CIAO DATE: 05/02

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Volume 1, Number 2, Summer/Fall 2000

 

The New World Information and Communication Order
by John Walcott ^*

 

In mid–September of 1983, the United Nations and UNESCO, the world body’s Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization, convened a roundtable of experts on the media in the scenic alpine village of Igls, Austria to debate the creation of what UNESCO had dubbed the “New World Information and Communication Order.”

Much of the discussion followed in the deep ideological ruts of the Cold War: Delegates from the East accused the West of cultural imperialism, delegates from the South accused the North of neocolonialism, and delegates from the West complained about the absence of press freedom in the East and the South. Then, about midway through the conference, a protracted debate erupted over whether developing nations needed to develop indigenous computer industries in order to fully participate in the dawning information revolution. Yes, argued a Nigerian academic: Otherwise, new technology would serve only to perpetuate colonialism and mercantilism. No, replied an American journalist: While developing nations might want to cultivate the ability to write software for their own requirements, there was no reason for them to invest billions of dollars in an effort to build their own computers.

After a half–hour or so of this, the Soviet delegate, a high–ranking official of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, grew visibly impatient. Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, he exclaimed, “We are wasting our time. The personal computer is a matter for the twenty–first century!”

The Yugoslav delegate, a professor at a university in Ljubljana, today’s capital of Slovenia, who had maneuvered himself adroitly into a position to referee the conference’s East–West political squabbles, quickly pounced. The Soviet delegate and the conference, he said matter–of–factly, might be interested to know that his university had recently purchased a number of Apple IIC computers.

That shot of reality destroyed the Soviet bloc’s credibility at the conference, and with it any hope that UNESCO might conceive a normative New World Information and Communication Order. The roundtable’s final report, in fact, condemned censorship and harassment of journalists, as well as high telecommunications tariffs and the lack of media facilities in developing countries.

Barely six years later, the Soviet bloc itself collapsed, in part because by then it was clear that centrally planned economies and totalitarian political regimes were ill–equipped to participate in the new world information, communication, and economic order, powerless to defend themselves against it, and unable to ignore it. But if the Soviet Union and other totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have been the first to experience the Information Age’s “creative destruction,” to borrow Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase, the United States and the other post–industrial democracies are not immune to the same forces. Indeed, the irrational exuberance that has characterized not only the stock market, but also American foreign policy in the last decade, may turn out to have been, at best, premature.

 

Challenging Authority

The United States and other pluralistic, post–industrial, market–driven countries appear to be far better equipped to cope with the inevitable than totalitarian and authoritarian states. And if the United States is blessed, China is stressed and North Korea is doomed. The Iraqi newspaper al–Jamhuriyya captured Saddam Hussein’s attitude toward the mother of all media in 1997, when he wrote that the Internet means “the end of civilizations, cultures, interests, and ethics.”

The strains are already obvious, especially in nations such as China that are attempting to promote economic growth while continuing to strangle political dissent. Last March, while trying to negotiate its entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), China cracked down on more than 1,000 Internet cafes that had sprung up in Beijing and Shanghai. City authorities warned the cafe owners not to permit “any activities that would damage state security, disturb public order and interfere with the public’s rights and interests.”

On March 17, the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported that the China Press and Publications Administration (CPPA) had issued an order forbidding Chinese newspapers from printing “confirmed news and information from the Internet.” The order said that newspapers “must firmly follow the political guidance for the media and not carry reports that run counter to the principles and policies of the party and state,” according to Ming Pao.

At the same time, however, starting with bookstores such as Bookmall.com in Shanghai, which opened in early 1999, more than 600 online stores have popped up in China in less than a year, with an average of two new ones opening every day. According to the Boston Consulting Group, there now are 160 online bookstores, 189 online malls, and 126 online travel sites in China–a nation where just a few years ago even the simplest trip required navigating an elaborate bureaucratic maze.

