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Diplomacy II PART THREE The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, or any of its agencies. As more and more areas of the world move toward democracy, fostering understanding and influencing audiences will play an ever more important role in the pursuit of foreign policy. --Walter R. Roberts Walter R. Roberts is a board member of the Public Diplomacy Institute of The George Washington University, a former associate director of the United States Information Agency, and the author of Tito, Mihailovic and the Allies, 1941-1945. Will there be government international broadcasting in 2015? The answer is a resounding "yes." It is a resounding "yes" for two reasons. One, international broadcasting is an important element in the conduct of public diplomacy, which will have an ever-increasing role in international affairs; and two, radio will continue to play an eminent part in the communications area--millions of people will tune in to radio broadcasts despite the development of other media, such as television and the Internet. By 2015, the further advancement of the information revolution will have had a major impact on the conduct of foreign policy. Traditional diplomacy (government-to-government) will increasingly need to be supplemented by public diplomacy (government-to-people). As more and more areas of the world move toward democracy, fostering understanding and influencing audiences, that is to say, publics, will play an ever more important role in the pursuit of foreign policy objectives. And what better medium is there than radio broadcasting? It is direct and relatively inexpensive. It is the ideal mass medium. By 2015, radio audiences will continue to exist. The history of radio listening in modern societies, for instance in the United States and Western Europe, proves that despite all other advances in technology, radio continues to play an important role in the transmission and reception of information. The part that the car radio plays in everyone's life, the fact that the president of the United States uses a weekly radio address to reach the American people, and the reality that religious organizations have increased international radio audiences around the world are all testimony to the continued importance of radio for transmitting information. By 2015, radio listeners around the world will have even easier access to radio broadcasts from America than they have today, because shortwave reception will be clearer. Not only will newer and more powerful transmitters be available but the receivers will allow for sharper reception. Satellites will enable listeners to tune in directly to Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts. In the next year or two, car radios will be able to transmit as well as receive broadcasts directly from satellites. Many countries will be only too happy to supplement their own programs by carrying VOA broadcasts on their AM and FM stations. Because radio is an important element in the pursuit of foreign policy objectives, it is only natural that the government should bear the financial burden for its operation. A short review of international broadcasting by the United States may point the way to a framework for 2015. When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, after Pearl Harbor, a decision was made at the highest level of the government that the United States should immediately start international broadcasting. The impetus for the decision was not only the undoubted success of German radio propaganda in the pursuit of Nazi policies but also the high reputation that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had earned. There were two ways for the United States to proceed. It could run the operation directly or, following the British model, indirectly. But the indirect method proved impossible because, unlike in England, we in America did not have a domestic government-subsidized radio operation like the BBC or, for that matter, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). For the British and the Canadians, it was easy to add external broadcasting services to the established domestic service. We did not have National Public Radio (NPR) at that time. We had commercial networks like CBS and NBC, which did not lend themselves to establishing overseas services, even with government financial support. We set up our international broadcasting operation as government-run, a division of the Foreign Information Service (FIS), which in turn was part of the Coordinator of Information (COI). Within two-and-a-half months after Pearl Harbor, the first broadcast to Germany went on the air. The speaker, William Harlan Hale, an American newspaperman who had studied in Germany and spoke German fluently, told his audience that from that day on (February 25, 1942), they would hear voices from America, that the news might be good or bad, but we would always tell the truth. Hale wanted to impress upon the German listeners that while ours would be a government operation, we would, unlike the Nazis, speak candidly. And so we did throughout the war and beyond. VOA is and always has been a model of objective reporting. In 1950, the international broadcasting picture changed when the United States added a new radio service, Radio Free Europe (RFE). By this time, the Cold War was raging and so was the information battle. Clearly, VOA, as a government operation, was not in a position to pursue aggressively the information offensive, which in its broadest context aimed at undermining the East European communist regimes. Would it not be a good idea to set up an operation for which the U.S. government could deny responsibility? So a plan was prepared under which the American people, outraged by Soviet policy in Eastern Europe, would through advertising campaigns come up with funds that would run a radio operation directed at Poland, Hungary, and the other Eastern European countries under Soviet domain. Thus, a direct contact would be established with the oppressed people. The broadcasts would deal mostly with their problems rather than American news and