave towers and satellites, add yet another dense layer of transmission capabilities to the hypermedia environment. The radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is used to transmit electronic signals in a frequency spectrum ranging from low-medium frequencies (10-30,000 KHz) to high frequencies (3-30 MHz) to very and ultra-high frequencies (30-100 MHz) to microwave frequencies (3,000-12,000 MHz). 70 Each of the frequency ranges has particular strengths and weaknesses depending on the type of communications being transmitted. Moreover, because the electromagnetic spectrum is a limited natural resource, there are constraints on the amount of information that can be transmitted. 71 However, as with cable and copper wires, compression techniques to enhance bandwidth over the airwaves have been achieved in wireless communications to squeeze more carrying capacity into the electromagnetic spectrum essential for the accommodation of wireless cellular phones, pagers, and other mobile computing devices now flooding the market. 72
Satellite systems, operating in the microwave band, are placed in a space-based geostationary orbit 22,300 miles above the earth's equator. At this distance, the period of rotation coincides with that of the earth, causing the satellite to appear stationary. The orbiting satellites perform a function similar to that of ground-based microwave relay stations, transmitting electronic information to ground antennas which then relay the information to cable, fiber optic, or copper wires. Because a satellite situated in geostationary orbit is visible to 43 percent of the earth's surface, a satellite situated over, for example, the Indian Ocean, can beam simultaneously to the United Kingdom and Japan. 73 Three communications satellites positioned at appropriate distances from each other can cover the entire globe with the exception of the poles. 74 However, as with the radio spectrum, there are a limited number of "parking spaces" or "slots" for satellites in the geostationary orbit. As a consequence, there has been a considerable battle over the principles upon which such "slots" should be distributed, with richer countries--and in particular the United States--arguing on the basis of "first-come, first serve," while the less developed countries have attempted to achieve a more internationally equitable distribution. 75 More recently, low-earth orbiting (LEO) satellites have been proposed for mobile communications systems, the most famous of which is Motorola's planned Iridium system, which will employ approximately 66 LEO satellites to allow phone communications from point-to-point anywhere on the planet. The Motorola satellites will be launched in the late 1990s, with as many as seven other planned systems following soon thereafter. 76
The result of these three technological innovations, in conjunction with social forces, has been a convergence of both media and industries into a single, integrated planetary web of digital electronic telecommunications. Today, not only are text, video, graphics, and audio intertranslatable, but once-discrete technologies that have been associated traditionally with different communications spheres--particularly computers, telephones, and televisions--are becoming indistinguishable in terms of the information they provide. They are, in the words of an Economist survey, "being whirled into an extraordinary whole." 77 The days when one processed text on a computer, watched the television, and spoke into the telephone are drawing to a close. As Gleick aptly put it, "These little boxes will be connected, one way or another, to that vast, entangled, amorphous creature known to those in the business simply as the network." 78
Indeed, only two obstacles stand in the way of the complete convergence of communication technologies into a single, seamless web of digital electronic telecommunications: industry competition and government regulations. 79 The technological convergence outlined above has suddenly thrust together once self-contained industries in both competition and cooperation as firms traditionally bound within one sector now find themselves under challenge from firms in other sectors, and visa versa. The most acute battle-line is drawn between cable and telephone companies as each is increasingly providing services that are indistinguishable from the other. But other industries--in particular consumer electronics, publishing, and information services--are entering the battle as well. 80 However, existing government regulations that were tailored for the communications of the preconvergence environment still maintain regulatory fences that prevent direct competition. And not only are these regulations a barrier within individual national jurisdictions but they also pose problems for international interconnectivity as well. As one author commented:
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The problem is simple. Although the industrial world is already rich with telecommunications networks and computers, these systems can't always link up with each other because of differing standards and protocols, not to mention old-fashioned telephone monopolies that still control who has access to the wires and switches in many states. So "building" the information superhighway is partly a question of removing barricades on both sides of the Atlantic. 81 |
