In the past decade, with the advent of the portable satellite transmitter, media guru Marshall McLuhan's old prophecy of a video-linked global village has become a daily reality in ways that would have astounded McLuhan himself.
I've known this reality at an intellectual level for a long time, but it officially hit home on that Friday night in 1989 when CBS interrupted the season-ending episode of Dallas and cut live to Peking where Dan Rather was in a bunker-like studio hallway arguing with some Chinese bureaucrats who'd come to pull his plug before the shooting started. The bureaucrats won that battle, but they still couldn't hide the massacre that ensued at Tiananmen Square.
The immediacy of a live broadcast like that is what television is made for. America first began to realize this during the weekend after the assassination of President Kennedy, when all three networks went wall-to-wall and America experienced itself as a national community -- in this case a community of grief -- with a new depth and implied kinship.
What changed with the new technology was that TV's live, on-the-scene approach to covering events went global. As a result, since the mid-1980s we've witnessed, live in our living rooms, the People Power revolution in the Philippines; the invasion of Panama; the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the war against Iraq; and, most recently, the attempted coup in the Soviet Union.
Each of these events, in turn, has grabbed the spotlight in a downright faddish fashion, like a really good global mini-series. For a week or so, people talk of little else. Daily life (paced as it is by our TV-viewing habits) is disrupted. We feel, however vicariously, that we are living on the world stage and are somehow a part of dramatic world events.
It's a thrilling process, as we all know by now. It is also, I think, a very positive and at least potentially constructive one. Life in this global video village could, and I'd say does, foster a new sense of international solidarity among the peoples of the world which should lead to a new sense of international accountability among their politicians. This kind of solidarity and accountability is a key building block for a truly new world order founded upon respect for a universal standard of human rights and mutual non-aggression.
SOME DRAWBACKS TO this live new world of ours exist, however. For instance, the fickleness of the global village viewer makes for a thin-skinned solidarity. Reciting the litany of late-'80s to early-'90s world media events probably reminds us of how quickly those events entered, shook, and flitted out of our respective consciousnesses. If an irresolvable crisis drags on for too long and gets boring (like, say, the ethnic mess all over the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe), it drops off the screen.
Simple observation should also tell us that reliance on live, instant coverage for our knowledge of events in other countries leads to an ironclad tyranny of English-speakers. The voices we hear speaking for the reality of another nation's life will never necessarily be the best informed or the most authentic. They will be the voices nearest the microphone who have the best English.
The tyranny of the English-speaking is also symptomatic of the total lack of cultural context and historical background that live television brings to events. The average viewer could be forgiven if, in the more than six months of watching the drama of buildup to the big bang in the Persian Gulf, she or he never quite got the picture of how or when Kuwait came to be an entity separate from Iraq. Jane or John Q. may have not even caught a glimmer of how that tiny family fiefdom was governed in its glory days.
Those historical facts were a vital part of what the war was about. Electronic gizmos that see in the dark were not. But guess which got more airtime.
In addition, live TV is tied to its pictures like a ball and chain. That's why the satellite technology exists, to pump exciting visual images of faraway events into our homes and thus deliver us to the advertisers. Analysis and investigation, always scarce in the electronic media, will probably therefore disappear completely.
This problem is exacerbated by The Big Three's cost-cutting disinvestment in the news business. It's a lot cheaper to turn on a camera and hook up a dish than it is to field a competent staff of researchers. And these days the network news teams almost always do what's cheapest.
As a result we get situations like the one in Romania where, a couple of years ago, we all watched what we thought was a genuine peoples' revolution. But it turned out to be little more than a carefully staged, and deliberately televised, coup by a disgruntled faction of the Communist Old Guard. The Romanian people sincerely fought for democracy. But they, and we, were duped. And our free media could not tell us, or them, anything about what was really going on. As events in the old USSR wear on, we may well find that the attempted coup, and the resistance to it, were also part of some shell game orchestrated by the power players behind the scenes.
With the rapid development of the CNN-CSPAN broadcast news ethos, the day of the pontificating talking head is virtually over. But things could be worse.
No analysis or context for world events is better than a patently false one, which is what the official sages of McKoppel-Lehrer Land usually spew. If this is going to be an age of raw data and unexplained information, then dissidents of the world should welcome it and take up the challenge it brings for us to help supply the grassroots viewing public with the conceptual tools they'll need to make their own sense of the world. That challenge, I'll wager, will be the organizer's task in the 21st century, which, as you may have noticed, is almost now.
Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.
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