policies. Never mind that the private fundraising, while quite successful, did not come close to covering the costs of this new operation; it did succeed in hiding the actual source of funding: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (The cover was blown on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1971.) So from 1950 to this very day, the United States has operated two international radio services--the government-run VOA and the "privately" run RFE, along with several other similar organizations modeled after RFE--such as Radio Liberty to the Soviet Union and its successor states, Radio Marti to Cuba, and Radio Free Asia to China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and a couple of other East Asian countries. When RFE was established in 1950, its raison d'être, the destabilizing of the East European regimes, was not advertised. What was advertised was that RFE filled a void that VOA was unable to fill. Inasmuch as VOA was the official voice of the United States, its mission was to acquaint foreign audiences with American views and policies. RFE, on the other hand, was to deal with internal developments in the Soviet-occupied countries. For example, the RFE Polish service was to sound like Radio Warsaw in a free Poland. The difference between VOA and RFE programs was obvious and compelling. Both stations complemented and supplemented each other with extraordinary effectiveness. As the years went by, inevitably VOA and RFE programs resembled each other more and more. In order to stay competitive to their Eastern Europe audiences, VOA programs began to deal with regional internal developments and RFE programs, with American news and policies. Analyses made over the years showed that VOA and RFE programs, while different in emphasis, were hardly distinguishable in content. It is hard to believe that in 2015, the United States will continue to fund VOA services in English and many other languages while at the same time paying for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Marti, and Radio Free Asia. It is duplicative, expensive, and even counterproductive. All of these broadcast services should be combined, so that America will speak with one voice to each country. All these programs should be placed under VOA. The only question is this: Should VOA be continued as a U.S. government institution, or should it be a grantee operation like the BBC? I would have no hesitation to continuing VOA as a governmental entity. Over almost sixty years, VOA has stood the test of pressure. In hot and cold war, during Watergate and impeachment, VOA has performed with journalistic skill and objectivity. A nongovernmental operation could not have acquitted itself more honorably. Still, there are those who maintain that journalism and civil service should not mix; that the American international radio operation should be a private corporation receiving its funds from the government; and that the employees should not be civil servants. This will work, too, as long as the organization retains the Voice of America designation, known and respected by millions of listeners overseas. (In the rare case when the U.S. government's objective is the destabilization of a foreign regime, and if in that endeavor, the administration wishes to use broadcasting as a tool, covert means should be employed, not VOA.) My prediction: In 2015, VOA will broadcast in many languages and be heard by millions of people overseas. It will be funded by the U.S. government either directly or indirectly and will be an important element in the conduct of American foreign policy. Released: July 23, 2001 New Media: How They Are Changing Diplomacy In an attempt to create a communications network that would survive a nuclear attack, the United States also has created a technology that is dissolving censorship and totalitarian control more effectively than could have been imagined a generation ago. --Adam Clayton Powell II Adam Clayton Powell III was recently named general manager of WHUT-TV at Howard University, the nation's first African-American-owned public broadcast station. He was vice president for Technology and Programs of the Freedom Forum and co-producer of the motion picture, "Keep the Faith, Baby," a biography of his father, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. In January 2000, journalists from around Europe gathered in London to discuss the role of online journalism in their countries. Late in the session, editors began to volunteer their favorite Internet-based sources of research and information. Most were predictable--the Web sites of the BBC, the Guardian, and The New York Times. A few mentioned cnn.com. No one mentioned Voice of America (VOA). But one group of editors had a different choice: the Croatians said their favorite source was the online edition of the Washington Post. The reason: they found washingtonpost.com had better coverage of the Balkans than other Web sites, and they were checking the site every day.1 Consider the implications: only six years after the start of popular adoption of the World Wide Web, editors in Zagreb and Dubrovnik were not listening to VOA or CNN but were reading the Washington Post, a local newspaper with insignificant distribution outside the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The Post is also a newspaper whose lead story that month was American football, but no matter. Editors in Croatia, or anywhere else in the world, could bookmark the Post international news section and go straight to the coverage they wanted. And as they decide which stories to play and how to play them, these editors view the Washington Post as the "voice of America." (At washingtonpost.com, readership data are proprietary, but Mark Stencel, washingtonpost.com political editor, confirmed that a substantial portion of the site's traffic is from outside the United States.) This means American diplomats in the Balkans must assume that the Post has an influence on the news background that was unthinkable even a decade ago. And it means U.S. diplomacy must be prepared to react to stories in the Post filed by its reporters in the Balkans, at