COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY The Mobile Information Society
	NEW PERSPECTIVES ON 21ST-CENTURY COMMUNICATIONS Conference, May 24-25, 2002 Hungarian Academy of Sciences

The origin of the contemporary idea of "globalization" lies in the eighteenth century experience of the "planetary consciousness" of natural historians and travelers. "The systematizing of nature... is a European project of a new kind, a new form of what one might call planetary consciousness among Europeans... Unlike navigational mapping, however, natural history conceived of the world as a chaos out of which the scientist produced an order" – writes Mary Louise Pratt in her book on travel writing and transculturation.¹

The travelers' experiences required a framework of scientific interpretation in order for the travelers to be able to narrate (write and draw) what they had come across in the uncharted fields of continents only just discovered. They traveled to faraway places, across the oceans, where they collected instances of the various species indigenous to those new, unfamiliar countries. The classification system of natural history helped them to distinguish the essential from the trivial, to create order. The victory over distance was an essential part of this planetary consciousness: the explorers and travelers succeeded in connecting and interpreting vastly disparate cultural and natural phenomena within the single framework of natural history. Unlike Wunderkammers and curiosity cabinets, modern consciousness relied on invisible laws, on the paradigm of typology, and had an understanding of development, of the rules governing change in time and space. Linnaeus's system offered a standardization of the natural world in the period of early capitalism; the systematization of nature preceded the Industrial Revolution. The Victorian Mind, Darwinism, and ideas about the hierarchy of life forms substituted the paradigm of evolution for typology. Planetary consciousness became increasingly important and widespread.

The 18th century, the classical age of colonialism controlled, divided, and ruled the planet – not too successfully from the European point of view as evidenced by the First World War. However, the real question is not which European country controlled the world; the essence lay in the philosophy and the writing practice employed by this control, which lead to the development and the heyday of orientalism. The West and the rest was the common ground of colonialism. Those who belonged to the white race dominated the "rest". The so-called racial maps, eugenics, and the ladder of civilization, were gatekeeper concepts in the intellectual navigation system. The classification system was globalized: the European scientific and technological superiority was the one globally accepted social practice, the only way in which things were understood. Primitivism was the permanent enemy. Every culturally distant society, class, or community, was easily designated "primitive". Distance remained crucial during the Victorian decades: a small minority of travelers informed the whole community, most of which almost never left their region or village.

In the 20th century, the question of distance – which is connected to Geert Hofstede's category and metaphor of „ power-distance” – has changed dramatically: the planet has become smaller and smaller every decade. As it is primarily the various forms of telecommunication and the invention of broadcasting that are responsible for this change, its main exponent is the emergence of the 'small planet' feeling, and not the growing number of travelers.

The telegraph was the first step in the progression towards simultaneity, which is hitherto the most important and characteristic element in the created social space of modern societies. The telegraph was the most successful unifying influence of colonialist culture. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke quote a 19th century Australian opinion: "To us, old colonists, who have left Britain long ago, there is something very delightful in the actual contemplation of this, the most perfect of modern inventions... let us set about electric telegraphy at once."

However, the telegraph, and a few decades later the telephone, which opened up the promised land of simultaneity, were and are limited to one-to-one communication. (Although in Budapest a first attempt at broadcasting was made by Tivadar Puskás, who invented a telephone news broadcasting service). The telephone is the technology of freedom, as Ithiel dela Sola Pool teaches, and was the first step in the process of the privatization of social space. In the early days of the telegraph and the telephone, when access to these rare instruments was limited, the public aspects of these new technologies were the most important: they had a unifying influence. Now that these technologies are living their heyday and telephones are omnipresent, they facilitate the creation of individual relations in private, intimate space.

In the history of media and space, of the struggle to overcome distance, the second turning point was the invention of radio and later television. Broadcasting, this new system of dissemination, created a new type of social space, termed „media space” by Monroe Price. Media space is censored and stringently controlled, unified and simultaneous. Within a few decades media space dramatically changed the concepts of foreign policy, of the validity of nation states, of the meaning of political communities, of the cultural hierarchy, and of canons in the market of loyalties. In media space, distance became a technological and political issue. Technologically, it is simply the calculation of the energy needed to overcome a given distance. There is, of course, a price to be paid: transmission over long distances is not cheap, and can be politically difficult. The messages and  radio programs that were transmitted beyond enemy lines became part of the art of warfare. Media space was always watched over by the gatekeepers of this period, politicians. Censorship was different in democratic societies and in the one-party-system Comecon countries, but technologically there was no difference in the implementation of control. Media space did not only influence the political circus, it probably also reshaped the nature of political debate, and the technology of war. In the second World War, radio propaganda was an essential element of warfare; during the Gulf War, the media became the playground of the war. CNN did not just cover the war, it partially created it.