On the one hand, the result has been a concerted push by private corporations and governments around the world for regulatory changes, often in the face of strong political counter-pressures to keep the status quo intact. 82 Debates have been fierce in both the developed and developing worlds regarding the appropriate regulatory framework to facilitate the technological convergence favored by large private capital interests while still ensuring "universal access" and "affordability" for the average consumer. To date, the forces of "liberalization" have clearly gained the momentum, having the support of both big business and large governments--in particular, the United States. 83 It is from these forces that much of the constructed anxieties on "being left behind" about hypermedia emanate. 84 For example, U.S. Vice President Al Gore's push for a single "planetary information network" is interpreted by many as a concerted effort to open national telecommunications industries around the world to private enterprise and competition. 85 One of the more recent and forceful adoptions of liberalization policies has been the planned break-up beginning in 1996 of the German state telephone monopoly Deutsche Telekom, which is expected to be the second largest privatization in the world, the largest being the $70 billion sale of stock in Japan's telephone monopoly in the late 1980s. 86 Throughout the Asia-Pacific region, seemingly all states have moved swiftly to adopt telecommunications liberalization and deregulation. 87 Even China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications has made liberalization moves to allow foreign access to their telecommunications infrastructure, as has Vietnam's Post and Telecommunications. 88 Elsewhere in the developing world, the norm is increasingly for a breakup of former state telecommunications monopolies and a massive scramble to attract private investment. 89
On the other hand, communications firms around the world have entered into a frenzied spate of cross-border, multimedia joint ventures and alliances designed to sidestep existing regulations as well as reduce the costs and risks of operating in what is gradually evolving into a single massive marketplace. 90 The number and scope of these alliances is truly staggering and difficult to track on a day-by-day basis, as firms enter into talks only to have them scuttled by legal entanglements or disagreements. 91 The pace of alliances and dealmaking is most furious within the United States. In 1994, some of the largest multimedia mergers were completed in the United States, including AT&T and McCaw Cellular, valued at $11.50 billion; Viacom and Paramount, valued at $9.6 billion; and Viacom and Blockbuster, valued at $7.97 billion. 92 Exemplifying the trend toward tangled cross-border alliances, the Microsoft Corporation of the United States entered into partnership with eight other firms in 1994, including Telstra Corporation of Australia, Deutsche Telecom of Germany, and Rogers Communications of Canada. 93 The cellular telephone company PacTel, based in the United States, has shareholdings in cellular networks in Germany, Portugal, Japan, Sweden, and Belgium. 94 Some of the most furious action is taking place in the Asia-Pacific region, where because of the economic boom and the generally poor state of traditional infrastructures massive investments and developments have been drawn in. In China, for example, where new telephone lines are being laid at the rate of 14.5 million annually, AT&T has signed a $16 million deal with the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications to construct a massive fiber optic trunk line--one of an expected sixteen to be laid by 2000. 95 Likewise, the demand for handsets has led to joint ventures with Siemens, NEC, AT&T, Northern Telecom, and Alcatel. 96 As privatization of former state communications monopolies proceed, these cross-border, multimedia mergers will only become more dense and complex.
It is too early to predict exactly what type of regulatory arrangements will be reached that will reconcile global standards and interconnectivity with existing national jurisdictions. Nor is it clear exactly what type or types of business enterprises will emerge from the dizzying series of ongoing transnational strategic alliances and mergers in the communications industries once (or if) the dust settles. However, what presently exists might best be characterized as a web of webs of still separate but increasingly linked communications systems, such as the telephone, movies, television, personal computers, cellular phones, faxes, and more. 97 Each of these systems is gradually becoming interconnected and interoperable as regulatory and technical barriers standing in the way of complete integration are toppled. Some new systems--like the latest generation of multimedia computers--are neither telephones, televisions, nor computers, but a complex amalgam of all three. However, it is doubtful that a single device like the multimedia computer (what Stewart calls "a full-featured information appliance") will emerge as the sole means of communicating in the hypermedia environment. 98 Instead, what appears to be the case is that a number of functional devices--some situated in the home (computers/televisions/telephones/multi-media systems), some hand-held or portable (cellular phones/personal digital assistants/camcorders/laptop computers), and some that are remote (satellite reconnaissance systems/surveillance cameras)--will coexist in a globally networked web of digital communications. 99 These devices now have the potential to interconnect with each other seamlessly, some at the speed of light, with information moving through the air, bouncing off of satellites, through upgraded existing copper wires and cables, and through fiber optic wires. 100 Rather than a single instrument of technology or means of communication, then, it is this complex, digitally integrated web of communications as a whole that defines the hypermedia environment.
