by Daniel Bell
The global economy is vastly different. It means a single economy for goods and services, the unification of capital and currency markets, die equalization of commodity markets, and the growth of what I have called “distributed manufacturing” in production. The international economy still exists, of course. Large countries, even multinationals, are still located primarily in one country and are counted on as the bastion of that nation’s economy, though they sell around the world. But increasingly they are drawn, inexorably, into the global economy. Shell (in oil), Unilever (in foods and fats), and N. V Phillips (in electronics) are Dutch and to some extent English. Ciba-Geigy (drugs) and Nesde (foods) are Swiss, yet more of their production and sales are around the world. Toyota and Nissan, Sony and Matsushista are Japanese but are being drawn, inexorably, into the global economy for sales and now production.
The most decisive change is in the capital and currency markets. There are few borders. Capital goes (if there is political stability) where there is the greatest return on investment or the greatest value added or flees when there is trouble. Currency rates (except for small differences in arbitrage) are equal in all the money markets of the world. Increasingly each country begins to lose more and more control over its national currencies, and exchange rates are dictated less by purchasing-power parities than by the volatility of currency speculation, which is driven by the desire to hedge or to speculate on changing exchange rates. Bank transactions are almost instantaneous. Less than twenty-four hours after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Kuwaiti banks were able to shift most of their capital abroad. Networks and information become the conduits and arbiters of the global capital and currency markets. These new geographies of centrality bind the major international financial business centers: New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, and in the widening circle, Sao Paulo and Mexico City in Latin America and Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing in Asia.
We find, thus, the “globalization” of capital, currency, commodities, and, increasingly, production. Will we have a “global society?” Most of the tastes of the world, for clothing styles and entertainment, have been shaped by television. Until recently, television in many countries was under the control of state-run monopolies, as in Britain, France, Italy, and Japan. Now all these monopolies have been broken. Not only do we have independent companies but, increasingly, global television such as CNN or the satellite systems of Rupert Alurdoch and others. The crucial sociological question is whether we still may have “national” cultures that set off countries from one another. The distinction between “high culture” and “low culture” has been disappearing. English is becoming a predominant international language. Will we have national differences or common social patterns in sport and leisure activities? Baseball, golf, and skiing are common international activities. Soccer is beginning to catch on in Japan and even somewhat in the United States. Tastes in food and clothing have gone global. In my home town of Cambridge, Massachusetts (with a population of 90,000 persons), we have Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, Tex-Mex, Brazilian, Peruvian, French, Italian, Russian, Mddle East, and Jewish restaurants, let alone, of course, those that serve steak and seafood.
Entertainment has become global. The American television series Dallas was popular in almost every country in the world except Japan, perhaps because Japanese businessmen behave somewhat differently. India produces more movies than any country in the world, but those are adapted to local and rural tastes. With the rapid growth of an Indian middle class, will India join the global society?
All of these developments raise serious questions for culture and national lifestyles. The usual fear is that of an homogenization or flattening of local cultures. But that may be too simple a thought. Where there is a strong traditional culture, reinforced by religious theocracy (as in Islam or orthodox Judaism), cultural conflicts may be quite sharp. In other instances of a diverse society, as in the United States, we see a greater mingling of culture (as in the arts, music, and cuisine). For some societies, as with Japan and India, one sees the rise of a greater cosmopolitanism, especially among the educated classes and the intellectuals. Cultures are rooted in history and language, and the defense of cultures come with the respect for history and the suppleness of language. Clearly there are no single answers as we enter the information age.24
VI
ENTERING THE INFORMATION AGE
As we come to the end of the twentieth century, we may be entering the “information age.” The term seems to announce something radically new. Not completely. Human beings have always communicated with one another, from the first primitive smoke signals to tom-tom beats to semaphore flags to die electrical codes of telegraph and telephone that began a hundred years ago. Each of these innovations precipitated new conceptions of space and time, binding together nations and peoples in new cooperative and, often perhaps, conflictual ways. What is different now is that the new information age is founded not on a mechanical technology but on an intellectual technology and that the new conceptions of time and space transcend the boundaries of geography (is there any portion of the world that is now exempt from some searching voice or image?) and take place in “real time,” making the phrase “virtual reality” seem like a truism rather than a trendy slogan.
Much of our attention focuses on things, but the beginnings lie with the conversion of theoretical knowledge to basic practicality. Charles Babbage, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University in England, in the mid-nineteenth century built the first calculating machine, a mechanical abacus. The electronic calculator, created by Aiken at Harvard and Eckert and Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania, used light switches as conducting devices that pulsed currents on and off to make calculations. But that device—and all modern computers—work on a binary principle and on binary mathematics. Our conventional mathematics is based on the decimal (or units of ten) coming from the Latin deci, meaning ten. But the binary principle of 1/0 derives from Boolean algebra, the system of symbolic logic invented by George Boole, a nineteenth-century English mathematician and logician. His system was the basis for the millions of strings of 1/0 pulses that are converted into the operating codes of the computer. Vacuum tubes were replaced by the transistor, a semi-conducting device that derives from the solid-state physics developed by Niels Bohr, who made a model of the atom, and by Felix Bloch, the German refugee physicist at Stanford who described the way energy levels arise in quantum states when a gas condenses into a solid.
