Page 40 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

16 PELTON

about 100 years after Guttenberg's famous press appeared on the scene in Europe)
changed the world of the Renaissance. The free exchange of ideas and the result-
ing intellectual intercourse gave rise to the concepts of both individualism and po-
litical systems, which were the precursor to the modern nation state. Political and
technological philosophers as diverse as Siegfried Gideon in Mechanization
Takes Command and Jacques Ellul in Technological Man, on the liberal side of
the argument, and Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Weiner, and Buckminster Fuller,
on the "scientific side" of the spectrum, have all suggested that these intellectual
changes reshaped human society in fundamental ways.
Essentially philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau, Jacques Ellul, and
Lewis Mumford have seen technology as adversely affecting and "dehumaniz-
ing" society, whereas others such as Norbert Weiner and Buckminster Fuller have
seen technology not only as positive, but almost as an inevitable outcome of hu-
manity's intellectual development. Thus, the technological positivists see tech-
nology as the ineluctable quest of human civilization.
Regardless of which interpretation we choose, the nation state is showing its
age as we start the 21st century. All of these writers and more suggest that politi-
cal institutions may need to be reinvented. Exactly how national political systems
adapt to an electronic world whose business and economic systems work on the
basis of split-second communications across the world is clearly a challenge. Po-
litical systems work within relatively small, intimate, and low-moving communi-
ties and cultures, and thus are often ill equipped to cope with their faster (and
other more wealthy) protagonists. This is just one of the more interesting puzzles
of our technological age. Certainly the institutions that provide global communi-
cations, including satellites, are currently in a hubbub of change and transforma-
tion. One thing we know: "Faster is not necessarily better."
Today with the rise of global information systems, worldwide e-commerce and
media, and planetary science and engineering, the dawning of a new age seems to
be occurring. Yet we see another landscape: We see fundamentalist and closed
cultures with absolutist political systems. These societies are many centuries old,
and in many cases the political and religious leadership of these entities actually
despises the results of global connectivity and modernity. In many cases, they de-
spise Western culture, human and political freedoms, and civil rights, and they
have contempt for the "loose morals" and "materialism" of what seems to them a
depraved society.
We are certainly living in a time of turmoil and cultural striving. These "gaps"
in philosophy and culture impact not only the "West's relationship" with Afghan-
istan, Iraq, Pakistan, Borneo, or the rain forests of the Congo. These gaps also
stretch across the hopes and values that divide urban and rural America and sepa-
rate suburban communities and the inner city. Similar conflicts are present
throughout other advanced nations as well.
The point to note here is that satellite communications is neither the cause nor
the focus of change. Yet it is these systems, along with fiber optics, cybernetics,