The Internet and World-Wide Web
The paradigm of the new mode of communication--and clearly the emerging infrastructure for the hypermedia environment--is networked computing, and in particular, the loose conglomeration of worldwide networked computers known as the "Internet." As Grossman explains, "the Internet serves as a remarkable example of the 'law of unintended consequences' run amok." 101 As is well-known by now, the Internet actually began as a U.S. military experiment in the 1970s to design a computer network called ARPANET that would withstand a nuclear attack. 102 The fundamental principle of the network was a distributed form of communications without central control, underpinned by a routing system called "packet switching." Through packet switching technologies, messages would be split up and sent along dispersed routes so that if parts of the network were lost in a military conflagration, they would still arrive at their destination. The ARPANET eventually evolved into a communications tool for public research organizations and universities in the United States, to be followed by other similar systems elsewhere. Using what was originally intended to be merely a sidebar feature of the network--electronic mail--discussion groups proliferated on a wide-range of esoteric topics and issues. By the time Internet became the successor to ARPANET in the late 1980s/early 1990s, networked communications had exploded to include private individuals around the world linked through a truly anarchic web of computers, searching and sharing databases and entering into unmediated on-line discussions. 103
As the editors of a recent special issue of Scientific American put it, "the Internet has grown so fast in so many places that no one really knows how big it is or how many people use it." 104 The migration to the Internet in the 1990s has been remarkable as government agencies, research organizations, universities and colleges, businesses, individuals both young and old and of both sexes scramble to get a piece of the action. In 1993 the President, the Vice President, and the First Lady of the United States all acquired Internet addresses (president@whitehouse.gov; vice-president@whitehouse.gov; and root@whitehouse.gov). In 1995 Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien was the first head of state to participate in an on-line computer network conference. The result has been an explosion of growth in Internet users according to measurements undertaken by the Internet Society. 105 For example, the number of host computers, or network "nodes," around the world has grown from 1,000 in 1984 to 10,000 in 1987 to 100,000 in 1989, to 1,000,000 in 1992, to 4,851,000 in 1994, to 9,500,000 in January 1996, to 12,881,000 in July 1996. 106 One million new hosts were added in the first six months of 1994 alone, many of which came from outside the United States. In that same first six months of 1994, Germany experienced a 51 percent increase in hosts; France 117 percent; Spain 79 percent; New Zealand 157 percent; Hungary 169 percent; Mexico 45 percent; Chile 170 percent; and Malaysia 204 percent. 107 Although the figures are rapidly made obsolete by exponential growth, there may be as many as 90 million individual Internet users spread unevenly around the world. 108
For many years the Internet was unwieldy to navigate, with a primarily text-based interface that could often be intimidating to all but experienced computer users. Over the 1990s, however, improvements in software and navigation capabilities gradually made browsing and searching the Internet much more user-friendly. Hoping to cash in on the burgeoning market, a number of private services providers (e.g., Compuserve, America On-Line, Prodigy, and more recently the Microsoft Network and AT&T's Worldnet) emerged as appendages to the Internet, offering a much more accessible gateway. 109 Subscribers to the Internet and these private services could search data bases, exchange text, audio, graphics, and video information, and discuss topics on electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBS's), USENET newsgroups, and listserves. 110 The number of active USENET newsgroups world wide now totals around 10,000, with BBS's estimated at around 57,000. 111 Although many are specialized academic discussion groups, others reflect a bewildering variety of ultra-arcane and esoteric topics, like alt.personals. spanking.punishment or alt.barney.die.die.die.
But the truly revolutionary development--the one that has contributed to such exponential growth of the last few years--has been the emergence of the World-Wide Web, which permits the integration of hypertextual links and multimedia in a single platform. 112 Although technically distinct, the World-Wide Web has grown with such rapidity and adaptability that it has practically subsumed the Internet entirely. In conjunction with new browsers, such as Mosaic, Netscape, Spyglass, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, "surfing" the Internet has suddenly become as easy as switching channels on a TV. Moreover, the ease by which such World-Wide Web "home pages" can be created has contributed even more to the rapid growth of Internet participants. Governments, news services, interest groups, academic institutions, businesses of all sorts, and--perhaps most importantly--individuals seeking to advertise their unique personal hobbies and fetishes, have all rushed to set up World-Wide Web home pages.
As might be expected, the substantive depth of these pages is uneven. But with seemingly every passing month the amount of information deepens and expands. According to measurements done by Matthew Gray of MIT's MediaLab, the number of World-Wide Web home pages has a doubling period of six months, with around 230,000 known home pages at the time of writing. 113 In providing globally-networked, hypertextual, interactive, multimedia digital communications in an anarchic web-of-webs of private and public computer organizations, networked computing in the form of the World-Wide Web is probably the best illustration of the "paradigm" of communications in the hypermedia environment.
What is the geographic distribution of hypermedia? From one perspective, it is truly planetary in its scope considering the extent to which satellite communications ensure that no area of the planet is beyond the reach of hypermedia penetration. Military, commercial, and environmental remote sensing satellites have mapped every square inch of the planet. Communications satellites provide computer and telephone links from even the remotest of regions, and global television networks and direct broadcast satellites beam programs to every continent on earth. There is no doubt that the hypermedia environment now blankets the planet in a dense network of digital-electronic-telecommunications. Indeed, it has for many years. However, it is becoming increasingly dense, spacious, and swift with each passing day.
From a control perspective, however, the distribution of hypermedia is clearly concentrated in the Northern hemisphere of the planet, with the wealthiest countries typically accounting for both the highest penetration rates of personal computers, telephones, and televisions, as well as the largest volumes of communications flows. 114 The starkest illustration of the disparities is that 4.7 billion of the world's 5.7 billion people still do not have a telephone. 115 The least telecommunications-developed country--Cambodia--has a teledensity of only 0.06 telephones per 100 people. The 47 least developed countries have an average teledensity of 0.25 per 100 people. 116 In Africa, the communications infrastructure is still so closely tied to colonial legacies that telephone calls made between neighboring countries often leave the continent entirely and are then routed back rather than simply crossing borders. 117 Nonetheless, the most dense penetration rates of hypermedia also happen to correspond to the wealthiest and most powerful segments of the planet. This is certainly not insignificant in terms of world order transformation--especially in light of the planetary reach of hypermedia outlined above.
