The Telecommunications Revolution

Cellular phones are becoming available worldwide, enabling many among the estimated 50 percent of the world population who have never before made a phone call to communicate instantly with others. This is one element of a larger revolution in telecommunications that is shrinking our world. "The death of distance as a determinant of the cost of communications will probably be the single most important economic force shaping society in the first half of the next century," according to the "Economist" (September 30, 1995). "It will alter, in ways that are only dimly imaginable, decisions about where people live and work; concepts of national borders; patterns of international trade. Its effects will be as pervasive as those of the discovery of electricity".

The PC and the Internet

Computers are a second symbol of globalization. They are also its most potent agents. No area of the world and no arena of politics, economics, society, or culture is immune from the pervasive influence of computer technology. Even victims of ethnopolitical conflict and natural disasters in the most remote corners of the world are connected to others by the laptop computers that relief workers from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies bring with them.

Several hundred million computers are in use today; more than 90 percent are personal computers (PCs), which have replaced the mainframes of yesteryear. Their number is growing by as many as 18 to 20 million annually. Miniaturization has propelled their rapid spread. Microprocessors in today's PCs are incredibly small and growing more powerful at an exponential rate. "Computers owe their growth and impact to a phenomenon dubbed Moore’s Law (after Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel) which says that computing power and capacity double every eighteen months. This exponential growth has led to the digital revolution, and it has only just begun" (Economist, July l, 1995).

The freedom people enjoy with personal computers and their ability to tap into emerging technologies without government intervention is most apparent on the Internet. Individuals routinely "surf the Net" without constrains, creating a global, electronic web of people, ideas, and interactions – a cyberspace unencumbered by state borders. Governments are not bystanders in the emerging technology of the future, however. Under pressure from the German government, one on-line service company, CompuServe – concerned about the use of the Internet to transmit offensive sexual and neo-Nazi materials – temporarily cut access to more than two hundred sex-related Internet news groups (arguing it was unable to stop transmissions on a selective basis). The United States has also taken new steps toward regulating the rapidly expanding telecommunications industry. A law passed in early 1996 to promote competition contained a provision requiring television manufacturers to incorporate technology into their sets that will enable parents (or others) to block reception of particular stations or programs.

Because the United States spawned the Internet, is home to more PCs than any other country, and is at the forefront of the telecommunications revolution, its influence on the emerging technology of the future is substantial. America’s information capabilities probably provide the most potent basis for continued U.S. global influence in culture, politics, and military affairs in the twenty-first century (Nye and Owens).

Although computer technology and the Internet are agents of rapid globalization, wide differences exist in countries' ability to shape (and be shaped by) a computer-driven, technocratic world. The spread of the Internet is confined almost exclusively to the Global North and some of the emerging markets, notably those in Asia. Thus the revolution in computer technology adds to the promise that globalization will be uneven – benefiting some while putting others at a disadvantage. In addition, the growing global electronic network has spawned a new condition known as virtuality – "the ability to create a fictitious world using one’s computer and to conceal one's identity in dealing with others," and it is "a more diffuse danger" with uncertain costs (Moisy).