NATO headquarters, at the United Nations, and in Washington. This is just an anecdote that tells a larger story. From on-the-ground experience on five continents over the past five years, it is clear that what editors are doing in Zagreb is also happening in newsrooms from Delhi to Bangkok, Dakar to Nairobi, Lima to Santiago. Following international news by going directly to the Internet editions of The New York Times is now routine. Going directly to the Web sites of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times or Miami Herald is not unusual. For regional coverage, journalists in Mexico have discovered that the Dallas Morning News devotes a great deal of effort and space to covering their country. And editors in Moscow found insights into U.S. views in the surprisingly extensive coverage of Chechnya in, of all places, the Des Moines Register--which was also a prime source of information about U.S. wheat exports to Russia. And everyone seemed to know, or at least know of, Matt Drudge's drudgereport.com. It does not take a great deal of imagination to extrapolate from year VI of the Web to Web year XX, calendar year 2015. With the large caveat that behaviors can always change, it seems clear that the Internet is enabling journalists and everyone else to bypass traditional gatekeepers of all kinds. Today, it means Russian financial journalists can get news of U.S. agriculture directly from Iowa. Tomorrow, they will be able to bypass the Register and cultivate their own sources, filing by e-mail. Consider the coverage of Al Ahram in Egypt, an influential voice in the Arab world, where stringer coverage of the United States was being phased into the newspaper during September 1998. Gamal Nkrumah, international affairs editor, described the stringer network his newspaper was assembling, covering the United States through the eyes of reporters in Brooklyn, Detroit, and other cities with large Arab-American populations.2 Nkrumah said he even had a stringer filing by e-mail from inside a federal prison in the United States, an inmate who was writing essays on Islam and U.S. politics. "We could never do this even by fax," Nkrumah said. "But by e-mail, we can cover America." And needless to say, Al Ahram's stringer network provided a very different picture of the United States from the news of CNN or The New York Times. That, in turn, means U.S. diplomacy needed to take account of the daily news Al Ahram's readers were starting to see--in 1998. This far more complex, far more transparent view of the United States is also becoming the standard for most of the world. Almost every country in the world is now connected to the Internet, so anyone online anywhere can delve into another country and find information, sources, and people of interest. At the very least, this means diplomats must also be schooled in these new tools, so they can remain current with events and trends in their regions. But diplomacy must also be reimagined in a more public context, since anyone at a public computer kiosk or an Internet café has access to information resources of unprecedented breadth and depth. And those kiosks and cafés are an important trend. Many observers argue that in much of the world the Internet reaches only elites: government officials and business leaders, university professors and students, the wealthy and the influential. If this were correct, the Net would be an important influence on diplomacy, precisely because diplomacy has historically been the province of elites. But through Net-connected elites, information from the Internet reaches radio listeners and newspaper readers around the world, so the Internet has an important secondary readership--those who hear or are influenced by online information via its shaping of more widely distributed media. But remember those kiosks: in the past few years, it is clear that Internet use has spread beyond elites. Consider the case of Peru.3 The Internet is just for Peru's elite, according to the official figures, which showed that 1 percent of the population had Internet access at home in 1999. But drive down any street in Lima and you can see another story. Block after block, in rich neighborhoods and as well as the less affluent, appear signs for "Internet Cabinas" everywhere. And some cabinas were "unofficial"--families renting out their PCs and Net connections by the hour in their homes. The reason for the spread of these homegrown kiosks was cost. The price of using a cabina for a quarter-hour of e-mail was about the same as the price of a stamp for a postcard to the United States. At prime tourist locations, cabinas sprouted almost next to each other, even in remote corners of Peru. In the old Inca capital of Cusco, population 300,000 and more than 11,000 feet up in the Andes Mountains, there are at least five Internet cabinas on the town square. Walk a block or two from the square and you can find others tucked into alleys, behind small, almost invisible signs. But in Lima, the engine of Internet growth was more visible. It was not tourists, but residents, who were fueling the growth of the Net. And the killer application was not checking your office e-mail, but chatting with relatives on other continents. And much of that chat had started to shift from text to voice-Internet telephony. Lima's Miraflores neighborhood is one of forty-two official districts in the city, each with its mayor and town hall. Just across from Miraflores's town hall, beyond the main church and John F. Kennedy Park, was a collection of small restaurants and local businesses where commuter buses converged from around the city. Look up to the second floor, where hand-painted red letters across eight windows spell "Internet." Welcome to Macrostudio, a neighborhood Internet center open twenty-four hours a day. Up from the street via a flight of spiral stairs, Macrostudio boasts two dozen PCs with Internet connections and another computer by the stairs--just for play. Over the cashier's window at the top of the stairs, prices were posted: one hour online for four soles (just over a dollar), 3 soles for a half-hour and 2 soles for fifteen minutes. But