A Planetary "Central Nervous System"
The central properties of this new communications environment might best be characterized in McLuhan's terms, as a planetary "central nervous system" composed of a web of webs of communications devices--telephones, televisions, computers, camcorders, portable digital assistants, and fax machines--all linked together into a single integrated network of digital-electronic-telecommunications. 118 This network never shuts down, constantly moving information in an instantaneous flow at the speed of light through fiber optic cables, through orbiting satellites, through the air, or through cable and copper. It is increasingly a "ubiquitous" computing and communications environment, deeply saturated by the tools of hypermedia in every facet of life--from the tiny computers that invisibly operate household appliances to the surveillance cameras in the bank and on the street corners, to the automatic teller and "interac" machines that read and process digital "smart" credit cards, transmitting digital financial information instantaneously to financial institutions, to the 35, 58, or 120 channel television systems that "narrowcast" programs to specialized audiences around the world, to the cellular phones, personal digital assistants, and laptop computers that offer mobile telecommunications. It is a communications environment in which all media are intertextual or intertranslatable. Video, audio, text, and graphics are all similarly reduced to binary digits, and thus can travel through the same channels, and be processed in the same way, to be displayed on the same screen. It is an interactive environment, in which communication flows in two directions rather than from a single center. Everyone has the potential to reach everyone else instantaneously in the hypermedia environment--"publication" and "broadcasting" are open to all who are connected.
In sum, the change in the mode of communication was driven by a complex set of technological, social, and material factors reaching back to the late nineteenth century. Largely in response to the Industrial Revolution, and building on newly founded scientific principles of electromagnetics, a series of innovations in communication technologies occurred rather suddenly in the second half of the nineteenth century. While the telegraph, and later the telephone, opened up the possibility of complex communications over distances, the photograph, and later the moving picture and the television, provided the first in a series of image spectacles. The onslaught of two world wars and the ensuing Cold War significantly altered the urgency and trajectory of R&D into electronic communications, and formed the basis for a complex of government-science-military-capital interests centered mostly in the United States. It was out of this complex of interests that some of the more important technological precursors to the hypermedia environment arose, including most importantly the computer. However, by the 1970s this complex began to dissolve and was gradually replaced by a more consumer- and business-oriented push behind the R&D of electronic communications. Corporations outside the United States--in particular those based in Germany and Japan--began to compete with American firms in the consumer electronics market at the same time as government expenditures in defense began to erode. The abrupt end to the Cold War added an urgency to corporate restructuring, and a new science-government-capital complex began to emerge centered not on military applications of electronic communications, but the burgeoning entertainment, home-consumer, and business applications market. The conjunction of this new complex with a series of technological innovations brought about, by the late 1980s, the emergence of the hypermedia environment. Using the theoretical and analytical lens employed in part one of this study, the remaining two chapters examine the way the architecture of modern political authority may be undergoing transformation in this new communications environment.
Note 1: The term "cyberspace" was coined by science fiction writer William Gibson in Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984). "Information" and "information superhighway" are used widely in popular magazines and newspapers to refer to what I call "hypermedia." Back.
Note 2: See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, [Translated by Paul Foxx, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman] (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Back.
Note 3: See Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 64. Back.
Note 4: Beniger, The Control Revolution, p. 7. Back.
Note 6: Ibid., pp. 220-226. Back.
Note 7: Daniel Czitrom, "Lightning Lines," in Crowely and Heyer, eds., Communication in History, p. 150. Back.
Note 8: Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 66. Back.
Note 9: Carey, Communication as Culture, p. 215. Back.
Note 10: Saxby, The Age of Information, p. 65. Saxby provides overviews of parallel developments occurring coincident with Morse's research in Great Britain and Germany. Back.
Note 11: Claude S. Fischer, "The Telephone Takes Command," in Crowley and Heyer, eds., Communications in History, pp. 167-172. Back.
Note 13: Saxby, The Age of Information, p. 72. Back.
Note 14: Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 71. Back.
Note 15: Ibid.; See also, Alexander Marshack, "The Art and Symbols of Ice Age Man," in Crowley and Heyer, eds., Communications in History, pp. 10-20. Back.
Note 16: Ulrich Keller, "Early Photojournalism," in Crowley and Heyer, eds., Communications in History, pp. 193-200. Back.
Note 17: Douglas Gomery, "Nickelodeons to Movie Palaces," in Crowley and Heyer, eds., Communications in History, pp. 201-206. Back.
Note 18: See Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting: 1912-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 19: See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Lowe, History of Bougeois Perception, especially chapter 6. Back.
Note 20: In particular, I am referring to the work of the early Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists, especially Herbert Marcuse, OneDimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). For a general overview, see David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Back.
