kriz@skat.usc.edu (Dennis Kriz) (01/05/90)
[reposted from the group soc.rights.human]
Copied from TIME magazine, Jan 8, 1989, pg 46:
America Abroad
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Glued to the Tube
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by Strobe Talbott
In the totalitarian world of Nineteen-Eighty-Four, George Orwell
imagined that the Thought Police would rely on a ubiquous "oblong
metal plaque like a dulled mirror" to keep the citizens of Oceania
brainwashed and obedient: "The intstrument (the television, it was
called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off
completely." That prophecy turned out spectacularly wrong. TV, along
with radio, computers, modems, copiers, and fax machines, caused big
trouble for Big Brother in 1989. Once the more repressive precints of
the global village were wired for glasnosts, legions of little
brothers whispered subversion in everyone's ear.
What has been called the third industrial revolution, the
transformation of society by high technology and mass communications,
has made it possible to infiltrate competing images of reality across
borders. "Terrestrial overspill" allowed East Gernams to watch West
German TV, tempting them with what they say advertised. Young
Estonians have learned idomatic American English from reruns of
Dynasty shown in neighboring Finland.
When communism began to self-destruct last year, TV Journalists did
more than just report the phenomenon -- the participated in it. The
presence of foreign cameramen seemed to embolden demonstrators. Once
the Chinese authorities decided to shed blood, they literarily pulled
the plug on television coverage. Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu also
kept the press out of his country while he slaughtered its citizens.
Not until TV aired footage of his lifeless body were many Rumanians
convinced that the despot had really been executed.
The blank screen is a licence to kill. After the Tienanmen massacre,
China's regime implicitly acknowledged its vulnerability to short
waves by singling out the Voice of America for charges of slander and
fabrication. In fact, the VOA had broadcast the truth back into the
People's Republic, jamming the Big Lie.
David Webster, a former director of the BBC and now a senior fellow of
the Annenberg Washington Program on Communications Policy, calls
high-tech information gear "the essential hardware of freedom." He
rightly urges the U.S. to ease restrictions on the export of such
equipment to communist lands, since it will serve the ruled better
than the rulers.
While the collapse of communism made for some great visuals in '89, it
is worth remembering that the third industrial revolution can cut both
ways, complicating the lives of American Presidents as well as
communist leaders. To the fury of Lyndon Johnson, TV brought the Viet
Nam War home to the U.S. and hastened its humiliating end. Some
former advisors to Ronald Reagan suspect he might have stuck by
Ferdinant Marcos in 1986 had it not been for the extensive and
sympathetic coverage of People Power.
But most of the signals with which the U.S. bombards the planet
transmit not news but pop culture. Hollywood has more influence on
the Third World than does Washington. The barrios of Latin America
bristle with antennas. There are VCRS in rural India, satellite
dishes around the slums of the Caribbean and in Northern Mexica. In
some parts of the world, the poor and desperate can ponder the
lifestyles of the rich and silly on Dynasty. The experience teaches
viewers more than English. It can make for an explosive combination
of envy, hatred and determination to break out of wretched
surroundings, or to burn them down.
Everywhere on earth, tantalizing, sometimes infuriating images keep
coming from that oblong metal plaque. But Orwell was right about one
thing: there is no way of shutting it off.
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