Info/comm/tech in popular culture

Historical perspectives

Just the fact that this volume begins with more than three-decades-old citations should alert you to realizing the value of keeping the topic of ICTs in historical perspective. “The craving for instantaneous communication extends far back in history. Early historians write about the Greeks perched on rooftops watching for fire signals, or those who used a glint of sunlight on a polished surface to send messages across distance,” Anntheresa Lubrano wrote about the telegraph in 1997 (p. xiii).

The Moors in Algeria were using the heliograph, a device for signaling by flashing the sun’s rays from a mirror, as far back as the eleventh century A.D. Ancient Romans used citizens perched on towers as a form of communication to bridge the miles. Societies of the 1800s used semaphores to communicate across distance.

Consider: It was 513 BCE when philosopher Heraclites wrote that, “Nothing is permanent except change.” Just as Johannes Gutenberg’s fifteenth century invention of the moveable-type printing press revolutionized global communication, so too have its descendants of digital-data telegraphy, telephony, and laser publishing. Tom Standage (1988: vii–viii), Deputy Editor of The Economist and its futurist publication The World Ahead, has pointed out similarities to today’s Internet from that trusty telegraph:

During Queen Victoria’s reign, a new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances, in effect, shrinking the world faster and further than ever before. A worldwide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms, of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by the skeptics. Governments and regulators tried and failed to control the new medium. Attitudes toward everything from news gathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought. Meanwhile, out on the wires, a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary was establishing itself.

Xenophobia?

Although this book deals with topics such as globalization, including many examples of ICT around the world, it admittedly is mostly geared to North America, which accounts for about one-third of global computing, data management, ICT, and Internet technological endeavors. Info/comm/tech services there have traditionally been provided by private monopolies, as opposed to public/governmental models elsewhere that are run out of organizations like the Ministry of Post, Telephone, and Telegraph (PTT). Clearly positioned as an information society, with more than half of its workface employed in information-related sectors, for all its faults the United States boasts being the world’s information banker, home of the most computer-literate generation in the world.

With a diverse population of 340.1 million people having 123.8 million television sets, 95% owning at least one computer, 85% with broadband, the United States is the world’s largest market for ICT services and equipment. “Its history of technological and regulatory innovation, and its evolution from domination by a private monopoly to a pluralistic and increasingly competitive environment,” wrote Heather Hudson in 2006, “make the U.S. telecommunications sector both a compelling and enigmatic model” (p. 90). That history, dating from the military-industrial complex documented from World War 11 that introduced the nuclear reactor, includes the evolution of communications satellites in the 1960s, the divestiture of AT&T in 1984, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, computers, digital telephone technology, antibiotics and genetic modification, and the wireless and digital revolutions. As we have moved from the industrial era through information and molecular ones, Klaus Schwab (2017: 1) argues that we are entering a fourth industrial revolution:

Consider the unlimited possibilities of having billions of people connected by mobile devices, giving rise to unprecedented processing power, storage capabilities and knowledge access. Or think about the staggering confluence of emerging technology breakthroughs, covering wide-ranging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the Internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing, to name a few.

Cees J. Hamelink, a major force behind the Peoples’ Communication Charter (PCC) and the author of The ethics of cyberspace (2000), theorized about the myth of the information society, positing it has these dimensions:

• Economy: The information society will witness the end of the capitalist, industrial production with its inherent vices of centralization, expansion, standardization, synchronization, and exploitation. There will be a shift from industrial product to the provision of services in a de-monopolized and diversified market.
• Politics: The political arena of the information society is participatory. Its decision-making is decentralized and its insistence on greater access to information for all its citizens equates with the shift of power from the governing elite to the real democratic process of the push-button referendum.
• Culture: In the information society, the misery of labor is taken away from the human being and appropriated by the electronic system The massive culture of the industrial society gives way to the individualist cultural consumption of products at times and in places that people choose themselves.