Note 21: Alfonso Hernan Molina, The Social Basis of the Microelectronics Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989). Back.
Note 22: JJ. Salomon, "Science Policy Studies and the Development of Science Policy," in I. SpiegelRosing and Derek de Solla Price, eds., Science, Technology and Society: A CrossDisciplinary Perspective (London: Sage Publications, 1977), p. 48; See also Molina, The Social Basis, p. 16.. Back.
Note 23: Molina, The Social Basis, p. 37. Back.
Note 25: David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1984), p. 47; See also Molina, The Social Basis, p. 39. Back.
Note 26: Molina, The Social Basis, p. 40. Back.
Note 29: See Walter McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985). The topic of spacebased reconnaissance and its relationship to world order transformation will be taken up in ensuing chapters. Back.
Note 30: Peter Hall and Paschal Preston, The Carrier Wave: New Information Technology and the Geography of Innovation, 1846-2003 (London: Unwim Hyman, 1988), p. 153; See also, Molina, The Social Basis, pp. 49-62. Back.
Note 31: Hall and Preston, The Carrier Wave, p. 157. Back.
Note 32: W. Sharpe, The Economics of Computers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 186; See also, Molina, The Social Basis, pp. 44-45. Back.
Note 33: Molina, The Social Basis, p. 47. Back.
Note 34: See Thomas B. Sheridan and David Zeltzer, "Virtual Reality Check," Technology Review (October 1993), p. 22. Back.
Note 35: Molina, The Social Basis, p. 61. Back.
Note 36: Ibid., pp. 54, 61. Back.
Note 38: Hall and Preston, The Carrier Wave, p. 157. Back.
Note 39: See P. Freiberger and M. Swaine, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer (Berkeley: Osborne/McGraw Hill, 1984). Back.
Note 40: See Tom Forester, Silicon Samurai: How Japan Conquered the World's IT Industry (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), especially chapters three and four. Back.
Note 41: Molina, The Social Basis, p. 61. Back.
Note 42: Ibid., p. 132-144. As Molina writes on page 142, "The result is that electronics companies competing in the global and convergent electronics market are not driven by an overriding national interest. Instead, they are pursuing the over Back.
Note 43: See Trudy Bell, "Jobs at Risk," IEEE Spectrum (August 1993). Back.
Note 44: Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Penguin, 1987). Back.
Note 45: For the Media Lab vision, see Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995); Nicholas Negroponte, "Products and Servies for Computer Networks," Scientific American (September 1991), pp. 106-113; and the interview with Negroponte in Herb Brody, "Machine Dreams: An Interview with Nicholas Negroponte," Technology Review (January 1992), pp. 33-40. For the Palo Alto Research Center, see the interview with Mark Weiser, in Richard Wolkomir, "We're going to have computers coming out of the woodwork," Smithsonian (September 1994), pp. 82-90. Back.
Note 46: Lawrence K. Grossman, "Reflections on Life Along the Electronic Superhighway," Media Studies Journal 8, no. 1, Winter (1994): 30. Back.
Note 47: Some Asian national communications programs are highlighted in Kris Szaniawski, "As Many Strategies as Countries," Financial Times Survey (April 9, 1996): 2. For an overview of different national information and communication programs, see the International Telecommunications Union homepage at http://www.itu.ch/. Back.
Note 48: See Al Gore, "Infrastructure for the Global Village," Scientific American (September 1991). This author was present for (but underwhelmed by) Gore's online appearance on the private computer network, Compuserve, in the fall of 1993. Back.
Note 49: See Saxby, The Age of Information, p. 3; W. T. Stanbury and Ilan B. Vertinsky, "Assessing the Impact of New Information Technologies on Interest Group Behaviour and Policy Making," Bell Canada Papers III on Economic and Public Policy (January 1995); Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies Without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 20-22. Back.
Note 50: Stewart Brand The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Penguin Books, 1987) (Cited in Saxby, The Age of Information, p. 3.) Back.
Note 51: Saxby, The Age of Information, p. 266. Back.
Note 52: This is a point made by Saxby in The Information Age, p. 265. Back.
Note 53: See Ken Polsson, "Chronology of Events in the History of Microcomputers," OnLine Document, http://www.islandnet.com/kpolsson/comphist.htm. Back.
Note 54: Stan Augarton, Bit by Bit--An Illustrated History of Computers (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), p. 265. Quoted in Saxby, The Age of Information, p. 123. Back.
Note 55: See Robert Keyes, "The Future of the Transistor," Scientific American (June 1993). Back.
Note 56: Jack L. Jewell, James P. Harbison, and Axel Scherer, "Microlasers," Scientific American (November 1991). Back.
Note 58: Richard B. McKenzie and Dwight R. Lee, Quicksilver Capital: How the Rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the World (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 41; See also Gary Stix, "Toward 'Point One'," Scientific American (February 1995): 90-95. Back.