wait: There was also peak pricing: at 12:30 p.m., the price for an hour increased from 4 to 6 soles (not quite two dollars). The truly cheap prices started at 11 p.m., when access prices dropped to 3.50 soles an hour (almost exactly a dollar). If you could produce a student ID, you could get the overnight rate around the clock. And if you brought two or more friends, the group rates were even lower. Then there were frequent surfer bonuses: for every hour you are online, you received one entry for a lottery for fifty free hours. A photo of the winner of the most recent drawing was next to the cashier. By comparison, the price of a stamp for a postcard to the United States was 3 soles and to see a movie at the twelve-screen multiplex down the street from Macrostudio cost 15 soles. And this was not a cyber café. Instead of espresso, Macromedia featured techie cuisine. A vending machine sold Coke and Diet Coke, and in a country that grows 150 varieties of potatoes, the food choices were dominated by three varieties of Pringles. At midday on a Friday, just before peak pricing started, there were nine cabinas in use, most by men. Walter Merino Stapleton, the manager of Macrostudio, told me the cabinas drew equally from tourists and from local residents. Most come for e-mail, to surf the Web, and to chat with people "all over the world." And there was that other price list over the cashier's window: Internet telephone to the United States--one sol for one minute, 10 soles for fifteen minutes. For the price of three postcard stamps, you get fifteen minutes on the Internet "phone" with a relative. A fifteen-minute call to the United States from one of the many telephone booths on the street nearby cost many times Macrostudio's $3 charge. If you own your own PC, in Peru or anywhere else in the world, you can use Internet telephony almost for free. The quality has become much better, and instead of computer-to-computer "chat," the software now supports computer-to-telephone conversations. Just enter the telephone area code and phone number, and you can talk across the street or across the ocean. But few in Peru can afford to buy a PC, so the cabinas were doing a thriving business. Macrostudio used two different software packages, according to Merino, to link PC users in Lima to people all over the world in real-time voice contact. For calls to the United States, he said, www.dialpad.com seemed best. To other continents, Net2Phone was his preferred package. The tourists, most calling Europe, used Net2Phone, which had prices including 1.50 soles/minute to London, 2 soles/minute to Argentina (no one ever said the Net respected geography). Merino looked toward the back of the room, where there were two fully enclosed rooms--Net2phone booths, as it were--for those who wanted to use Internet telephony. The tourists came to call Europe, he said, but neighborhood residents came to call North America. And where were they calling? In March of last year, there were more than a million Peruvians living in the United States, estimated John Hamilton, the American ambassador to Peru. Many of Lima's eight million residents have relatives in America, said Hamilton, and they want to talk to them. Voice telephony "is driving (Internet) use," said Krishna Urs, the economic counselor at the U.S. embassy here. "It's a way of leapfrogging." And until very recently, Internet use was limited to Peru's "A" demographic, the highest of five income levels in the country, according to Urs. "People in the 'B' demographic are now using it at Internet cabinas," Urs said. But in 1999 and 2000, the cabina business exploded. Entrepreneurs created a new industry in less than two years, with Internet cabinas, "one of the fastest-growing businesses in Peru," said Rosental Calmon Alves, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies Latin American media. A family might rent out its PC by the hour, according to Professor Calmon. When there was more demand, they could buy a second or third PC, still running the cabinas from their homes. And indeed a drive around Lima found "Internet cabina" signs in some unlikely places--certainly not residential neighborhoods of Lima's "A" demographic. Prices were lower than in Miraflores: 5 soles for two hours online, lower even than Macrostudio's overnight rate, but the policy was cash only, no credit cards. Which brings us back to Macrostudio. Merino said his business, then just one year old, already faced fierce competition from a rapidly growing number of new neighborhood cabinas. Merino was correct. One of his many competitors showed us a copy purportedly of one page of the survey done by Lima authorities--the page on the Miraflores district. In a neat computer printout, it listed thirty-seven new Internet cabinas in that district. A check on five of the thirty-seven at random showed the list was accurate. One of the newest, open just three months, was around the corner on Avenida Pardo, next to a new McDonald's advertising a cone for 0.90 soles and a Mac Fiesta (looking very much like a Big Mac) for 2.50 soles. It was the high-end glitzy Studio 2K Cyber Café, whose slogan, in English, was "your interactive home." Decorated in postmodern high-tech but painted purple (think Soho meets Barney), Studio 2K was right on the street, all hard surfaces, mirrors, and a ceiling-mounted projector to show Web sites on a large screen over the bar. Upstairs was a second floor just now being expanded, with twenty-one PCs (some still in boxes) and more on the way. Clearly not competing on price, Studio 2K quoted an hourly price of 7.50 soles. But Studio 2K competed on high-end service. On Friday afternoon, young women in uniforms were showing a stream of visitors to their PCs. And as soon as a computer was free, an attendant would reset its PC to Studio 2K's slick home page (purple, of course). The cuisine was a big step up from Diet Coke and Pringles--and a big step up in prices. Sandwiches ranged from ham and cheese (5 soles, or about $1.50) to "American roast beef" (11.25 soles). There were also salads; the most expensive was "American chef salad" at 10.50 soles. The coffee menu