China’s dilemma is evident in its on–again, off–again efforts to forbid foreigners from investing in Chinese Internet businesses. In September 1999, Information Industry Minister Wu Jichuan declared that Internet–related businesses could not be financed or operated by foreign entities. Late in the same month, Yahoo! launched Yahoo!China, a joint venture with Beijing Founder Electronics. Two months later, on November 9, 1999, Sina.com announced it had raised a total of $85 million from a number of foreign investors, including Dell Computer and Goldman Sachs in the United States and Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation.

On November 15, 1999, the Chinese government agreed in negotiations with the United States over WTO accession to allow foreign investors to own as much as 49 percent of the equity in Chinese telecom companies and as much as 50 percent two years after China joins the WTO. Although the deal apparently overruled Minister Wu and the Ministry of Information Industry, what it will mean in practice remains unclear.

Although Russia already has more than one million Internet users and more than 18,000 Web sites in the .ru domain, some Russian leaders appear to be having similar qualms about allowing unfettered access to information. In January, the chairman of the Russian Electoral Commission, Alexander Vesnyakov, said his agency would “consider the Internet as a mass medium” and “monitor and punish” violations of election laws. A month earlier, Russian bureaucrats drafted plans to have the state take over the registration of .ru domains and to consider all Russian Web sites, even personal homepages, mass media if they were updated at least once a year. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who at the time was still Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister, shot down the plan and told Internet officials that “the government will not try to find a balance between regulation and freedom. The choice will always be in favor of freedom.”

Putin’s dedication to freedom of the press has been less evident in his government’s response to critical coverage of its war against pro–independence forces in Chechnya, and missing entirely from its attempts to shut down the Media–MOST organization, which has been unkind to Yeltsin and his chosen successor. Chinese, Russian, and other nations’ efforts to control the electronic flow of information, however, probably are as futile as the Twenty–Fifth Session of the Council of Trent, which in December 1563 produced an index of prohibited books in a vain attempt to halt the Protestant Reformation. Johann Gutenberg’s movable type, invented more than a century earlier, could print Martin Luther and John Calvin as well as the Bible. In short order, a crude marketplace of ideas, rather than the ecclesiastical authorities, began to decide what was printed.

Now Iran’s conservative clerics, among others, are following in the footsteps of the Council of Trent and discovering that pixels are even harder to corral than printed pages; the little ones and zeros come flying over, under, and around the walls of censorship from a thousand different directions.

For example, on June 25, 1999, as India was stepping up its campaign against Pakistani–backed Muslim separatists in Kashmir, Indian authorities blocked Internet access to Dawn, a liberal Pakistani newspaper, by clamping down on India’s lone, state–owned Internet Service Provider, Videsh Sanchar Nigam. Internet activists on both sides of the line of control separating Indian– and Pakistani–controlled Kashmir promptly posted instructions on how to evade the ban.

In democratic nations, too, the Internet is proving to be something of a challenge. In February 1996, two protestors charged with libeling McDonald’s by accusing the fast food giant of contributing to deforestation of the rain forest, heart disease, cancer, and starvation in developing countries turned to the Web to publicize their cause. Frustrated by the lack of media coverage their case was getting, the two set up a “McSpotlight” Web site from a laptop connected to the Internet via a cellular phone outside a McDonald’s in central London. To evade Britain’s tough libel laws, they set up mirror sites in Australia, Finland, New Zealand, and the United States, aided by fellow activists in the Netherlands. (In 1997, a judge ruled that the two had failed to prove their allegations, but awarded McDonald’s only $60,000–half the damages the company had claimed.)

Although they are armed with more formidable weapons, neither Slobodan Milosevic nor the Vietnamese Communist Party have had much luck building walls against the Internet. And although the “digital divide,” the gap between electronic haves and have–nots, is both real and pernicious, even it cannot prevent those pesky pixels from penetrating the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the slums of Calcutta, or Cairo’s City of the Dead.

