SATELLITES AS WORLDWIDE CHANGE AGENTS Based on Joseph N Pelton’s paper published in Daya K Thussu book

Delivered to II MA Mass Communication students on 25 Sep 2015

TIME AND SPACE ABOLISHEDThe medium is the message means . …' that a totally new environment has been created‘. We have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both

space and time as far as our planet is concerned'

Marshall McLuhan (1966, pp. ix, 19)

COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES HAVE REDEFINED OUR WORLD

Satellites, for better or worse, have made our world global, interconnected, and interdependent'

Worldwide access to rapid telecommunications networks via satellites and cables now creates widespread Internet links, enables instantaneous news coverage, facilitates global culture and conflict, and stimulates the formation of true planetary market.

TREATY OF WESTPHALIA – THE ORIGIN OF NATION STATE Ever since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the

world has been defined by what is called nation state

Under the Wesphalian system as it has become known, the established authority of a state was responsible for internal laws, national subjects, national punishment, and even defined national religious beliefs. No man is an Island, but under international law countries were supposed to be.

INTELSAT 1As Fernaud Braudel has explained in the massive

trilogy on life up through the 18th century, institutional structure is key to the advance of civilization .

Until the 1950s, nations or national empires such as those of Britain and France were amazingly well self contained. Admiral Perry may have opened up Japan, and Europe may be becoming a community of nations, but prior to 1965, the date when Early Bird, or INTELSAT 1, became operational – overseas communications were incredibly limited and expensive.

INTELSAT 1 (EARLY BIRD)

MORE CHANGE EXPERIENCED IN THE LAST 60 YEARSInternational commerce was quire sparse. And

multinational corporations were only just beginning to emerge.

 The world has certainly experienced more change

on its economic, cultural, social, scientific and political systems in the last 60 years than at any time in history.

SHRINKING WORLD When one considers that the value of global

electronic fund transfers in 2002 were about $300 trillion and ran at over $1 trillion per day for 2003, it is hard to deny that the world today is dramatically different than only two generations ago.

In short, this is not an easy time for world shrunk by technology and yet fractured by fundamental religious beliefs and terrorism.

EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL ENTERTAINMENT AND NEWS Some would say that the _____ attacks on September 11 2001, and the US response to world politic. Yet the rise of the world corporation, the emergence of global entertainment and news, and the pervasive reach of modern telecommunications and information networks gave rise to fundamental shifts in the world community decades before the Al Qaida attacks on World Trade Centre buildings and the Pentagon.

GLOBAL TRANSACTIONS Over the past decade, space activities have

contributed nearly $ 1 trillion to the global economy.

World’s hundreds of trillions of dollars in electronic funds transfer as reported by the World Bank for 2003, went via saltellite. This stunning amount represents a figure that is more than four times the global GNP for all countries of the world -- nearly a $100 trillion.

A NIAGARA OF INFORMATION Satellites now beam down to us 24 hours a day, 7

days a week – a Niagara of information, entertainment, and business transactions. This massive dump of data is now accomplished by means of over 12,000 satellite video channels, produced not only in Hollywood, but in Bolloywood, India.

An evangelist or a pornographer can reach a billion people “live via satellites”.

THE ULTIMATE FORCE OF CHANGE No other technology interconnects the world so

incredibly well and reaches so many remote locations.

The futurist James Naisbitt (1980) in his book Megatrends, suggested that satellite communications, by making modern electronic media “omnipresent” and “instantaneously accessible”, was creating the “ultimate force of change”, in modern times. In short, Naibitt, argued that satellite systems were creating the global village not TV by itself.

EARLY COMMUNICATION SATELLITESHuman civilization has changed in significant ways from the days when we attempted to launch the first tiny artificial communication satellites in early 1990s. The first steps came quickly with the launch of

Score (1958)Courier (1960) Telstar (1962), Relay (1962), Syncom (1063) and (Spring 1965) world’s first commercial communications satellite

Today’s largest and most powerful satellites are some 10,000 times more capable than the first small satellites of the mid 1960s in terms of performance and lifetime.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD An abundance of rapid information overloads our sensory systems and compete attention.

The 1960 Olympics in Mexico city was in the first true international electronic emdia event.

The Apollo Moon Landing in the middle of 1969 became the world’s first truly global event.

Over a half billion people watched “live” what had seemed pure science fiction only a decades before.

1 BILLION +By the time of the Montreal Summer Olympics in 1972, satellite technology had made possible a global audience of over 1 billion.

By the end of 1970s, they were commonplace occurences, and the phrase “live via satellite’. Which once inspired a sense of awe, began to disappear from TV screens as irrelevant information.

Global interconnectivity is certainly one of the most fundamental shifts that now separate us from our past history.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS TRANSMISSION LIVESubmarine cables and fibre optic networks have served to integrate the most economically advanced countries together, but they have not been at the core of creating true global interconnectivity. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Sidney Pike of CNN almost single handedly brought satellite TV to scores of countries that had never seen international news transmission before. Today, satellite systems such as Intelsat, Panamsat, SES Astra, Eutelsat, Asiasat and nearly 100 other space networks provide literally thousands of international connecting links between the countries of the world.

POPULATION GROWTH VS INFORMATION GROWTHIn face if we look at the 5 million year history of mankind and proto humans as being represented by a 10,000 story building that is 20 miles high, we find that the last 40 years (the time that we have had broadband global communication capability via satellites) represent only a matter of some inches of space on the top floor of this imaginary mega structure.

More simply, we can say that the generation of global information is growing at least some 2,00,000 times faster than our global population.

WORLDWIDE MIND The satellite, other wireless systems, and fibre communications networks will not only assist in creating the oft quoted “Global Village”, but will soon start to fashion what might be called a “Worldwide Mind”. Marshall McLuhan, Fernand Braudel and other taught us to analyse the relationship among communications, technology and political history. They and others such a sGeorg hegel, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Victor Ferkiss, and Norbert Weiner, from widely different perspectives, examined how technology has reshaped modern life.

INFORMATION NETWORKSToday, people in developed countries and a growing umber of those in developing countries can quickly connect to tens of thousands of “information networks” to learn about virtually any conceivable subject or watch any form of entertainment or amusement. Censorship will have become obsolete.

INTELSAT’S PROJECT SHARE There is only one evil, ignorance, and only one good, knowledge. From this perspective, satellites represent knowledge. When we at Intelsat began Project Share (Satellites for Health and Rural Education) in the mid 1980s, we did not know what to expect.

Little did we realize that the Chinese National TV University experiment that we started with several dozens small earth terminals would mushroom into a vast educational enterprise operating in over 90,000 remote locations and supporting over 5 million students in rural China.

TELE-POWER, TELE-SHOCK Technology provides a powerful duality. Its positive impacts could be called tele-power, on the one hand and the negative impacts might be called tele-shock, on the other hand.

The Al Qaida and other fundamental extremists actively use the tools of modernity and communications to organise and fight “Western Influence”. 

Thanks