topped off at 7 soles for an Amaretto cappuccino. But it was Macrostudio and its low-rent competitors that were driving Internet penetration into something close to a mass medium. And the impact on the information environment was already obvious. To take just one example, if the many Peruvians living in the Washington, D.C., area saw stories of special interest about Peru in the Washington Post (and there have been many), word of those stories spread quickly via the Internet to relatives living in Lima. So, in a country where the government controlled almost all broadcasting and newspapers, people could still get more independent reporting, either e-mailed from relatives or surfing on their own. The cost-effectiveness of the Internet has also led some governments to employ it for their embassies. Portuguese officials claim to have been among the early adopters of encrypted e-mail for diplomatic messages, and Lisbon's envoys around the world were advised in 1995 to scan the Internet for news from and about home. Canada and Greece were among the early adopters of another Internet technology: webcasting. In an early demonstration of radio over the Internet, Andrew Patrick of Canada's Communications Research Centre organized transmission of CBC radio news broadcasts.4 "We are a small country," he said, and this allowed Canadian embassies around the world to hear newscasts from home. Transmitting CBC newscasts over the Internet, said Patrick, cost a tiny fraction of the cost of maintaining radio transmitters powerful enough to reach Canadians around the world. But these transmissions were not restricted or encrypted. Anyone in the world could now listen to CBC domestic newscasts. In the years since those early experiments, government and private broadcasters around the world have begun to transmit their signals on the Internet. In Ghana alone, every major radio station in Accra is now available worldwide on the Internet. Whatever Ghana's government is telling its citizens can be heard by anyone, anywhere, who wants to tune in from a PC. And it means that the rest of the world can hear U.S. local radio and watch U.S. local television. In Africa, Asia, South America, or Europe, if you want to hear the voices of America, you can just as easily hear Washington's local WTOP newsradio 1500 (http://www.wtop.com/)--or Rush Limbaugh (www.rushlimbaugh.com)--as the Voice of America (www.voa.gov/). This may seem a recipe for cacophony. It certainly is a reality of decentralization and pluralism. And it may be an opportunity for democracy in general and the United States in particular to claim an edge in diplomacy and in broader public relations. In the 1950s, when Greece was teetering on the edge of communist control and crowds gathered to stone the American embassy, the United States fought back not with the Marines but with Dizzy Gillespie. The State Department-sponsored tour sent the Gillespie band (and a young manager-orchestrator named Quincy Jones) to the hot spots of the Mediterranean, and in country after country angry crowds, mostly young people, turned into crowds of young fans. Jazz trumped politics. Later it was rock music and blue jeans that became worldwide synonyms for freedom and opportunity. Millions around the world, especially young people, who had never heard of Adam Smith knew Paul Simon. Today millions around the world, especially young people, have embraced the Internet and new media. There is a case to be made that information technology is the new jazz, capturing the imagination of people on every continent. Yes, new media destroyed the news cycle. Yes, new media may have accelerated shortening attention spans and an ever-faster pace of news and information--and diplomacy. But in an attempt to create a communications network that would survive a nuclear attack, the United States has also created a technology that is dissolving censorship and totalitarian control more effectively than could have been imagined a generation ago. This means the United States, with a tradition of transparency unparalleled among the great powers, is well suited to leverage the new media tools and to survive the new media scrutiny. In an era of public diplomacy, diplomats worldwide will be obliged to work in an environment to which Americans are already accustomed. Released: July 23, 2001 1. Discussion at Freedom Forum European Center, London, January 25, 2000. Will International Broadcasting Stke a Claim on the Elcetronic Frontier? The more traditional kind of international broadcasting--government sponsored, based on an established international regulatory regime, and promoting long-term interests--will be the province of small rich countries with important international interests and a vibrant cultural life. --Robert Coonrod Robert Coonrod is president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which he joined in 1995. Before that, he served as deputy managing director of the Voice of America (VOA), the global radio and television network. He oversaw VOA, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (both Radio and TV Marti), and Worldnet Television and Film Service, as well as technical operations, programming, and budget. Coonrod joined the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1967, serving as a Foreign Service officer in Italy and Yugoslavia. He has also held senior positions in USIA's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. In its millennial edition, The New York Times said that Moore's Law would reach its theoretical limits in 2014. The same article assured us that new technologies would have replaced current ones long before then. The implication: Don't worry about scarcity or limits. Focus on abundance and speed. That report prompted thoughts of Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner was the Wisconsin-born historian who in 1893 delivered a lecture at the Columbian Exposition that has been called, "the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history." His "frontier thesis" has been hotly debated since, and the nature of that debate is relevant.1 Turner's idea was simple and revolutionary: the existence of a