The first Community Computer School in Brazil was erected in 1994 in the Rio slum of Santa Marta with five Intel 486 computers, a fax/modem, and a color printer. Now the Comíte para a Democratização da Informatica (Committee for the Democratization of Computer Science) is collecting used computers in Japan for poor people in Brazil. In Peru, “Internet cabinas” are springing up in Lima and even in Cuzco, the old Incan capital in the Andes at 11,000 feet above sea level. Many are run by families who let their neighbors rent time on their computers and Internet connections–an hour of e–mailing costs about the same as mailing a postcard to the United States.

 

Future Visions

The power of the Internet has fueled two dueling predictions. The first, propounded by no less formidable an intellect than Peter Drucker, is that the nation–state, which after all is a relatively modern construction, cannot survive. Optimists suggest that the new world information and communication order will be blessedly free of nationalism, languages other than English, officious customs agents, and irritating currency conversions. Pessimists foresee a snakepit of feuding Basques, Chechens, Hezbollahis, Karens, Kosovars, Kurds, Tamils, Tupamaros, and Zapatistas, all of them conspiring in 128–bit encrypted code and armed with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons they cooked up using recipes they downloaded from the Net.

The second school predicts that e–commerce, e–warfare, and e–diplomacy will make strong nations such as the United States even stronger and leave everyone else even further behind. This view is especially fashionable in France, where the government has decreed that all Web sites in France must offer content in French, and President Jacques Chirac has called the widespread use of English on the Internet “a major risk for humanity.”

Both the one–worlders and those who fear le défi Américain électronique may be wrong. More likely, there will turn out to be some truth found in all of the predictions: The Information Age will weaken some aspects of national government, but strengthen others; promote both globalization and localization; and advance some American interests while obstructing others. If the upper strata of the economic world continue to integrate while the lower strata do not and the political order crumbles, the new world information and communication order will be anything but orderly. If things get messy enough, anyone who remembers that obscure UNESCO conference in Austria way back in 1983 may come to wish that the experts the UN assembled in the Alps had drafted a normative new world order.

 

Toward a New Social Compact . . .

In the past, periods of great technological, economic, and demographic change in democratic nations have, in time, produced demands for greater government power, activism, and intervention–usually on behalf of the less fortunate. As Robert Wiebe, Richard Hofstadter, and other students of the Progressive Era have described, the industrial revolution in the United States led, in time and after much misery and some bloodshed, to the activist view of government that President Theodore Roosevelt championed. Government busted trusts, set standards, financed education, and underwrote scientific research. Much the same thing happened in England and elsewhere in Western Europe.

Similarly, the social and economic strains of the Great Depression inspired the New Deal, and the technological fears and demands of the Cold War led to what critics on the left have dubbed the “National Security State.” In some authoritarian regimes–think of Chile, East Germany, or South Korea–much the same thing has happened, but more slowly, less completely, and sometimes, more dramatically.

In the United States, Western Europe, and East Asia, the actual and feared dislocations caused or aggravated by new information technology have already led to calls for more muscular government regulation (and perhaps taxation) of e–commerce, policing of cyber crime, and enforcement of antitrust, banking, and securities laws and regulations. The U.S. Department of Justice’s action against Microsoft, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s challenges to the accounting practices of MicroStrategy, America Online, and others, and the difficulties encountered by police hunting for the culprit behind the May 2000 “I Love You” virus all may presage demands for more, not less, government action. In time, the combination of an economic downturn in the United States and questionable activity by today’s malefactors of great wealth is likely also to lead to calls for greater government power to police the new economy and patrol cyberspace.

 

. . . But Moving Too Slowly

Whether even the United States, the undisputed leader of the information revolution, will be able to respond effectively is another matter. For all its obvious advantages–a diverse, well–educated labor force; a formidable educational system, especially in the natural sciences; a high–tech military; an enormous domestic market; a dearth of mortal threats; and a tradition of innovation and ingenuity–it is nowhere preordained that the United States will dominate the Computer Age as it did the Age of Slide Rules.