Note 59: Lawrence G. Tesler, "Networked Computing in the 1990s," Scientific American (September 1991): 89; Experimental computers so small that they can be swallowed have been developed by the U.S. Army. See "Wave of Future: Computers So Small You Can Swallow Them," CNN Network (OnLine) (August 22, 1996). Back.
Note 60: Elisabeth Angus and Duncan Mckie, Canada's Information Highway: Services, Access and Affordability (Ottawa: Industry Canada, New Media Branch and Information Technologies Industry Branch, 1994), p. 25. Back.
Note 61: See Emmanuel Desuvire, "Lightware Communications: The Fifth Generation," Scientific American (January 1992). Back.
Note 62: See Ibid.; and The Editors, "The Computer for the 21st Century," Scientific American (Special Issue on the Computer in the 21st Century, 1995), p. 7. Back.
Note 63: Angus and Mckie, Canada's Information Highway, p. 25. Back.
Note 64: Desurvire, "Lightwave Communications." Back.
Note 65: Philip ElmerDewitt, "Take a Trip into the Future on the Electronic Superhighway," Time (April 12, 1993): 50. Back.
Note 66: For a good overview of the capacity of fibre optic telephone lines, see "The Death of Distance," Economist Survey (September 30, 1995), available online at: http://www.economist.com/surveys/distance/index.html. Back.
Note 67: See ElmerDewitt, "Take a Trip," pp. 51-52; Angus and Mckie, Canada's Information Highway, p. 26; James Gleick, "The Telephone Transformed--Into Almost Everything," New York Times Magazine (May 16, 1993), p. 54. Back.
Note 68: TimeWarner has developed a system called "Road Runner" in the United States which will allow Internet access through television cable connections at speeds of up to 100 times greater than dialin connections. See "Cable May Speed the Line," CNN Financial Network online (August 15, 1996) available online at: http://cnnfn.com/digitaljam/9608/15/cablemodems;llpkg/index.htm. Back.
Note 69: Angus and Mckie, Canada's Information Highway, p. 30. Back.
Note 70: Raymond Akwule, Global Telecommunications: The technology, administration, and policies (Boston: Focal Press, 1992), pp. 34-35. Back.
Note 72: See Gleick, "The Telephone Transformed"; "Speak to Me: A Survey of the Computer Industry," The Economist (September 17, 1994); and "End of the Back.
Note 73: Aharon Kellerman, Telecommunications and Geography (London: Belhaven Press, 1993), p. 40. Back.
Note 75: Pool, Technologies Without Boundaries, pp. 30-31. Back.
Note 76: See Joe Flower, "Iridium," Wired (November 1993): 72-77; 118; See also "End of the Line," p. 15; and Stephen K. Black, "A Sobering Look at Cyberspace." Ridgeway Viewpoints 96-3 (June 1996) OnLine Document, http://www.pitt.edu/rcss/VIEWPOINTS/BLACK2A/black2a.html for a discussion of the way developing countries have tended to pursue satellite and wireless communications because of the poor communication information infrastructures. Bill Gates has made a proposal for a LEO satellite system called Teledesic that would ring the planet with 840 satellites. See "Technology Brief: The Final Frontier," The Economist (July 27, 1996), found online at http://www. economist.com/issue/27-07-96/st1.html. Back.
Note 77: "Make Way for Multimedia," The Economist (October 16, 1993): 15; See also "The tangled webs they weave," The Economist (October 16, 1993): 21-24; ElmerDewitt, "Take a Trip." Back.
Note 78: Gleick, "The Telephone Transformed," p. 28. Back.
Note 79: As will be explained in more detail below, although the hypermedia environment is "planetary" in scope, this does not mean that every single individual in the world has access. To the contrary, the actual numbers of those "plugged in" to the hypermedia environment represent a very small portion of elites. However, the environment itself--by its very nature--has a planetary reach. Back.
Note 80: See ElmerDewitt, "Take a Trip," pp. 50-51. Back.
Note 81: James Pressley, "G7 Seen Skirting Key Issues at Superhighway Jamboree," Wall Street Journal Europe (February 23, 1995). Back.
Note 82: See Andrew Adonis, "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" Financial Times (London) (October 11, 1993), for a view of the European moves to deregulate telecommunications; For more general accounts, see William J. Drake, "Territoriality and Intangibility: Transborder Data Flows and National Sovereignty," in Kaarle Nordenstreng and Herbert I. Schiller, eds., Beyond National Sovereignty: International Communication in the 1990s (New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1993), pp. 259-313; Stephen D. Krasner, "Global Communications and National Power: Life on the Pareto Frontier," World Politics, 43 (April 1991): 336-366; Peter Cowhey, "The International Telecommunications Regime: The Political Roots of International Regimes for High Technology," Back.
Note 83: On this issue in particular, see Drake, "Territoriality and Intangibility"; and Cowhey, "The International Telecommunications Regime." Back.
