Page 46 - Communications Satellites Global Change Agents

22 PELTON

Furthermore, this international trade of the past involved a much greater ele-
ment of colonial or neocolonial exploitation than it does today. When satellite
communications came to the island nation of Samoa well over two decades ago,
the prices of exports increased on the order of 30%, and the price of imports
dropped by about 30%. This is because prices could be negotiated via satellite
rather than set by the last freighter to steam into port.
We now have a court of world public opinion that stems from worldwide and
instantaneous electronic news coverage. We now have worldwide banking, stock
trading, and electronic funds transfer at a level that exceeds $100 trillion a year.
Global satellite communications, fiber optic networks, and terrestrial wireless
have over the past decade begun to create not a "global village," but what might
be called the earliest manifestations of a "global brain" or an "E-Sphere" (Pelton,
1999, p. 1).
Part of this new worldwide mind has created an omnipresent Hollywood and
MTV culture around the world. Other parts have created global, political, and cul-
tural observatories that span our planet. Yet others have enabled research net-
works that interlink Nobel scientists in a nonstop quest for new knowledge.
America, the land of the Internet and nonstop satellite TV and video streaming, is
now at once the primary envy as well as the primary source of perceived evil of
the world. Like Janus, our nonstop electronically fed society faces both ways. It
marches forward and backward at the same time.
TV broadcasters like Ted Turner, John Malone, Rupert Murdoch, and Kerry
Packer of Australia would never have risen to prominence without the satellite.
The same is true about MTV, HBO, and a host of other media organizations.
Clearly not all change is good nor is it evil. What satellites are today, however, are
virtually omnipresent.
Certainly fiber optic systems now transport a huge portion of this global traf-
fic, but satellites started the revolution. Satellites still carry most of international
TV. They still link North and South together as global networks interconnect the
developing countries to each other and to the countries of the OECD.
Some see this satellite-driven revolution as a way to bring new services and
new forms of care and comfort to many of the 6 billion people on our planet.
These human beings survive without potable drinking water, electricity, educa-
tion, health care, or the hope of prosperity. From this perspective, satellites are
an instrument of knowledge and enlightenment. In the words of Socrates:
"There is only one evil, ignorance, and only one good, knowledge." From this
perspective, satellites represent knowledge. When we at Intelsat began Project
Share (Satellites for Health and Rural Education) in the mid-1980s, we did not
know what to expect. Little did we realize that the Chinese National TV Univer-
sity experiment that we started with several dozen small earth terminals would
mushroom into a vast educational enterprise operating in over 90,000 remote lo-
cations and supporting over 5 million students in rural China. This seemed satel-
lites at their best.