ABSTRACT
Video, cable and satellite technologies, and their attendant communication novelties – ways of transmitting entertainment, words, pictures, data, voices and other services in huge variety, over vast distances, at ferocious speeds – have been discussed in such extravagant terms, and introduced with such little debate, that their wider social and economic implications have often been ignored. We are in danger of seeing emerging patterns as necessary, or, even more dangerously, as technologically determined, and accepting the consequences fatalistically. Seventy-year-old audience habits have changed. The impact of these
developments will go far beyond what people do with their leisure. There is also the likelihood of direct impact on political behaviour and institutions. Every previous innovation in communications, from the emergence of the mass circulation press through the development of radio and television, has profoundly altered not only how politics is understood in societies, but the nature of political negotiation itself. Such an immense set of changes as are now occurring will inevitably revolutionize political expectations, behaviour and institutions. We, as yet, can only speculate about the likely effects: but they will clearly influence the future of democracy. Yet we have seen thirty years of speculation driving policy. Audience behaviour has proved more stable. Experts have been divided between the neophiliacs and the cultural pessimists.
Neophiliacs write of the disappearance of class (by which they mean that traditional types of work will be replaced), the disappearance of workplaces (as the work-bench is supplanted by the home computer terminal) and the eventual relocation of the production process to the developing world as the management of information (about production and consumption) becomes the key commodity in the technologically advanced economies. Such predictions seem premature. Neophiliac arguments bring to mind an
earlier debate about the arrival of the ‘post-industrial’ society. Comments by Anthony Smith and John Howkins belong to the same tradition as Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine,1 who argued that the expansion of the service sector, increasing expenditure on the production of knowledge, and ever
larger investment in research, together with changes in the technologies of production and leisure, were creating a new social order. Plus ça change: as Krishan Kumar has argued, similar developments become apparent early in the history of industrialization, and do not represent any qualitative change.2
Many of the neophiliac predictions of future patterns are based on naïve extrapolation from current trends, and ignore the idiosyncrasies of historical development. The pessimists, on the other hand, see changes in mass commercial culture
as a subversion of ‘standards’. In the discussion of broadcasting technologies, the new ‘cultural’ pessimists, such as Nick Garnham and Richard Collins, joined hands with the ‘industrial’ pessimists, like Henry Braverman,3 who shared concern over the impact of computer and information technology on employment. Thus, broadcasting becomes the fulcrum of a wider social and economic upheaval. The pessimists see little evidence for the emergence of new cultural patterns and much evidence for the irreparable damage to old ones. In practice this ‘revolution’ represents the continued industrialization of
the service sector. New technology performs old tasks more efficiently: in particular, the sorting, correlating and ordering of information in bureaucracies. Many of the current problems in broadcasting policy concern the next stage: the domestication of the computer. Indeed, from both sides of the British political spectrum great, and perhaps
unrealistic, hopes of industrial revival have been pinned on the exploitation of new communications technologies. On the one hand, those on the left have argued that the provision of a national cable network is similar to the laying down of the other great service infrastructures of industrial society: water, rail and road. It has been persuasively suggested that markets for goods and products increasingly exist not in physical space, but between those who are in contact via the networks of cable communication. Goods and services can be produced anywhere and to any specification with the complex exchange of data provided by cable facilities. It has thus been argued that the state should invest in a massive programme of cable provision in order to provoke a dramatic new regional and national economic revival. Advocates of this strategy point to the success of French governments’ attempts to modernize communications. Using the notion of ‘informatics’, the French argued that access to, and understanding of, the most modern means of communication is part of being a contemporary citizen. Consequently, French policy makers have suggested that the state must educate the people and provide the means for the fullest possible public participation in this technology. The French government has also based its policy on the belief that the industrial possibilities of cable systems can only be developed if the technology is in the widest possible use. Thus, in France there has been a typically ‘dirigiste’ development of cable and telephone services by the state, according to a clearly laid-down plan, with little room for liberal ‘free market’ principles.