Note 84: See Marc Raboy, "Cultural Sovereignty, Public Participation, and Democratization of the Public Sphere: The Canadian Debate on the New Information Infrastructure," (Paper presented to the "National and International Initiatives for Information Infrastructure" Symposium, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, January 25-27, 1996) for an excellent discussion in the context of Canada of the way public policy pressures are constructed around not being "left behind" the hypermedia environment. Back.
Note 85: See New York Times (March 22, 1994), p. D2; See also, Karen Lynch, "World Net Strategy Laid Out," CommunicationsWeek International (March 28, 1994). Back.
Note 86: See Nathanial Nash, "Goldman Wins Big Role in German Sale," New York Times (November 26, 1994), p. I39. As Nash notes, "Europe is entering a period of about five to eight years in which vast telecommunications assts, mostly state owned, will be sold to the public." Back.
Note 87: For an overview, see "AsiaPacific Telecommunications," Financial Times Survey (April 9, 1996), which provides detailed articles on liberalization and deregulation measures undertaken in Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and elsewhere. Back.
Note 88: Lynne Curry and Andrew Adonis, "China's Telecoms Regimes Under Pressure," Financial Times (London) (November 23, 1993); See also, "AT&T China Contract," New York Times (November 28, 1994); For India, which is experiencing a similar privatization, see John F. Burns, "AT&T Seeks Stake in India's Phone Market," New York Times (January 6, 1995); For Vietnam, see Jeremy Grant, "Red Tape Snags Progress," Financial Times (April 9, 1996): 5. Back.
Note 89: See Catherine Arnst, "The Last Frontier: Phone Frenzy in the Developing World is Charging Up the Telecom Industry," Business Week (September 18, 1995) for a lengthy special report on the trends towards telecommunications deregulation and liberalization in the developing world. Back.
Note 90: See "Make way for Multimedia"; "The Death of Distance," and "The tangled webs they weave"; John Teresko and William H. Miller, "Tripping Down the information Superhighway," Industry Week (August 2, 1993): 32-39. Back.
Note 91: See Andrew Adonis, John Ridding and Arian Genillard, "European Telecoms Lay Down Lines of Defence," Financial Times (London) (November 15, 1993); Caroline Monnot, "France Telecom et DBT s'engagement pour le long terme," Le Monde (December 7, 1993); Ernest Beck, "US West, France Telecom to Bid for Hungarian Stake," Wall Street Journal (Europe) (October 29/30, 1993); Gary Stix, "Domesticating Cyberspace," Scientific American (August 1993); and Anthony DePalma, "AT&T Gets Mexico Partner For LongDistance Service," New York Times (November 10, 1994). Back.
Note 92: Geraldine Fabrikant, "Deal Makers' Phones Could Be Busy," New York Times (January 3, 1995). Back.
Note 93: John Markoff, "Microsoft Organizes Its Interactive TV Team," New York Times (November 2, 1994). Back.
Note 94: "End of the Line," p. 7. Back.
Note 95: Alan Cane, "Winners in the East Will Inherit the Earth," Financial Times Survey (April 9, 1996): 1. Back.
Note 96: Tony Walker, "Subscribers could double by 2000," Financial Times Survey (April 9, 1996): 2. Back.
Note 97: Popular media coverage often seems to suggest that the socalled "information superhighway" is something yet to be built. However, this view is mistaken. The infrastructure of the new media environment already exists in the form of the "web of webs" to be described below. Only government regulations and technical barriers, as outlined above, stand in the way of complete integration, and these are fast becoming obsolete. A similar view is expressed by Angus, Canada's Information Superhighway, pp. 5, 13. Back.
Note 98: Thomas A. Stewart, "Boom Time on the New Frontier," Fortune (Autumn 1993), p. 158. Back.
Note 99: This accords with view of Nicholas Negroponte in "Products and Services for Computer Networks," Scientific American (September 1991), pp. 106-113. Back.
Note 100: See Angus, Canada's Information Superhighway, pp. 36-37; See also, Negroponte "Products and Services," p. 108 who suggests that a good rule of thumb to define how information is being distributed (or should be distributed) is that things that move will have information sent to them through the broadcast spectrum while things that are fixed, like offices and homes, will be sent through wires. Back.
Note 101: Grossman, "Reflections on Life Along the Electronic Superhighway," p. 32. Back.
Note 102: Kurt Kleiner, "What a Tangled Web They Wove," New Scientist (July 30, 1994), p. 36; See also Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (New York: AddisonWesley, 1993), p. 7. See also "The Accidental Superhighway," Economist Survey (July 1, 1995) for a good historical overview of the early Internet. Available online at http://www.economist.com/surveys/internet/index.html. Back.
Note 103: One of the more useful historical overviews of the Internet's development is provided by Robert H. Zakon's "Hobbes' Internet Timeline v2.2," available at the Internet Society's WorldWide Web site, http://www.isoc.org/. Back.
