The highway will spread information and opportunity across borders to developing nations, too. Cheap global communications can bring people anywhere into the mainstream of the world economy. An English-speaking Ph.D. in China will be able to bid against colleagues in London for consulting work. Knowledge workers in industrialized countries will, in a sense, face new competition—just as some manufacturing workers in industrialized countries have experienced competition from developing nations over the past decade. This will make the information highway a powerful force for international trade in intellectual goods and services, just as the availability of relatively inexpensive air cargo and containerized shipping helped propel international trade in physical goods.
The net effect will be a wealthier world, which should be stabilizing. Developed nations, and workers in those nations, are likely to maintain a sizable economic lead. However, the gap between the have and have-not nations will diminish. Starting out behind is sometimes an advantage. It lets those who adopt late skip steps, and avoid the mistakes of the trailblazers. Some countries will never have industrialization. They will move directly into the Information Age. Europe didn’t adopt television until several years after the United States. The result was higher picture
quality, because by the time Europe set its standard a better choice was available. As a result, Europeans have enjoyed better-looking television pictures for decades.
Telephone systems are another example of how starting late can provide an advantage. In Africa, China, and other parts of the developing world, many citizens who have phones use cellular instruments. Cellular telephone service is spreading rapidly in Asia, Latin America, and other developing regions, because it does not require that copper wires be strung. Many people in the cellular industry predict that improvements in technology will mean that these areas may never get a conventional copper wire-based telephone system. These countries will never have to cut down a million trees for telephone poles or string a hundred thousand miles of telephone lines only to rip them all down and bury the entire network. The wireless telephone system will be their first telephone system. They will get increasingly better cellular systems wherever they can’t afford a full broadband connection.
The presence of advanced communications systems promises to make nations more alike and reduce the importance of national boundaries. The fax machine, the portable videocamera, and Cable News Network are among the forces that brought about the end of communist regimes and the Cold War, because they allowed news to pass both ways through what was called the Iron Curtain.
Now, commercial satellite broadcasts to nations such as China and Iran offer citizens glimpses of the outside world that are not necessarily sanctioned by their governments. This new access to information can draw people together by increasing their understanding of other cultures. Some believe it will cause discontent and worse, a “Revolution of Expectations,” when disenfranchised people get enough data about another lifestyle to contrast it with their own. Within individual societies, the balance of traditional versus modern experiences will shift as people use the information highway to expose themselves to a greater range of possibilities. Some cultures may feel under assault, as people pay greater attention to global issues or cultures, and less to traditional local ones.
“The fact that the same ad can appeal to someone in a New York apartment and an Iowa farm and an African village does not prove these situations are alike,” commented Bill McKibben, a critic of what he sees as television’s tendency to override local diversity with homogenized common experiences. “It is merely evidence that the people living in them have a few feelings in common, and it is these barest, most minimal commonalties that are the content of the global village.”
Yet if people choose to watch the ad, or the program the ad supports, should they be denied that privilege? This is a political question for every country to answer individually. It will not, however, be easy to filter a highway connection so that it selects and takes in only some elements.
American popular culture is so potent that outside the United States some countries now attempt to ration it. They hope to guarantee the viability of domestic-content producers by permitting only a certain number of hours of foreign television to be aired each week. In Europe the availability of satellite and cable-delivered programming reduced the potential for government control. The information highway is going to break down boundaries and may promote a world culture, or at least a sharing of cultural activities and values. The highway will also make it easy for patriots, even expatriates, deeply involved in their own ethnic communities to reach out to others with similar interests no matter where they may be located. This may strengthen cultural diversity and counter the tendency toward a single world culture.
If people do gravitate to their own interests and withdraw from the broader world—if weight lifters communicate only with other weight lifters, and Latvians choose to read only Latvian newspapers—there is a risk that common experiences and values will fall away. Such xenophobia would have the effect of fragmenting societies. I doubt this will happen, because I think people want a sense of belonging to many communities, including a world community. When we Americans share national experiences, it is usually because we’re witnessing events all at the same time on television—whether it is the Challenger blowing up after liftoff, the Super Bowl, an inauguration, coverage of the Gulf War, or the O. J. Simpson car chase. We are “together” at those moments.
Another worry people have is that multi-media entertainment will be so easy to get and so compelling, some of us will use the system too much for our own good. This could become a serious problem when virtual-reality experiences are commonplace.
One day a virtual-reality game will let you enter into a virtual bar and make eye contact with “someone special,” who will note your interest and come over to engage you in conversation. You’ll talk, impressing this new friend with your charm and wit. Perhaps the two of you will decide, then and there, to go to Paris. Whoosh! You’ll be in Paris, gazing together at the stained glass of Notre Dame. “Have you ever ridden the Star Ferry in Hong Kong?” you might ask your friend, invitingly. Whoosh! VR will certainly be more engrossing than video games have ever been, and more addictive.
If you were to find yourself escaping into these attractive worlds too often, or for too long, and began to be worried about it, you could try to deny yourself entertainment by telling the system, “No matter what password I give, don’t let me play any more than half an hour of games a day.” This would be a little speed bump, a warning to slow your involvement with something you found too appealing. It would serve the same purpose as a photo of some very overweight people you might post on your refrigerator to discourage snacking.
Speed bumps help a lot with behavior that tends to generate day-after regrets. If someone elects to spend his or her free hours examining the stained glass in a simulation of Notre Dame, or chatting in a make-believe bar with a synthetic friend, that person is exercising his or her freedom. Today a lot of people spend several hours a day with a television on. To the extent we can replace some of that passive entertainment with interactive entertainment, viewers may be better off. Frankly, I’m not too concerned about the world whiling away its hours on the information highway. At worst, I expect, it will be like playing video games or gambling. Support groups will convene to help abusers who want to modify their behavior.