continuous frontier before 1890 meant that America and Americans were able "again and again" to recapitulate the developmental stages of the emerging nineteenth-century industrial order. He theorized that this experience had helped shape the American character, and that with the closing of the frontier after 1890, "the first period of American history" had closed. Turner's critics have attacked almost everything about his thesis. They say his basic assumptions were wrong. They challenge the accuracy of the historical details he cites. Most say he was flat wrong. The frontier was not the key to American history. It was other things: slavery and the Civil War, immigration, industrial capitalism. If he was so wrong-headed, why, more than a century later, does the Turner Thesis remain the subject of controversy? Gordon Moore has not (yet) been subject to such criticism and controversy. In a 1965 paper that began, "The future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself...," he predicted that computing power would rise exponentially. His time horizon was ten years. Since then, others have given his predictions the force of law, Moore's Law, and scientists now tell us that Moore's Law will not reach its theoretical limits until 2014--one year before 2015, which is the focus of this paper. What if science is right and optimism is wrong? What if there is a closing of the electronics frontier around 2015? In the late twentieth century, descriptions of a postindustrial world based on an information economy were fueled by the incredible developments in computer technology. Whether we believed the NASDAQ bubble would burst or not, we did sense something basic had changed. We got to reinvent everything every eighteen months. We talked of "Internet time." And we all agreed "strategic planning" was oxymoronic. We were exploring the electronics frontier that Moore's Law postulated. And we still are. In fact, with broadband and 3G technology, we are likely in the midst of a still confusing electronic land rush. If these trends continue, by 2015, connectivity will be ubiquitous. Not everyone will have it, but it will be everywhere. AIDS researchers in Africa will have super high-speed, broadband connections to labs and research institutions while most residents in the same community will still be awaiting electricity and access to basic hygiene. Terrorists in Sudan, while they may live in Spartan conditions, will have instant connectivity with counterparts in Afghanistan or New York. American or European travelers will be able to transact personal business from anywhere in the world. Like-minded people with religious or political agendas will also be able to be in constant touch. In the poorest countries, significant minorities will be connected. In more developed countries, it could well be significant majorities. But a connectivity gap will be there, and it won't close. We'll still have the electronic equivalent of subsistence farmers, freed slaves, disillusioned Native Americans, and recent immigrants. Will these billions of people matter? Will they matter to governments? To advertisers? Will their diseases, their poverty, or their restiveness lead to their being quarantined, either in the literal sense or electronically? Or will they wander the planet freely while the "connecteds" isolate themselves behind high walls or electronic moats, secure in the knowledge that their broadband connectivity provides them the economic, social, and cultural security they need? And who will be the 2015 equivalent of today's international broadcasters? If we think of an international broadcaster as anyone who has the wherewithal and the desire to affect the views of large numbers of people over vast geographic spaces, we think of everyone from international media conglomerates, to most governments, to evangelical religions, to Internet polemicists. The circle closes when Matt Drudge embraces Rupert Murdock. The international broadcaster of today usually has some combination of three goals: to make a lot of money; to promote a long-term interest; to advance a specific idea. By implication, and often in fact, the international broadcaster avoids any intermediary and transmits directly from the source to the intended audience/user. The technology (high-frequency [HF] broadcasts), until recently was efficient at covering large geographic areas inexpensively from a single terrestrial source, and the people in those regions could receive the transmissions on cheap, easy-to-acquire receivers. The quality of the transmissions was often poor and the propagation unreliable. In the last twenty or so years, satellites, and now the Internet, have changed the equation. We now have high-cost, high-quality, point-to-multipoint choices and moderately priced, moderate-quality, interactive, point-to-point choices. By 2015, distribution choices at various price points are likely to proliferate. The technology choices, although relatively static once the electronic frontier closes, will still be very robust. And the costs, relative to today, are likely to be significantly lower. Any institution of a certain size, and many individuals--perhaps millions--will have the wherewithal of global reach. Also, the available technologies will offer all sorts of pricing choices, with costs to users ranging from zero upward. Put another way, there will be a threshold. Most individuals and organizations will not be able to cross it, but millions will. They will be able to become what I am defining in this paper as international broadcasters: anyone who has the wherewithal and the desire to affect the views of large numbers of people over vast geographic spaces. So much for the wherewithal. What about the desire? Who will have it? Whose views will they want to affect? In what parts of the world? Governments have been in the international broadcasting business since the 1930s, at least. Religious groups have been involved nearly as long. There were a few commercial HF broadcasters, but with the advent of satellites and pay services, there has been an explosion of commercial international broadcasting. In addition to the direct