One of the minor irritations which never fail to provoke a (silent) reaction in me is the growing number of people who walk along with a mobile phone held to the ear, engaged in animated conversation, oblivious of fellow pedestrians. The conversations, which it is virtually impossible not to hear, usually seem to be notable for their triviality and banality.
This of course may seem to demonstrate that I am a Luddite, out of touch with the real world. I can understand that reaction, but I really do not think it is true. My dislike is not of modern methods of communication — quite the reverse — but of much of what is communicated. Twaddle is still twaddle even when the means of uttering it are in the van of technological progress.
I confess that these remarks are somewhat flippant, but the communication developments that I have been thinking a great deal about are far from flippant. To the contrary, they raise major issues.
Essentially, these can be summed up quite simply: instant, or virtually instant, means of communication provide an important access to power. We saw this during the recent riots in London and other cities. The small number of people wanting to encourage others to engage in rioting and looting were able to use modern digital technology to organise instantaneous actions in a way that would have been inconceivable only a few decades ago. In effect, as Emma Duncan pointed out in an article in The Times , digital communications have “shifted the balance of power permanently away from the authorities to the street”.
Going digital
The use of digital technology in the riots is of course only one aspect of the effect of the dramatic developments in communications technology in recent years. Let me draw on personal experience to illustrate the point.
Half a century ago, I as a journalist was covering Africa for The Times . E-mails did not exist. Nor did mobile phones. All the articles and reports which I sent to the paper had to be typed (with a portable typewriter) and taken to a cable office to be sent by cable, or dictated by landline telephone to foreign news shorthand writers in the office. (That was usually a worse alternative, because of the poor quality of the telephone service in many of the countries that I visited.)
One consequence of these methods, which seem antediluvian from today's perspective, was that a great deal of time and effort had to be devoted to the business of sending information, which, in an ideal world, would have been better devoted to finding it. We did not, of course, think of it like that, because there was no realistic alternative to the way we did things.
To say that the changes have been dramatic is a truism. The effects have been equally dramatic. Events are now universally known pretty well as they happen. Reporting major events, such as the revolution in Libya (and equally the riots in the United Kingdom), cannot be done in the same way as it used to be. Tomorrow's newspaper, to take an obvious example, cannot compete with television, or digital media generally, in telling people what has happened. What it can do, and indeed has to do, is to provide well informed interpretation of what has happened.
Unusual number
In attempting to illustrate the way in which communication has changed I have looked back half a century. To put the changes even more fully in context, it is worth going even further back. Again, I shall draw on my own experience. I was brought up in a small town on the south coast of England. My family was unusual in having a telephone. An indication of how unusual this was is provided by the fact that our telephone number (which I still remember) was just three figures: New Milton 522. Calls were not automatic, but were made by speaking to a telephone operator.
In fact, the development of telephone networks was remarkably slow until well into the 20th century. I relish a story — almost certainly alas apocryphal — of a mayor of New York who, when someone briefed him about this new invention, the telephone, remarked that he could foresee a time when there would be one in every major city.
To return to my assertion that I am certainly no Luddite, I suggest that we need to recognise that the continuing major developments in communications technology carry with them major, and continuing, changes in the balance of power.
Bill Kirkman is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, UK. Email him at: bill.kirkman@gmail.com
