The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives

Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997), 314 pp., $24.95.

When Napoleon reorganized French administrative units, Frances Cairncross tells us, he chose a size for the departement that would permit officials to travel anywhere within it and still be home for dinner. As Cairncross observes, on-the-spot investigation was the quickest way to get information. Now, of course, the patchwork localism of the Napoleonic world is as dead as a dodo. Worlds created by more recent technologies are also dead and improved communications are making the one we live in obsolete far faster than many people think. Although saying "many people think" may sound like the condescension to which reviewers are prone, Cairncross shows that this is not so; she notes, for instance, that 40 percent of Americans still think of AT&T as their local telephone company, though it ceased to be so in 1984.

"The death of distance", we are told, "will probably be the single most important force shaping society in the first half of the next century." Cairncross is a little breathless about the electronic communications that will conjure new worlds into existence. Nevertheless, because her text is well informed and her prose lucid, and because the technological developments are intrinsically exciting, she is more persuasive about the future than other DNE (Dawn of New Era) writers. Although she concentrates on technology, she does also pay regard to the roles of deregulation and competition in forcing the pace of change. If there is a fault, it is that her conclusions about the benign cultural and political implications of modern communications are perhaps a little overly optimistic, or maybe just too premature, though this does not detract from the clarity and force of the book as a whole.

One optimistic proposition is that companies will be able to locate more or less where they choose. Using the Internet, they will be able to find niche markets, and customers will be able to find them. Suppliers and buyers will both cross national frontiers and virtually cancel those frontiers out. Non-tradables, that is services, will increasingly be supplied internationally and "remote maintenance" will increase. Openings will thereby be provided for skilled computer operatives in poor countries, especially if (like many in, say, India and the Philippines) they speak English. Nation-states will find it hard to raise taxes, since members of the "floating elite" of skilled professionals-more in demand than before, unlike the unskilled workers of rich countries-will counteract the effect of high taxes by leaving. The advantage of large countries will decrease and small jurisdictions will flourish. The exodus from the rural areas of poorer countries will be checked; people will stay down on the farm and feel less urge to see Paree. Companies will decentralize and their employees will work more from home. And as work decreases in city centers, these will be re-jigged as better places to go for entertainment. Safer, too: surveillance cameras (more than one-quarter of a million in the United Kingdom alone) are starting to ensure that.

It is indeed hard not to write breathlessly of these changes, and few resist the temptation. The litany is familiar to readers of The Economist, where Cairncross published a survey as a trailer for her book. Thus we have already digested the notion that the new technologies will have an internationally leveling effect; that the structure of the firm will alter as entry costs fall and intermediary functions are occluded; that privacy will evaporate as more and more data bases contain information about our tastes, contacts, and behaviors; and that society will become vulnerable to futuristic technological breakdowns compared with which occasional failures of lifeline services like gas and water will seem small beer. Who, after all, is planning to fly on January 1, 2000?

Many changes can be interpreted favorably or unfavorably. Cairncross is better than typical whiz-bang technological writers at putting both sides, but she is still inclined to minimize the downside. She is not particularly self-conscious about methods of forecasting and, understandably, covers her position by saying that, while we exaggerate the short-term, we underestimate the long-term effects of new technologies. Here is the nub of the problem: although it is easy to foresee change, the definite forecasting of change is much harder.

The history through which we actually have to live takes place in the lags during which some regions have yet to catch up on technologies already assimilated by other competing regions. Rates of uptake vary - again, mark the irony - from place to place. We can easily share Cairncross' hope that cheaper information will improve the world, encourage the spread of democracy, and tilt the odds toward peace. Nevertheless, greater interest will attach in the meantime to the frictions set up by differential resistance to change. What we shall notice will not be uniform political and cultural adjustment to technological advance, but a series of episodes of blockage or rejection that will often be perverse and sometimes violent.

"Cultural Protection", to which The Death of Distance devotes a section, will continue to be the cockpit in which the forces unleashed by electronic communications fight it out with the forces of resistance. Trade negotiators on the side of openness are pushing against non-governmental organizations lobbying for closure. The struggle will involve a nationalistic defense of cultural industries against "globalized" products. These products are the ones that use the English language, more specifically American products, and most pointedly those of Hollywood. If something will play in Kansas, it will, after a fashion, play anywhere. This will cause distress to overseas competitors and incline them to try handicapping Hollywood rather than actually competing. Big earnings for companies are at stake. There was some grumbling about this year's Oscars, since the much-admired British film, The Full Monty, was sunk, so to speak, by the American Titanic.

If cultural resentment rises even in Britain, which is second to the United States as an exporter of intellectual property, it will swell much more on the Continent. Europe now provides half the revenues of Hollywood studios. The European industry cannot compete in terms of blockbuster budgets or - which is where it hurts - in mass appeal. Hollywood movies, like other American cultural products, succeed in touching basic, if stylized, human emotions. American culture travels and Europeans ought to learn from this instead of grinding their teeth. Many will not agree to learn.

