Page 31 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

8 PELTON

ture. In his book Megatrends, he suggested that satellite communications, by mak-
ing modern electronic media "omnipresent" and "instantaneously accessible," was
creating the "ultimate force of change" in modern times. In short, Naisbitt argued
that satellite systems were creating the global village—not TV by itself.
Instantaneous information also has other unintended consequences:

1. An abundance of rapid information overloads our sensory systems and
competes for attention. Thus, information in the modern context must be as
contemporary as possible. As a result, information today is less enduring.
2. New constraints on decision makers emerge as news is contemporaneous
with policymaking.
3. Policymakers try to avoid this amplification of news by ever-increasing
forms and processes of secrecy and intelligence.
4. The media can also be fed false and misleading information, and the pace
with which it flows is so short and fast that facts cannot be checked ade-
quately—the major problem is to determine what is really real.

Indeed, it was satellites that brought TV and global telecommunications rather
quickly and dramatically to an increasingly small planet in the 1960s. The 1968
Olympics in Mexico City was the first true international electronic media event,
but satellite TV service was still limited at that time. The countries of the Indian
Ocean region were not yet included in the world of instant messaging in 1968.
That was to change forever 1 year later.
The Apollo Moon Landing in the middle of 1969 became the world's first
truly global event. Satellite service to the Indian Ocean region via an Intelsat III
satellite was achieved just a little over 1 week before this huge media and scien-
tific event changed our view of our small planet in a significant way. Over a
half-billion people watched "live" what had seemed pure science fiction only a
decade before. By the time of the Montreal Summer Olympics in 1972, satellite
technology had made possible a global audience of over 1 billion. In less than a
decade, the earth had been "dramatically shrunk" by satellite networking and
broadcasting. Global TV programs evolved rapidly over the decade that fol-
lowed. At the start of the decade, they were revolutionary events. By the end of
the 1970s, they were commonplace occurrences, and the phrase "live via satel-
lite," which once inspired a sense of awe, began to disappear from TV screens as
irrelevant information.
Satellites, as much as any other technology, thus served to create what can legiti-
mately be called globalism. Communications satellites reshaped our vision of hu-
manity when we first saw "Earth Rise" from the moon in the last gasp of the 1960s.
The 21st-century world is different in many ways, but global interconnectivity
is certainly one of the most fundamental shifts that now separate us from our past
history. Just as mass access to books and newspapers created a new world for us
centuries earlier, global media separates us from the near-term past.