But messages are delivered through a medium. And again a theoretical work provided the gateway for modern telecommunications systems. This was the theorem of Claude Shannon at MIT, who computed the ultimate transmission capacity of a communications channel in terms of both its bandwidth (there are different bandwidths for telephone, radio, television, and cable) and the ratio of signal to noise (that is, of a clear message to the space between signals, or to a disturbance) so that one can calculate the number of “bytes,” or units of a message, that can be sent within a specific period of time. In that way we know the capacities of different transmission systems.
The next step was the “unification” of the different transmission systems—voice, text, image, and data—within a single channel. Voice, over a telephone line, is an “analog” signal, because sound is a wave. Images as on television or text as on facsimile or data as on a computer are all “digital,” that is, they are pulses of discrete units. The basic technological change in communication is the conversion of analog signals into digital pulses so as to make them compatible with one another and send these on a common channel. (The case is similar for music or sound recordings; the analog “wave” signals are digitized, which gives them a greater degree of precision under the control of the sound engineer.)
And finally, we have the microprocessor. Just as motors are the driving force for all machines of the industrial age, so the microprocessor is the control device for the post-industrial or information age.
The microprocessor, now miniaturized, is the heart of all calculating, control, and memory devices we have. Microprocessors store millions of bits of information on disks, retrieve these by rapid access for users, control the operations of motors and machines, and act as the switching devices for all communication.
The twentieth century has been crossed by two axes—transportation and communication. Transportation has allowed for the greater dispersion of individuals and goods. Tnicks move goods along highways to railroads and ports and airports. Automobiles, buses, trains, and planes allow for the dispersion of habitat. Improved transportation has led to the development of the suburbs, where the majority of Americans now live. Airplanes, first propeller-driven and then jets, cross continents and oceans in five to fifteen hours. Subsonic and sonic jets such as the Concorde cross the Atlantic Ocean in three hours.
Modern communication systems have also “shortened” distances. Short-wave radio allows an individual to listen to anyone broadcasting from any point on the globe. Motion pictures provide the basis for a common culture. Television, for the first time, created what the Greeks once called the great oekumene, a single common community, or what Marshall McLuhan, the media futurist, called “the global village.” Most news today is transmitted visually in “real time,” whether the Gulf War in Iraq or the poison gas attack in the Tokyo subways or the terrorist war in Bosnia. Images are transmitted by microwave, coaxial cable, even telephone wires, and increasingly by satellites.
But a “qualitative change” has come with the new infrastructure of post-industrial society. These are cable, broadband, digital TV, optical fiber conduits, facsimile, e-mail (electronic mail), ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network, which combines data, text, voice, sound, and image dirough single channels),25 and, most extraordinary, the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Internet has grown at a rate that is unprecedented in the history of communications. No previous telecommunication advance has penetrated the public consciousness and secured public adoption so quickly.
The Internet was born twenty or so years ago with the effort of the U.S. Defense Department to link military research through an interactive network called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). To send a message on the network, the computer had to put its data in a packet called an Internet Protocol (IP). Thus computer operators, not the network, were given the responsibility of ensuring the communication—in short, every computer could “talk” to any other computer. At about the same time, local area networks (LANs) were developed, and networking among local desktop workstations began. Rather than connect their computers to a large mainframe time-sharing computer, firms and organizations now connected their entire local area network to the ARPANET. Thus networking expanded to business firms.
The next steps came when the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) created five supercomputer centers at major universities; up to that time the world’s fastest computers had been available only to weapons developers. Beginning with these five centers, the NSF then decided to build its own network. In November 1991, Congress passed a bill, introduced by Senator Al Gore, creating the National Research and Education Network (NREN) to expand networking to all educational and scientific institutions—not only to tie together these centers but to allow anyone within a university to link up with the centers at any other university (like spokes in a wheel)—and thus enlarge the network enormously. What is important is that NREN is an inter-network of autonomous logical networks, not a single centrally managed system, and thus it has the flexibility to develop and extend in accordance with user needs. In effect, through the NSF there arose, through campus connections, university educational access, so that everyone attending a four-year college could become an Internet user.