The French and Germans will not refrain from efforts at cultural protection. Both countries lag behind the United States in the adoption of the seminal technologies. Businesses founded by "netpreneurs" are rare almost everywhere outside the United States. Cairncross tells us that just about the time when the American president delivered the first State of the Union address ever carried live by Internet radio, the French president toured his country's new national library and was shown a computer "mouse." Jacques Chirac was astounded by this novelty and gazed at it in wonder. That was in January 1997.

Both France and Germany contain people who resent the success of Global English, which already has more second-language speakers than any other tongue. France spends $100 million a year on promoting French language and culture. Germany may be prodded in a similar direction. The Club for the Preservation of the German Language, established in 1997, is, in the unconvincing words of its founder, "all about the colonization of German by English . . . most Germans lack national pride." And if to German academics the problem seems the rise of "Denglisch" alongside the "Franglais" so distressing to their French counterparts, it quickly transpires that the real enemy is the English of Hollywood, the Internet, and the lyrics of pop music, all of which leak royalties away.

These nationalistic resentments are ultimately artificial since, historically speaking, all national cultures are artificial and syncretic. But they are also dangerous. It would be better for competing countries to shift some investment to industries in which they have comparative advantage, or to exploit the genuine signature of their cultures, which will still be valued in local markets. After all, as Cairncross points out, new technologies cut production costs everywhere and enable minorities to speak to one another more easily than ever before. The more salient point is, however, that America's is the only valid exceptionalism, by which I mean that only in the United States is the future plausibly being created. Ultimately the rest of the world emulates this future, whatever the lags and degrees of resistance. Other cultures may turn back or down some path that we cannot anticipate, but for the moment they may be visualized as a wedge of "flying geese" strung out behind the United States.

American culture is global culture. That does not mean that it is perfect - or even necessarily good - but that it is the closest thing that exists to universalism. For all the crassness of the worst blockbusters, cultural productions do emerge in the United States under the most stringently competitive conditions and are accepted by the largest possible market. They develop in a country that places fewer restrictions on expression than most. The individuals who create them hail from nearly every culture. The plots they write may often be banal in the eyes of intellectuals, but the world will not become a better place if foreign intellectuals combine with nationalistic politicians to frustrate the free choice of their countrymen to share in the common culture.

Cultures may be slow to change, if people wish to change only slowly. We have to be clear, though, just which people in a given society set themselves up as the arbiters. They are likely to include local cultural producers, who have vested interests in captive markets. If this is the case in developed Western markets, how much greater will the resistance be to a free flow of information at a second level, in rigid non-Western societies? There, as Cairncross remarks, a picture of a girl in a bikini is an outrage and almost any political statement may be taken as interference in a country's internal affairs. Thus while I want to agree with her optimism about the eventual outcome, and to thank her for her stimulating work, I am more hesitant than she is about the smoothness of the passage into a universalist, peaceful, and democratic future.

RELATED ARTICLE: Hope Grafted Onto Tragedy

Here I come to the question I sought to understand in my recent book, Le passe d'une illusion. The question was not the history of communism. It was rather the very different one of the sway that the communist idea held over so many minds during the twentieth century: a sway so deep and so vast that it gave rise to a universal belief whose geographic reach exceeded that of Christianity. . . . I mean by this, not that it dominated everyone's imagination, but simply that it was endowed with an exceptional ubiquity; not that it failed to arouse adversaries, but simply that it was more universal than any known religion. Whether in its soft or hard versions, whether reassuring or demanding of sacrifices, it spanned nations and civilizations as a prospect inseparable from the political order of every society in the modern epoch.

Yet this prospect presented the paradoxical character of being linked to a historical event and a historical reality: the October Revolution of 1917 and the regime to which it gave birth. Without the October Revolution, without the USSR, the communist idea would have remained what it had been in the nineteenth century: a vague promise, a far horizon, a post bourgeois-alienation world that each could imagine according to his own inclination. It was October 1917 and the USSR that gave the vision its unity, its substance, and its force. . . . The communist idea was no longer free, as it had been in the preceding century, but subordinated to the constraint of a constant affirmation of the varacity of its Soviet incarnation. This was its strength - that the idea had taken root in history - but also its weakness, for the idea was dependent upon its manifestation in reality. The interesting thing is that its strength triumphed over its weakness. Until its end, the Soviet Union managed to embody for millions of people the promise of a new society. . . . No amount of massive, organized violence committed by its government and no failure in the economic realm could ever snuff out the dogma of its superiority to capitalism. The mystery of the communist idea in this century is thus that of a hope grafted onto tragedy. . . .

[N]othing less than the disappearance of the USSR was required to break the spell that had linked the regime born in October 1917 to the idea of a better society.

- Francois Furet, "Democracy and Utopia"

Eric Jones is professorial fellow at the Melbourne Business School and professor of economics at the University of Reading, England.

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