Page 39 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

1. SATELLITES AS WORLDWIDE CHANGE AGENTS 15

services to occur within the next 10 years. The driving force will be cheap pro-
cessing power. The challenge will be for fiber optic and satellite networks to keep
pace—not only by providing faster and faster transmission speed, but by furnish-
ing them at low cost and with high reliability and security, especially in wireless
and mobile systems. The biggest challenge of all may be filtering out unwanted
information.

NEW PATTERNS OF GLOBAL TRADE, POLITICAL PROCESS,
AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Although a good case might be made for other instruments of change, this book
presents the case for satellites and how they will represent the prime key to glob-
alization. The rise of globalism will undoubtedly bring changes to education,
health care, entertainment, and business. Low-cost services and user terminals
that support easy communications by satellite are likely to complicate interna-
tional trade in products, but especially so in relation to services. This will seem
particularly true as more and more electronic immigrants work across interna-
tional boundaries. Today more than 1 million people are what I call electronic im-
migrants or international teleworkers. This special class of workers might live in
Barbados, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, or Russia, but work in the United States, Ja-
pan, or Europe. These international teleworkers actually have been around for de-
cades, and many now accept such a way of life as normal.
Within a decade, it could well be 10 or even 20 million people who are profes-
sional business nomads and who will find their way to work on electronic beams
of digital information, sometimes halfway around the world. Such trends, and the
parallel efforts to facilitate global communications, will make national and inter-
national satellite links just as common and convenient as cell phones or global TV
shows are today. In 20 years, the cost of communicating across town, across a
country, or around the world could well be much the same—just as Arthur C.
Clarke predicted decades ago. What is not known is whether this will generate su-
pranational relationships and institutions that could well confound the working of
today's national states or of regional, ethnic, or religious cultures.
The nation state, a modern invention, is only a few centuries old. Countries are
actually the manifestation of what is fundamentally a 16th-century technology (i.e.,
low-cost printed materials in mass distribution) and then of the 18th-, 19th-, and
20th-century industrial revolutions that followed. The role of the nation state in a
global service economy has yet to be clearly defined.
Marshall McLuhan, Fernand Braudel, and others taught us to analyze the rela-
tionship among communications, technology, and political history. They and oth-
ers such as Georg Hegel, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Victor Ferkiss, and
Norbert Weiner, from widely different perspectives, examined how technology
has reshaped modern life. We certainly know that the rise of mass printing and the
dissemination of knowledge on a broad scale in the 16th century (a lag time of