services, there are international syndication services. Most government broadcasters now have them. They depend on an intermediary to deliver the programs, but their purpose is similar to those of traditional government broadcasting. International syndication services are generally noncommercial and free of charge. Commercial suppliers are heavily engaged in this business, both over the air and on cable. In terms of reach, audience, and revenues, they compete well with the direct satellite services. They are almost always advertiser-supported, and most have subscription fees. Their targets are audiences who have money to spend. Because the program suppliers own much of the content they distribute and are able to revert it, these services can be very profitable even when the audience in a given country or area is only a small proportion of the overall population. The wild card is the Internet. Everyone is trying it out. Unlike the more traditional services, its cost of entry is very low. But the cost of success can be exorbitant. Individuals can effectively become international broadcasters today--provided they can support the cost of success. On the Internet, each new "audience member" is an added cost, and subscription and advertiser-supported models have yet to prove themselves. Is it likely that in 2015, the same kinds of players will engage in the same kinds of activities? Will their focus or aims change? Will there likely be new players, with new aims? Let's look at the commercial players first. Their decisions will be important economically and culturally. Their decisions will reflect the pace of "globalization" or perhaps the backlash to it. They will indicate both where we've come from and where we are heading. The changes could be dramatic, and the drama--given the commercial interests involved--will be played out in public, in the popular media, the trade press, and in international regulatory bodies. There will be economic winners and losers. We will all know who they are. There will be cultural and social implications. Their impact and effect will be the subject of public debate. It will all be interesting, often confusing, and the intricacies will always be complex. For example, interactive media may proliferate, or they may not. We may never know precisely why. But we will know who the important economic players were, which way they bet, and who won and who lost. Intellectuals and pundits will debate the meaning of it all, and if media consolidation continues, they will continue to express disquiet about control of the means of distribution, the monopolistic practices of media giants, and the seeming inability of the Internet to offer a genuine democratic alternative. Whether these views have an impact on the broader public, however, will be as much a factor of public interest as of monopoly control of the media. In many ways, the debate could be resonant of the early twentieth-century debate about the monopolistic practices of industrial giants, with commercial players who are active globally. The noncommercial players will probably get less attention, but their influence could be just as significant. Imagine Mao's cultural revolution or Khomeni's Islamic revolution in this electronic environment. As their legitimacy erodes, governments become vulnerable to swings in mass opinion. Whether their goal is "people power" or wholesale ethnic massacre, those who manipulate mass opinion effectively have enormous power to effect change. Milosevic stands trial today for war crimes not because he committed specific heinous acts but because he was able effectively to manipulate Serb mass opinion. He stood on a field in Kosovo 600 years after a battle had taken place there. He manipulated the collective Serb memory of that battle to galvanize a population. Over the next several years, that Serb population committed or condoned actions and atrocities that required seventy-eight days of intense NATO bombing to bring to an end. It seems obvious that countries, groups or individuals seeking to destabilize or undermine established authority or institutions will still want to be international broadcasters in 2015. I'll call them the "bad guys." What about the "good guys"? The "good guys" seek peaceful change, stable economies, the rule of law. Will the costs, the uncertainty about which technologies will prevail, the lack of any actual crisis that grips public opinion, or a loss of trust in the political leadership of the "good guy" nations lead to an erosion of support for "good guy" international broadcasting? We could find a world of commercial international broadcasters targeting affluent publics and "bad guy" broadcasters targeting the disaffected masses. The BBC World Service is getting out of the international broadcasting game to North America and English-speaking Oceania. Instead, it offers syndicated placement services on local radio stations. In the United States, such stations are noncommercial public radio stations. The BBC cites cost as the reason. The change will save 500,000 pounds annually, it says. It is doing this at a time when sales of world-band radios in the United States are growing rapidly. The BBC made this decision in the face of evidence that public interest in its World Service broadcasts in English is growing. The savings, under a million dollars, are less than 1 percent of the World Service budget. The syndication service in the United States, which is essentially a news magazine show, is designed to attract commercial underwriting. This is an anecdote, not a trend. Perhaps we can't infer much from it. But if we look behind the decision and look at reaction to the decision, we may get some insight into what the trend might be. The BBC says it is still interested in audiences in North America and Oceania. It just doesn't want to spend real money to reach them. These are rich areas. Their local media are robust. While there are no formal barriers to access, the practical ones are formidable. It would take considerable time, money, and talent to break through. The BBC made a pragmatic decision. The status quo was not effective, and it was not