Note 104: Editors, "The Computer for the 21st Century," p. 6. Back.
Note 105: The Internet Society is the international organization for coordination and cooperation for the Internet. The following statistics were acquired directly Back.
Note 106: The January and July 1996 figures were taken from Matrix Information and Directory Services, which is found at: http://www1.mids.org/growth/internet/html/hosts.html, and Network Wizards internet domain survey, found at http://www.nw.com/zone/hostcounthistory. Along with the Internet Society, the latter two are crossreferenced often on the WorldWide Web, and appear to use reliable survey methods. Back.
Note 107: See the following site for a list of Internet service providers by country, from Andorra to Zambia: http://thelist.iworld.com/country/country.html Back.
Note 108: Estimating with precision the "size" of the Internet is a notoriously difficult exercise. Typically, estimates vary widely depending on the definitions employed. Probably the most reliable and rigorous surveys (and the most widely cited) are those organized by John S. Quarterman in association with Texas Internet Consulting (TIC) and Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS) and distributed online through the Matrix News (See http://www.mids.org/). The latest survey, conducted in October 1994, made an estimate of 27.5 million who have at least minimal access (i.e, electronic mail), 13.5 million that can use interactive services, such as the World Wide Web, and 7.8 million that can provide interactive services, such as Telnet (remote login), FTP (file transfer) or WWW (hypertext). The same survey estimates that the Internet is approximately doubling each year. Quarterman has argued that a rough estimate of the total number of users can be gauged by multiplying the number of hosts by 7.5. According to the most recent survey of hosts found by this author, in July 1996 there were an estimated 12,881,000 hosts, which would equate with approximately 96,607,500 individual users. An important caveat is that not all of these roughly 13 million hosts are reachable by all of these users. Thus Quarterman's more precise definitions of depth of use would come into play. These figures notwithstanding, the Internet as a whole has been growing exponentially around the world and is clearly emerging as a kind of infrastructure for the hypermedia environment. An Economist survey of the Internet (July 1, 1995) cited Quarterman's more conservative middle estimate of 13.5 million users in October 1994. Back.
Note 109: For "Prodigy," see Peter H. Lewis, "An Atlas of Information Services," New York Times (November 1, 1994); for "Compuserve," see Peter H. Lewis, "The Compuserve Edge: Delicate Data Balance," New York Times (November 29, 1994); for "America OnLine," see Peter H. Lewis, "A Cyberspace Atlas: America Online," New York Times (November 15, 1994); for "Microsoft" see Peter H. Lewis, "Microsoft's Next Move is On Line," New York Times (January 13, Back.
Note 110: One of the listserves of which I am a member, the International Political EconomyNet, or IPENET, has grown from 64 persons in 1993, to 300 in 1994 to close to 1000 today from over 31 countries. On a single peak day in September 1994, 32,000 messages were distributed. These figures are taken from the IPENET Enews #8, distributed online on November 13, 1994 from the IPENET manager, Lev Gonick. Back.
Note 111: Negroponte, Being Digital, p. 176. Back.
Note 112: See Philip ElmerDewitt, "Battle for the Soul of the Internet," Time (July 25, 1994), p. 40-46; Steiner, "What a Tangled Web They Wove"; and "The Accidental Superhighway," Economist Survey. Back.
Note 113: See Matthew Gray's "Growth of the WorldWide Web," at http://www. mit.edu:8001/people/mkgray/net/webgrowthsummary.html. Back.
Note 114: Of the approximately 1 billion television sets in use worldwide in 1992, 35% were in Europe, 32% were in Asia, 20% were in North America and the Caribbean, with Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America accounting for the other 13%. See "Feeling for the Future: A Survey of Television," The Economist (February 12-18, 1994). Back.
Note 115: Karen Lynch, "Telecoms funding body set," CommunicationsWeek International (February 6, 1995). See also Rex Winsbury, "Who Will Pay for the Global Village? Funding the Buenos Aires Declaration," Intermedia (June/July 1994). Back.
Note 116: Winsbury, "Who Will Pay for the Global Village?" See the World Telecommunications Development Report 1995 (International Telecommunications Union) available online at: http://www4.itu.ch/WTDR95/. Back.
Note 117: See Black, "A Sobering Look at Cyberspace." See also Peter Knight, et al., "Increasing Internet Connectivity in SubSaharan Africa: Issues, Options, and World Bank Role," (March 29, 1995 OnLine World Bank Draft Report), available online at: http://www.worldbank.org/html/emc/documents/africa0395.html. See also Steve Homer, "Still on Hold in the Developing World," The Independent (9, 10, 1995) which notes that there are more telephones in Manhattan than in all of subSaharan Africa. Back.
Note 118: For a good overview of the properties of the hypermedia environment, see William J. Drake, "Introduction: The Turning Point," in William J. Drake, ed., The New Information Infrastructure: Strategies for U.S. Policy (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), pp. 6-8. Back.
Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation
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