But—and this is the crucial fact—the Internet was only for text, to allow researchers to work cooperatively on-line in doing their experiments (and in many instances there might be forty or more persons on-line exchanging information or extending their experiments). In October, 1994, the Netscape Company in California introduced the “browser,” a software program that both made it easy for everyone with a computer to gain access to the Internet and also added sound and image to the program.26
The logical next steps were to bring the Internet directly into the home, and this was done by commercial organizations such as America Online, which, for a monthly fee, would hook any computer into the Internet by providing server and browser software. Today the Internet connects probably 30 million computers, tens of millions of users. At the current rate of growth, the Internet may connect 100 million computers by the end of the century.
The Internet itself is a conduit, a packet-switching network along which messages are sent.27 The Web site is a location or address of an organization or individual; sites now number in the tens of thousands. These sites, or “home pages,” provide information on products, additional material from a newspaper or magazine or television station (today almost every major newspaper, periodical, business magazine, and television station has its own Web site), updated data on government activities (as well as historical data from government files), complete library catalogs—all of which can be “downloaded” by users onto their own computers and then printed out, if so desired, onto paper.
An individual “surfing” the Internet can be overwhelmed by this avalanche. In consequence, various information services have arisen as “search engines” to allow a user to locate what he or she may need.28 A major “portal” named Yahoo estimates that the Web currently contains 30 to 50 million pages of information, or 200 to 300 gigabytes of text.29
The Internet and the new communications infrastructure differ radically from infrastructures of the previous decade: They were primarily for business transactions; the new system brings in the ordinary citizen as a user and consumer. The new communications infrastructure emphasizes interaction and participation and extends the medium enormously with its hundreds of millions of interconnections. The Internet multiplies the circulation of news and gossip and rumor, thus emphasizing novelty and scandal. It provides enormous access to the cultural resources of humankind in a way never known before. It multiplies the number of affinity groups—people with like-minded interests and common professions—across national boundaries. It changes the nature of the “gatekeepers,” the ones who determine or shape the tastes of those within a like-minded circle, who influence the acceptance or rejection of new styles, products, entertainment, and so on.30
The distinctive fact is that these new interactions are social networks, and one of the consequences of these networks is an increase in the importance of social capital and social influence. The term “social capital” is one that sociologists in recent years have been exploring intensively. Physical capital is the control of goods and resources, financial capital the command of money, human capital the acquisition of new skills and knowledge through education. Social capital is the awareness of new opportunities and possibilities for advancement through new information and, most important, by acquiring connections. (One of the problems of the Black community in the United States, researchers have found, is a lack of social capital and thus greater degrees of exclusion from social mobility in the society.)
Two crucial points, however, need to be noted. One is that the Internet, while spanning the world, is limited, actually, to those countries and areas that have a supporting infrastructure, essentially a modern telephone system. In almost all of Africa and other parts of the so-called Third World, as well as major sections of Eastern Europe and Siberia, the state-of-the-art phone systems are few or nonexistent. And even when many of these countries are on the Internet, only a few sites are usually available, either in government offices or a major technical university.
The second point is that at this time, the Internet as a medium is separate from television and telephone systems. But already in the United States, cable companies with broadband capacity are beginning to offer entry into the Internet through television sets. But thes
e sets only display information and images; they are not an interactive medium. Yet integration of the various media is a technological and commercial project on the minds of many companies, and the competition of different kinds of companies—computer, software, cable, and entertainment—may lead to various alliances and mergers as the possibilities of integration move from the horizon to practicality.
The Internet, as one can see from numerous examples, is transforming journalism, politics, and commerce. When the 450-page Starr report proposing impeachment of President Clinton was issued, it was released simultaneously on the Internet and to the print media. On the Internet six million “hits” were made by millions of persons who watched the report scrolling over the glass screen; the report could be rolled back to any page or location if a reader wanted to recall any items, especially the prurient ones. In 1977, when the NASA Pathfinder mission to Mars landed its six-wheeled vehicle smaller than a beer cooler, called Sojourner, it trundled about the surface of the planet in view of onlookers around the world. Over the year, the Pathfinder Web site logged one billion hits worldwide.
As an information resource, the Internet is becoming a working tool for anyone who needs to retrieve the most arcane information. The Library of Congress now records approximately one million hits every working day of the year. By the year 2000, the Library of Congress expects to have about five million American history items, from collections all over the country, available on-line and on CD-ROMs for schools and libraries all over the country. The British Library, in its new building at Euston in London, has an exhibition called Turning the Pages, in which an onlooker can read a complete Leonardo da Vinci notebook, putting hands on a special computer screen that flips from one page to another, magnifies and explains key passages, and even shows what the pages would look like if they were written the right way around rather than in Leonardo’s trademark mirror writing. A free directory called PubList, listing more than 150,000 printed periodicals, went on the World Wide Web in August 1998; it brings together the listings from the standard periodical directories to be found in die reference rooms of all major libraries. Entries in the new directory can be searched or browsed. Each one includes a description of the publication, its frequency, the name and address of the publisher, its price, its international standard serial number and, if available, its address on the Web.