worth the effort to try to improve upon it. The best alternative was to find a low-cost option that minimized adverse political and popular reaction. The BBC made a good business decision. The press reaction demonstrates it. In the United States and the U.K., press reaction was muted. It got nothing like the level of coverage an average business decision by Rupert Murdock or Vivendi might receive. By the criteria we might use to judge commercial international broadcasters, the BBC made a good decision. Its reasons were sound, and they were, at least tacitly, endorsed by the British Foreign Office and the Blair Government. If a government broadcaster adopts the rationale of a commercial broadcaster, we can reasonably surmise that the commercial rationale it adopts will replace the traditional norms governments have used to determine their level of support for international broadcasting. Commercially oriented norms are likely to be situational and tactical, more like those we associate with U.S. government efforts to establish new surrogate broadcast services. They are certainly valid norms, but they are different. They have more in common with those used to assess low-intensity conflict situations than they do with broad strategic questions. "How do we offer low-risk, low-cost support to Saddam's opposition?" is a critical question. It differs significantly, however, from "How do we put in place a global strategy to counter the Soviet threat?" In one sense, we have made real progress. In another, it sets up an imbalance that we will need to ponder. In developed areas and among the rich, we are likely to see robust, transnational commercial activity on all media platforms. The second or third generation Internet is likely to be a significant communications tool everywhere. Religious groups, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), terrorists, and ideologues will all use it, as will governments. The patterns in different parts of the world will differ, however. In Asia, particularly China and India, there will be large intracountry systems. They will be inexpensive to use, fairly robust, and easily susceptible to government manipulation and control. In Africa, on the other hand, we are likely to see patterns similar to the airline patterns of today. An exchange of e-mail within the same city might well pass through servers in Europe or the United States. The service will be expensive but more difficult for local governments to manipulate. The more traditional kind of international broadcasting--government-sponsored, based on an established international regulatory regime, and promoting long-term interests--will be the province of small rich countries with important international interests and a vibrant cultural life. Iceland and the Netherlands come to mind. For the countries that have been major international broadcasters, telecommunications, in whatever form, will just become another tool to employ when and where necessary. The Internet will be a common platform. In the less developed world, foreign language broadcasts of the Voice of America, for example, will no longer be thought of as an effective way to project American society and interests. They will be seen, rather, as the means to counter specific challenges or threats. Radio or, better, audio services will still dominate. Given the cost and the vulnerability of video services, most governments will be reluctant to make investments of the scope and scale commercial suppliers will be making in Europe, the developed parts of Asia and Latin America, and North America. That is what is likely to happen if science is right and optimists are wrong. Of course, if the optimists are right, new scientific plasma-based or biological electronics breakthroughs will push the limits of Moore's Law well into the twenty-first century. These last thirty-five years will be just the first chapter of a compelling science fiction novel, the plot line and conclusion of which are far from clear. The electronics frontier is not a physical frontier, but the real stimuli of electronic innovation may be just as debatable as the real contributors to nineteenth-century industrial innovation were. Moore's Law may yet stimulate as much debate as the Turner thesis. If so, there is no way to project what international broadcasters might be doing in 2015, though it will be reasonable to project that everyone would be an international broadcaster. Released: July 23, 2001 1. See: http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/turner.htm. This report is the second of three in a special series published by the United States Institute of Peace's Virtual Diplomacy Initiative. The series, entitled "Net Diplomacy: Toward the Year 2015," was originally published July 23, 2001, by the online magazine iMP: The Magazine on Information Impacts, http://www.cisp.org/imp/, a publication of the Center for Information Strategy and Policy (CISP) and of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Guest editor Barry Fulton invited authors to speculate on the state of diplomacy in 2015. What turned out to be the final edition of iMP for the foreseeable future became an opportunity to print and circulate its contents to the Virtual Diplomacy Series' audiences. We are grateful to Amy Friedlander, editor of iMP, who edited the original online version, to all of the authors, and especially to Barry Fulton who agreed to reassume the duties of guest editor for the Virtual Diplomacy Series production. Barry Fulton is a research professor at George Washington University and director of the Public Diplomacy Institute. He retired from the Foreign Service as a minister-counselor after a thirty-year career with the United States Information Agency. He joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1997 and directed the CSIS study "Reinventing Diplomacy in the Information Age." The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policies. Home | Jobs | FAQs | Contact Us | Directions | Privacy Policy | Site Map United States Institute of Peace -- 1200 17th Street NW -- Washington, DC 20036
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