The Impacts of the Second Modern Information Revolution. How, then, has the second modern information revolution impacted the shape, relationships, and conduct of human institutions and human activities, and the structures and dynamics of international actors and the international system? The answer to this question is exceedingly complex, in part because the second modern information revolution is so recent that its technologies have yet to be fully absorbed, diffused, and operationalized.
Indeed, different international actors have absorbed, diffused, and operationalized television, computers, and satellite technology in different ways and at different rates of speed. This differentiated pattern and rate of absorption, diffusion, and operationalization has led to different types and rates of change in different actors on the international scene.
The multinational corporation is arguably the type of international actor that has been most affected by the second modern information revolution. Businesses transmit tremendous amounts of information and data throughout the world. In some cases, geography has little or no impact on business decisions about where to locate. For example, several U.S. airlines and other reservation services have facilities outside the United States because of lower labor costs there. Similarly, in international banking and finance, the ability to transfer funds electronically throughout the world has already had an immense impact. Some observers believe that the world has already become a single banking and financial market.45
Advanced information and communication technologies have also influenced the way some multinational corporations structure themselves. Although forces in addition to improved information and communication technologies led MNCs to move toward the adoption of global product divisional structures as opposed to the pre-World War II mother-daughter organizational structure arrangement, there is no doubt that the enhanced abilities of MNCs to communicate with their overseas subsidiaries strengthened this trend. Further advances in information and communication technologies in turn have influenced MNCs to begin developing a distributed network organizational structure.46
The technologies of the second modern information revolution have also accelerated the trends toward regionalization and globalization of business as more companies in the 1970s and 1980s gained access to less costly global communications capabilities. On a regional basis, this phenomenon was one of the factors that strengthened pressures in Europe for movement toward political and economic unity. In short, advanced information and communication technologies have allowed many firms to become multinational on either a regional or global basis.
The expanded role of MNCs has raised questions about the ability of individual states to provide for the economic well-being of their population since significant amounts of economic activity are being conducted on a transnational or global basis. The recent growth in global trade, much of it made possible by the technologies of the second modern information revolution, has been nothing short of phenomenal. As we have already seen, international finance and banking has been transformed by the ability to transfer funds electronically throughout the world at a moment’s notice, and many other service industries are becoming more and more internationalized.
This does not imply that states are in imminent danger of disappearing because of advanced information and communication technologies. In fact, in some cases, as in Argentina’s decision to outlaw call-back technology and Egypt’s decision to delay the implementation of debit card telephone and telegraph charging, states have actively sought to maintain their sovereignty by attempting to control information and communication flows. In other cases such as the European Union (EU), NAFTA, and MERCOSUR, states are positioning themselves to take advantage of such technologies to increase economic activity and position themselves for future prosperity. In some instances, for example in the EU’s case, this response opens the possibility of a movement toward a post-state international era in which a grouping of states cede a significant part of their decision-making capabilities to a transnational actor.
The technologies of the second information revolution have also had an impact on the role that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play in international affairs. Many of these actors have widely scattered memberships and have become more active, better coordinated, and more influential as advanced information and communication technologies have become more widely available. And the technologies of the second information revolution have already led to the formation of networks among certain NGOs. For example, the Association for Progressive Communication links 20,000 NGOs and individual members in 95 countries via electronic mail and facsimiles. Its membership includes some of the world’s most prominent NGOs and related organizations such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam, the Sierra Club, many labor unions, and a host of peace organizations.47
Individuals are also part of this growing global cyber-mainstreet, having ready access to telephones, electronic mail, and facsimiles whose links transcend national boundaries. Much of the personal use of these technologies is for social, educational, and business purposes. However, on several occasions, including most notably the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and during the 1991 Soviet coup, electronic mail and facsimiles provided an important link to the outside world for individuals in China and the former Soviet Union.
At the same time, the ability of the international media to provide foreign perspectives and outlooks on a real-time basis to virtually every major media outlet in the world has created a sense of global connectivity, if not community, that has never before existed. It is too much to argue that this has led to changed views on the parts of individuals about their role and the role of their countries in the world, but it is not too much to say that to many individuals, the international media is altering the way that they view themselves and the world.
At the regional level, the second modern information revolution has also had a demonstrable impact. As discussed above, advanced information and communication technologies have increased the flow of information and data transmission across national boundaries, thereby strengthening the impetus toward greater European integration and the transformation of the European Community into the European Union. To a certain extent, it may also be argued that a similar series of events led to the creation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation zone and the Free Trade Area of the Americas, although neither is anywhere near as developed an organization as the EU.