Definitions

At a most basic level, ICT refers to messages, or electronic transmission(s), typically sent by means of cables, computers, optical fibers, radios, satellite telegraphs, telephones, wireless networks, televisions, social networks, and other media applications that have led to what Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan has called a “global village” of users. A $9.8 trillion global industry, ICTs might be used for banking, agriculture, e-commerce, education, e-governance, defense medicine, or transport, dealing with forms of communication that can be one-way and/or two-way, wired and/or unwired. An umbrella term for broadcasting, computer technologies, electronic media, and telephony, ICT encompasses an enormous range of subject matter. You probably use them mostly for texting or video chats. Because ICT consists of so many integrated aspects, it may be helpful to consider them under these various headings:

• Computers: A1, CD-ROM, chatbots and chatboxes, desktop publishing, desktop video, electronic messaging, e-readers, the Internet, multimedia, on-line services, quantum computing, social media, tablets, videotex, virtual reality
• Consumer electronics: camcorders, DCC and MDD, digital audio tape, home video, videocassette recorders, videodiscs, videogames
• Electronic media: AM stereo radio, cable television, digital audio broadcasting, digital video compression, direct broadcast satellites (DBS), electronic retailing, high-definition television (HDTV), Interactive television, Low power television (LPTV), Pay-per-view television, radio, satellite master antenna television, television shopping, video dialtone, wireless cable (MMDS)
• Satellites: remote sensing, satellite-based distance learning, satellite news gathering, very small aperture terminals
• Telephony: cellular telephones, facsimile machines, fiber optics, integrated services digital network (ISDN), language models, mobile satellite service, personal communication networks, point-to-point cable services, smartphones, videoconferencing, videophone, voice mail and voice technology

Popular culture, incorporated at length here, with numerous citations, mainly concerns itself with the now, the cool, and what is trendy. As you read statistics about widespread usage of so many technologies, you will realize why its parallel inclusion is so critical for perspective. (See also the many pop culture references included here).

Theoretical basis: Diversity/inequality/oppression

In the United States, where ICT communications are pre-eminently advertiser-driven, we continue to witness a gap between the information rich and the information poor. Recognizing that Japan is recognized as the most technologically advanced country in the world, followed by South Korea and the United States (Germany #4, Singapore 5, UK 6, Sweden 7, Israel 8, China 9, Switzerland 10, Russia 11, Canada 12), it still is amazing that 12+ % of U.S. households lack Internet access, 3 % telephones. As we examines the influence of the Information Revolution on the “haves” and the “have-nots,” it is difficult to not be concerned about issues of access for various populations, and what that might mean in a wider frame.

Digital discrepancies and inequities continue to exist. We hear that about 60% of 100 million Americans use computers while only 42 % of the world’s population owns them, even though some 94% have access to mobile phones. The technology gap in our age of generative machines nevertheless continues in that nearly three billion people still lack access to the digital environment (see Compaine, 2001; Mack, 2001; Norris, 2001; Bauerlein, 2011; Ragnedda and Muschart, 2013; Andreasson, 2015; van Dijk, 2020; Helsper, 2021; Tomczzyk et al., 2023). When one realizes that our commercial media targets its audience in terms of its potential for purchasing goods and services, it is obvious that scant attention is paid to those less well positioned and/or endowed. The information gap not only divides youngsters in school and home atmospheres, it then continues when it is time to begin jobs or careers; hence, it behooves us to help our brothers and sisters around the word to be(come) ICT users/critical thinkers.

Aims/approaches of this book

With a wider concern for alerting media consumers about potential policy implications and services resulting from governmental regulation (as well as various deregulations) of our information infrastructure, this book has determined to get beyond merely the technical. Who pays, it wonders. Who profits, it wonders even more—especially in terms of information access and acquisition. While we are living through an unprecedented period of media mergers, an escalating phenomenon that is virtually unchecked, let us continue to question the oligopolistic production, distribution, and exhibition practices that are simultaneously crushing the competition and narrowing our media choices. Press freedoms for all the people, from both mainstream and alternative communication sources, inform persuasion in these pages.

As individuals and as members of a global media marketplace, we were bombarded and overwhelmed by discussions of the promised “Information Highway,” which claimed to change not only our homes but also our workstations and our civic/social community environments. While some consumers accepted this news happily and wholeheartedly, others humorously joked that emerging technologies will undoubtedly get clogged, and/or need constant repair, as does our current travel source infrastructure. Yet others of us more cynically question its prospects at all and wonder where we might belong in this continuing debate. The challenge is to try and make sense of the dizzying array of technologies that constantly enter the marketplace. The goal of Info/comm/tech in popular culture: An encyclopedic time capsule is to do just that: To explain the historical background to various technologies (print, electronic, and visual media; computers; satellites; telephony; data transmissions; multimedia; and the like) in terms of economic, political, socio-cultural, media, technological, policy, international, and theoretical considerations. In the ever-evolving ICT world, though, we welcome your interest and your input.