Indeed, the early returns suggest that the private sector and non–governmental organizations are adapting to the new order much more nimbly than are politicians and governments. The information revolution, in short, is leveling the playing field between nations and non–state actors ranging from Burmese activist Aung Son Suu Kyi to terrorist Osama bin Laden, and Human Rights Watch to Hezbollah. Environmental groups have organized worldwide to restrict oil drilling in Nigeria, and allied themselves via the Web with labor unions and others to disrupt the WTO meeting in Seattle and less successfully, the annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. In Seattle, alternative media activists created the Independent Media Center to tell the story their way; although they raised only $45,000 in cash, their Web site had 1.5 million hits during the week of the WTO meeting. Two–and–a–half hours after Japan’s worst nuclear accident, at Tokaimura on September 30, 1999, Citizens for Alternatives to Nuclear Energy in the high–tech hotbed of Bangalore, India, downloaded news and analysis of the disaster from a university professor in Japan. They relayed the information to anti–nuclear activists in Sirsi, India, where the Kaiga Nuclear Power Plant is located, and they translated reports into the local language, Kannada, and distributed them. It was a front–page story the next morning in Sirsi’s daily newspaper, Dheyanishta Patrakarta.

As Steven Thomma of Knight Ridder Newspapers wrote on the eve of the New Hampshire presidential primaries last February, the American political scene offers little evidence that either major presidential candidate or either of their political parties has given much thought to the new challenges–despite the fact that one of them claimed to have had a hand in inventing the Internet and the other lives in Austin, Texas, one of the nation’s hottest high–tech towns. Indeed, the slow, deliberative, consensus–driven politics of the Industrial Age seem ill–suited to the tasks of governance in the Information Age.

First, except in extraordinary circumstances, governments in the United States and almost everywhere else have lost the near–monopoly they once had on real–time information–economic, political, and strategic–and with it much of their ability to muster public support. Delayed television pictures of the Tet Offensive sapped public support for the war in Vietnam a generation ago, and CNN satellite images of a U.S. soldier’s corpse being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu helped end a peacekeeping mission (admittedly, one that was creeping toward being much more than that) in Somalia. What effect will streaming video and audio from the next battlefield or terrorist target have on public, allied, and congressional opinion?

Moreover, audio and video are likely to be available not only from big news organizations, but also from anti–war activists with their own Web sites–or from the terrorists themselves. Cat–and–mouse cyber warfare between Hezbollah and Israel, the commercial sale of high–resolution satellite photos, and the worldwide contagion of computer viruses suggest a range of unpleasant possibilities.

If technology is loosening the state’s grip on information, much as Gutenberg broke the Church’s, it already has broken the monopoly that the mass media have enjoyed since the advent of movable type. Given the high price that reporters too often pay for access to high–ranking government and business officials, the dumpster–diving quest for ratings and attention, and the herd mentality that too frequently characterizes the trade, this development is not altogether a bad thing.

Information technology is not altogether a good thing, either; if the new order has let a hundred flowers bloom each minute, often eighty of them are weeds, and one or two of them are toxic. During the turmoil that surrounded the ouster of President Suharto of Indonesia, for example, activists posted photographs of human rights abuses they said were being directed at ethnic Chinese in the country. Although there were real abuses, the photos turned out to be fake. So have numerous other bits of news on the Internet, one example being the “revelation” that TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a U.S. Navy missile.

But the overwhelming reality of the new century is that the absence of consensus, the lack of a common marketplace of ideas, will make governance increasingly difficult, especially across the traditional international boundaries across which money, ideas, and information now flow without interruption, twenty–four hours a day.

Nations rose and fell after the invention of movable type during the Industrial Revolution, and again during the Age of Engineering, which gave birth to, among other things, television, atomic energy, artificial satellites, antibiotics, and oral contraceptives. Now they will rise or fall depending on how successfully they can cope with the new demands of the Information Age. Yogi Berra put it more succinctly: “The future,” he reportedly said, “is inevitable.”

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Endnotes

Note *:   John Walcott is the Washington News Editor of Knight Ridder Newspapers. He was the United States delegate to the 1983 United Nations Roundtable on a New World Information and Communication Order and is the co–author, with David C. Martin, of Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War against Terrorism. Back.