The third turning point is the current digital revolution: the phenomena of convergence, of the multimedia and Internet revolution, and last but not least of the recent fusion of the various mobile and wired/wireless interactive communication tools and structures. This revolution, this new paradigm has now also created a new kind of social space: cyberspace or virtual space. Cyberspace is a domain shared by the public and the private sector, it is the expression and the manifestation of virtual identity, of virtual neighborhood, and of virtual distance. In cyberspace traditional concepts, such as distance, and the distinction between private and public, collapse and disappear. There are competing communities, there is a lively market for loyalties, and there is cultural alignment, but all this without control or censorship, without gatekeepers such as ruling classes, politicians, or nation states. Since cyberspace is now irreversibly part of discourse on politics, media, communication, and cultural development, one is often confronted with both over- and underestimations of the importance of this brave new world (e.g. a world of universal freedom versus a global Big Brother, the digital divide versus a world without boundaries, etc.).

One crucial aspect of this virtual space - the locus of planetary consciousness - is that it lacks the compulsory categorization systems and the classificatory forms and norms of the 18th century. In this new world order, or playground, in this world of virtual distance, there is an fundamentally new possibility to change the traditional institutions of cultural domination and the rules of social perception.

There are a number of global institutions and organizations in the off-line world that have their roots in physical geography, and that represent a technology of power and control that is based on a traditional notion of distance. The following example clearly illustrates the difference between the worlds of media space and of virtual distance. The WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization succeeded in making the parliaments of almost all countries in the world ratify legislation that represents the European approach to and notion of intellectual property. All developed countries have to accept that intellectual property and trade marks are not just big business, but also expressions of a political philosophy that values authenticity and individuality - the most sought-after values in our cultural and political hierarchy - over anything else. (Genius theory would be unthinkable without the cult of authenticity and individuality.) Yet we all know what has happened on the Internet: the domination of intellectual property in the forms developed during the centuries of the printing press and broadcasting has rapidly come to an end. This is not only because of MP3 and the permanent worldwide exchange of various digital databases and collections, in a cyberspace where distance does not play a role anymore, where geographical control is just a narration in the garden of cultural memory, or perhaps a website that commemorates this historical fantasy. The new developments often simply reject or disregard copyright.

The real revolution lies in the fact that there now is a world of cooperation, a virtual neighbourhood in cyberspace, where everybody can meet everybody, and the only remaining question is what system of navigation to use. There is a huge difference between the age of the great explorers and their discoveries and the current age of planetary consciousness. In the past, the system of geographical map making, the art of navigation, and natural history created a system of control.

However, in the case of the Internet this is all different: navigation systems and uncharted cyberspace exist side by side. There are a number of recent phenomena that deserve a brief analysis:

1. Virtual archives and the open source code movement are among the most important benefits of virtual distance: anybody can offer their cultural products, and collect what they need. Virtual and personal archives are the best examples of mobile interactive communication institutions: virtual archives are always under construction, there never is a final version. Interactive archives rewrite the traditional boundaries between written and oral culture. What is an e-mail archive? Who is the collector? What does the collector collect: the chain of messages? As the Internet archive by Brewster Kahle (www.archive.org) illustrates, it is also unclear what exactly an Internet archive is. Does it still make sense to distinguish copies from originals in the case of digital databases? How should media archeology deal with digital copies?. Brewster Kahle has been influenced by the Alexandria Library, the Museion. But where is Alexandria in cyberspace? In my screen? In whose screen?

2. Personalized collaborative filtering technology and the new boundary between private and individual. This is crucial: individualized cyberspace means a fragmented and permanently temporary system of information.

3. The transpublication system, an idea proposed by Ted Nelson, the founding father of Xanadu, and the inventor of hypertext. Transpublication is the copyright system of the Net: it recognizes the fundamental role that collaboration plays in every intellectual product. The work of art, the artifact does not exist in a final version anymore, only in a process of permanent communication. This permanent activity is documented in archives.

4. The renaissance of the curiosity cabinet as a valid type of collection: the recognition and reinterpretation of outsider artists and collectors, and marginalized culture. The end of the traditional cultural hierarchy. The Internet is the best example of a post meta-narration, post master-narration world.

5.The collapse of global ideology-based institutions, such as the WIPO and the UNO, and the rise of institutions that radically criticize globalization. The rebirth of multiculturalism, avant-garde, and counter cultures. Virtual distance is the best environment for radical criticism of globalization: global consciousness without global capitalism.

Summary:

The world of virtual distance is a world of new freedoms and rights, of new technologies of cultural identity, of new principles of authenticity, of communicative, dialogue-based personalities and communities. New creativity, new art forms, new coalitions against globalization.

The world of virtual distance is a world of new artistic activity and new types of movements against globalization. There are new technology-based widerstand formen: SMS, mobile phone calls, e-mails, Internet: a digital continuum of new technologies of political freedom and community creation.

1. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp.29-30.

2. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, The Social History of Media. London: Polity Press, 2002, p.141.