Global Dialogue. (Note on Society/Reflexion Sur la Societe)

A characteristic of the twenty-first century is the development of electronic communications that will make cultural productions of the past and the present available to virtually everyone on our planet. This is an exciting challenge; but it does not come without misgivings. Some of them are voiced in this brief note. Every classroom in the world is being wired to the Internet to enable young people to navigate. But are surfers who spend more and more time on the web acquiring the social skills required to be genuinely human? Will they be able to use the new technology to enhance their cultural heritage? Or will they be trapped in a computer-created universe where the question, Whose world? becomes, Whose program? Clicking and Learning Learning involves more than just being able to click on the appropriate information site on the World Wide Web. It must teach how to live in partnership with fellow human beings, and how to share common values while remaining sensitive to cultural differences and the uniqueness of human experience. Learning skills simply to be able to sell one's labour in the marketplace is too narrow a concept of education. It produces an adult who thinks of himself or herself more as a sellable property than a whole human being and a responsible member of society. One cannot attach a dollar sign to a shared cultural experience, yet cultural institutions throughout the world are being told to become cost effective and provide more value for money. The sense of identity and social trust that is essential to the development of culture is not founded on quick profits. We all know this, but does the technology, as it is embodied in the media, mirror our conviction? Seeing Is Believing There are more than a billion television sets in the world. In Japan, the average household watches 8 hours and 17 minutes of television per day. In the United States, the television set is on for more than seven hours a day and viewed on the average, if we can believe surveys, for four and a half hours a day by adults. Electronic communication has created a world that is sometimes more important than the real world. We do not think of people on the screen as actors, and some are dearer to us than the members of our own family. Missing the soap opera can be a matter of distress, and the divorce of the heroine can affect us more than our own! And there is more to come. High-tech computers will soon know and sense our moods. From the creases on our face, the pout on our mouth or the bags under our eyes, they will recognise our state of mind and give us the soothing message we need with, of course, the proper musical background. If the playwright and the filmmaker tried to communicate an experience, cyberspace w ill create that experience itself, or better still, it will have us live that experience. Virtual reality will do away with reality itself! Forsaken Dreams Technology has made promises before, and it is useful to look back to the twentieth century to see what happened. When the radio first appeared, it was considered a tool for information but also for the enhancement of culture. In America, public interest was gradually eroded by commercial interests, and the Communication Act of 1934 handed over vast control of the airwaves to companies like RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse, who quickly converted the medium an advertising forum for commercial sponsors. Europe was slower in capitulating, but I need not stress how fast they are catching up with the Americans. The danger was neither unheralded nor accepted without protest. Lee de Forest, the inventor of the vacuum tube that rendered radio broadcasting possible, was so upset at the way his invention was being turned a grubby money-making machine that he wrote an open letter to the National Association of Broadcasters in which he lamented that radio had become a laughing stock to intelligence by cutting time into tiny segments called spots (more righly stains) wherewith the occasional fine program is periodically smeared with impudent insistence to buy and try. …

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