At the system level, the industrialized West’s ability to take advantage of the technologies of the second modern information and communication revolution helped the West during the 1970s and 1980s create an uneven economic playing field between the West on the one hand and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other. For example, in 1978, the Soviet Union had roughly 25,000 computers in operation, while the United States had over 250,000. By 1988, the Soviet Union had about 150,000 personal computers, whereas, the U.S. had over 40 million.48 The Soviet situation was further worsened since the U.S.S.R. was unable and unwilling to incorporate widespread computer networking into its decision-making processes because of its centralized political and economic systems.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, then, the Soviet economy fell further behind the more advanced and technologically sophisticated industrialized democracies of the West and Far East, due in no small part to the U.S.S.R.’s inability and unwillingness to participate fully in the second information revolution. In simplest terms, the Soviet Union could not compete against knowledge-based technologies integrated into market driven economies.
Mikhail Gorbachev recognized this, and therefore instituted a set of reforms in the U.S.S.R. to address these and other problems.49 Gorbachev’s reforms, however, had unintended consequences. Intended to decentralize economic decision making and lead to improved production, they instead increased confusion and economic uncertainty in the U.S.S.R., and Soviet production declined. Designed to encourage popular support for communism by bringing more people into the political decision-making process, they instead led more Soviet citizens to question the system and eventually reject it. Intended to give more Soviet citizens a stake in the system, they instead led to the growth of nationalism and the eventual dissolution of the U.S.S.R.
In the final analysis, U.S. and Western development of advanced information and communications technologies coupled with the closed nature of Russian society and the centralized organizational structure of the Soviet economy played a major role in ending the Cold War as the Soviet economy proved unable to widely adapt emerging information and communication technologies. The forces at work that led to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. were much more extensive than those associated with the second modern information revolution, but there is no doubt that this revolution helped accelerate the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the accompanying end of the bipolar international system.
The preceding overview has shown that during the last century and a half, the first and second information revolutions had a significant influence on the capabilities and actions of human beings, states, and other international actors. As technical capabilities increased, men and women and the institutions that they created found themselves increasingly able to overcome barriers to communications imposed by distance, time, and location and to enhance their abilities to exchange information effectively.
However, despite the impact that the first and second modern information revolutions have had on human activity, the structure and importance of international actors, multinational corporations excepted, has not yet been significantly altered. States remain structured much as they were in earlier centuries, and they remain the dominant class of international actor. International governmental organizations (IGOs) remain creatures of states, addressing issues that states permit them to address. Advances in information and communication technologies have allowed IGOs to expand their activities and therefore, to a certain extent, to increase their their importance, but again only when states acquiesce. And even though NGOs have taken advantage of information and communication technologies to better enhance their capabilities, they remain relatively weak as a class of international actor.
As a class of international actors, only multinational corporations have significantly altered their actions and their structure as a result of information and communication technologies. With many MNCs employing advanced information and communication technologies to degrees unequalled by other international actors outside the military, decision makers at many MNCs now think and act as a matter of course on a global basis. Technology has impacted not only the way that MNCs operate, but also the way that they are structured. Most MNCs have discarded old-style mother-daughter organizational structure, replacing them with global product division structures, and some MNCs are now progressing toward a distributed network organizational structure, aided and abetted by information and communication technologies.
As for the impact that information and communication technologies have had on the international system, they played only a limited role in the demise of the pre-World War I balance of power system, the formation of the inter-war collective security system, and the collapse of that system. An arguable case can be made that they played a large role in the half century long survival of the post-World War II bipolar system. A substantial case can be made that they played a significant role in the collapse of that system and in the incipient creation of large regional economic trading blocs in the years since then.
What do these historical observations mean for the future? It is too early in our study to answer this question. However, given the capabilities that emerging information and communication technologies have and will have, it is a foregone conclusion that they will play even larger roles in influencing the actions of today’s and tomorrow’s international actors, on affecting the evolving structure of those actors, and on influencing the way the international system is shaped.
What will those roles be? How will tomorrow’s international actors and the international system that they create be influenced by emerging information and communication technologies? Are trends discernible today that might give us clues about answers to these and related questions? What issues will confront the international community as a result of the changes that are sure to come? To begin to answer these questions, we will turn first to some of the more prominent technologies that comprise today’s information revolution.
