This article originally appeared in the July, 2001, Number 22 issue of *spark.
I was talking to a co-worker, a young computer programmer, who said that he was excited to be working in this field because he hoped to be able to develop a programme that would help people communicate with each other. If they could just share their stories, he felt sure that people would learn to get along with each other, and we would see a substantial reduction in tensions between people.
Hasn't happened so far.
When the telegraph spread through the developed world in the middle of the 19th century, it was supposed to bring a new era of peace. This was truly the dawning of the electric age: now, news of distant lands could be transmitted virtually instantaneously. No longer would we be ignorant of other people. Scientific American claimed that the telegraph promoted the "kinship of humanity."
A similar rhetoric developed around the telephone. With that device, you could phone anybody in the world! (Well, anybody with a similar device.) Surely, people in distant lands sharing their experiences could not help but reduce tensions between nations.
Despite the use of the telegraph and the telephone, the world was plunged into two barbaric international wars that cost tens of millions of people their lives.
The advent of television marked a return to this utopian rhetoric. Given the ability to see the way people in distant lands live, it was only to be expected that great efforts would be expended to decrease human suffering around the world. In the 1930s, RCA executive David Sarnoff claimed that: "When television has fulfilled its ultimate destiny, man's sense of physical limitation will be swept away and his boundaries of sight and hearing will be at the limits of the earth itself. With this may come a new horizon, a new philosophy, a new sense of freedom, and greatest of all, a finer and broader understanding between all the people of the world."
This did not stop Korea or Vietnam from happening. Contrary to popular belief, television may not have been a significant factor in Vietnam ending (political advisers had started questioning the wisdom of continuing war before the coverage got the attention of citizens). Either way, military leaders have since developed methods of keeping the worst aspects of war off of people's television screens, so the medium did not stop wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, Bosnia or the Persian Gulf, to name but a few.
Proponents of computers could point out that it was flaws in the previous technologies that caused them to leave their utopian promise unfulfilled. The telephone, for instance, is not distributed widely enough (so that half of all people living on the African sub-continent have never made a phone call), leaving some parts of the world woefully underrepresented on the system. (Since the Internet piggybacks on the phone system, it's hard not to wonder how it can be seen to be an improvement on this situation.) I would suggest a different interpretation: improved communications technology will never bring peace on earth because the fundamental problem -- the dark aspect of human nature -- is not amenable to technological solutions.
The utopian promise rests on the idea that hatred is bred of ignorance. It's easy to hate blacks or Jews or [insert minority group here] if you have little contact with them. Conversely, if you get to know others, you see that, superficial differences aside, they are human just like you, with similar needs and desires and, therefore, deserve your compassion and respect, if not love.
This is undoubtedly partially true, but it does not tell the whole story. For hatred is also bred of an exaggerated sense of difference. Everybody wants to belong to a special group. Belittling those outside our group reinforces our special membership. This need for differences asserts itself most forcefully in times of crisis (economic downturn or social change), when scapegoats for group problems must be found.
Thus, many people consciously choose not to associate with anybody who is not like them, even when the opportunity exists. Why didn't the telephone bring people together more? One reason is that we tend only to phone people we already know. How are we going to get to know members of other groups that way? (Some research is beginning to emerge which suggests that people use the Internet in a similar way -- to communicate with others who basically share the opinions we already hold.)
Even when we can clearly see the suffering of others, it doesn't mean we will act to stop it. Why didn't television bring people together more? Because we can too easily turn our attention away from what we don't want to see. After the first wave of African famine relief, starving children with bloated bellies became a staple of late night TV. Yet, despite increasing death tolls, individual aid decreased. To be sure, personal donations were never a proper substitute for political action to deal with grotesque trade imbalances. For our purposes, however, it is worth noting that images of starvation soon stopped being a spur for people to act in humane ways.
Technology will not solve the problem of the darkness in the heart of the human soul. For that, perhaps we need fewer computer programmers and communications scholars and more poets.
SOURCE: David E. Nye. "Shaping Communications Networks: Telegraph, Telephone, Computer." Social Research (V64 N3, Fall 1997).
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