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21st-Century Technology, Medieval Information
USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2000 by Joe Saltzman
TECHNOLOGY in the 21st century can take us anywhere in the world in a flash, making the international community smaller and smaller and giving us a feeling of euphoria as we switch from one capital to another as easily as we watch another rerun of "I Love Lucy." For years, we have seen what this new technology can do for sports, celebrity deaths, and major conflicts and accidents around the world, but nothing matched the New Year's Eve television extravaganza preceding the year 2000.
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We saw what TV technology could do as the new century rolled in. Whether you were watching ABC News or Cable News Network or the Public Broadcasting System, the effect was the same: TV was everywhere as 1999 turned to 2000 across the planet--from New Zealand and Australia to Indonesia, Beijing, and Shanghai, India to Moscow, Berlin to Paris and London, then on to Rio de Janeiro, New York, Miami, Chicago, and finally Mexico City and Los Angeles. Everywhere we saw the same powerful images: human beings dancing, singing, playing music; spectacular fireworks (who will ever forget the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument engulfed in light?); thousands in public squares cheering as the new century began; and elected or self-appointed leaders welcoming in the new year.
Much of the spectacle was moving. How could any earthling looking at this universal outpouring of humanity of all races, colors, and ethnicity across the globe not be moved by the outpouring of joy on display? There must have been millions of self-congratulatory pats on the back, many cheers, and some tears as families in every country watched images no one else had ever seen in one 24-hour period.
It is now possible to switch to any news event in the world and bring it into every person's home, and the New Year's Eve spectacular showed the potential of doing just that--the glorious potential of what technology has wrought to bring humans together, and the horrific potential of how these images can be created, spun, and manipulated to make the viewer feel that this is the best of all possible worlds. Anyone watching the New Year's Eve broadcast would be forced to conclude that the human race is among the luckiest in the universe. Yet, this kind of technology is the perfect vehicle for strangling and mutilating accurate and fair information, cruelly distorting the image of the world in which we live.
The incredible show from Moscow, for example, pushed forward an image of millennium joy and good will. Who had time to think of the Russian military destroying Grozny in Chechnya? Fireworks will be all most viewers remember about Indonesia, not the atrocities committed by the country's dictator, Suharto, who has done a good job of wiping out any dissent. Soon there won't be anyone left in Indonesia to do nothing else except wave the flag for the TV cameras. We saw little of Africa, probably because wars, guerrilla movements, coups, and rebellions were taking place in more than 20 countries on that continent. There was no time for pictures of dying Angolans, the campaign of terror in Uganda against civilians, or inter-ethnic fighting in Nigeria. The silence among dissidents and journalists of each country didn't detract from the celebrations. Dissent was nowhere in sight, wiped out of the electronic festival of lights and sounds.
As we move through the first year of the 21st century, we should remember several things:
* What we see on television from cameras situated throughout the world is carefully managed by the governments of the countries involved. The images are controlled; the message, manipulated. Even the best of TV reporters can only augment the pictures through critical commentary, and these words are usually lost among the images beamed back to unsophisticated viewers.
* Even at their best, TV cameras can only see what the human eye can see. Most of the important stories and pieces of information we need to create an accurate and fair picture have very little to do with images. They have a lot more to do with words and ideas, concepts cameras and eyes cannot handle very well. Images are often confusing and misleading.
The real image of the world in which we live is seldom transmitted by the TV camera. The images you seldom if ever will see live on TV in this, the first year of the 21st century, include the suffering and murder of thousands of civilians, the anguish of dissent destroyed, the tyranny of the majority over a minority or even a minority over a majority. In too many countries today, those in charge lead campaigns of terror against anyone who tries to speak out against them, especially the media, jailing and usually killing journalists trying to report more accurate stories. With these defiant editors and reporters erased, who is left to augment the smiling images with cold reality? No one. The American networks, the BBC, CNN, AP, and Reuters, to name the biggest distributors of international news, all rely on stringers or a handful of reporters who fly into troubled spots to bring the news back to the world at large. This kind of slapdash reporting is always superficial, especially as more and more local journalists and source contacts are harassed, beaten, jailed, and murdered.