1. This is not to say that other factors have not complicated communications. For example, language differences and cost have also made communications more difficult.
2. For a good discussion of humanity's early communication technologies, see Eric A. Havelock and Jackson P. Hershbell, Communication Arts in the Ancient World (New York, NY: Hastings House, 1978).
3. For one view of the impact of these technologies on international affairs, see Daniel R. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics 1851-1945 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991). For histories of the development of these technologies, see George G. Blake, History of Radio Telegraphy and Telephony (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1974); Gerald J. Holzmann and Bjorn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995), and Fred Shunaman (ed.), From Spark to Satellite: A History of Radio Communication (New York, NY: Scribner, 1979).
4. Maurice Estabrooks, Electronic Technology, Corporate Strategy, and World Transformation (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1995), p. 20.
5. Ibid, pp. 20-21.
6. Ibid, p. 21.
7. Joseph Straubhaar and Robert LaRose, Communications Media in the Information Society (New York, NY: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996), p. 57.
8. Estabrooks, p. 22.
9. For several discussions of the role of the telegraph during the Civil War, see John O. Pastore, The Story of Communications: From Beacon Light to Telstar (New York, NY: Macfadden Books, 1964); Timothy Garden, The Technology Trap: Science and the Military (McLean, VA: Brassey’s Defense Publishers, 1989); and William Plum, The Military Telegraph During the Civil War, Volumes I and II (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1974). The following portrayal of the role of the telegraph during the Civil War is derived from these sources.
10. Plum, p. 9.
11. Ibid, p. 9.
12. Estabrooks, p. 23.
13. Straubhaar and LaRose, p. 262.
14. Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies Without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 9.
15. Estabrooks, p. 26.
16. Garden, pp. 21-22.
17. For details on the early development of radio, see Hugh G.T. Aitkin, Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio (New York, NY: Wiley, 1976) and W.P. Folly, Marconi (New York, NY: Stein and Day, 1972).
18. Straubhaar and LaRose, p. 180.
19. Estabrooks, p. 30.
20. Straubhaar and LaRose, p. 179.
21. Ibid, p. 175.
22. Thomas E. Will, Telecommunication Structure and Management in the Executive Branch of Government, 1900-1970 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978).
23. Straubhaar and LaRose, p. 179.
24. Garden, p. 35.
25. Estabrooks, p. 32.
26. Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1949), p. 38.
27. Straubhaar and LaRose, p. 206.
28. Estabrooks, p. 33.
29. See Richard D. Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1971).
30. Straubhaar and LaRose, p. 206.
31. Estabrooks, p. 33.
32. For discussions of "electronic imperialism," see for example Thomas L. McPhail, Electronic Colonialism: The Future of International Broadcasting and Communication (London: Sage Publications, 1981); and several chapters in Edward A. Comor, The Global Political Economy of Communication: Hegemony, Telecommunication, and the Information Economy (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
33. See Les Brown, Television: the Business Behind the Box (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971) for a discussion of television’s impact on business and marketing in the 1950s and 1960s.
34. For discussions of the 1960 presidential debate, see Sidney Krauss, The Great Debates: Background, Perspective, Effects (Glouchester, MA: P. Smith, 1968). For discussions of the impact of television on U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam War, see J. Fred MacDonald, Television and the Red Menace: The Video Road to Vietnam (New York, NY: Praeger, 1985). For discussions of both issues, see Robert Donovan and Ray Scherer, Unsilent Revolution: Television News and American Public Life (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
35. For an analysis of the role of trans-border television broadcasts in the collapse of Eastern European communism, see Ben Fowkes, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); and David S. Mason, Revolution in East-Central Europe: The Rise and Fall of Communism and the Cold War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).
36. Martin Van Crevald, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1991), p. 239.
37. Estabrooks, p. 42.
38. Straubhaar and La Rose, pp. 295-297.
39. Van Crevald, p. 240.
40. For discussions of the early phases of these trends, see Elaine B. Kerr and Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Computer-Mediated Communication Systems: Status and Evaluation (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1982); Jacques Vallee, Computer Message Systems (New York, NY: Data Communications, 1984); and Murray Laver, Computers, Communications and Society (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1975).
41. For several studies of the impacts of satellites on global communications, see Heather E. Hudson, Communication Satellites: Their Development and Impact (New York, NY: Free Press, 1990); David W.E. Rees, Satellite Communications: The First Quarter Century of Service (New York, NY: Wiley, 1990); Joseph N. Pelton, Global Communications Satellite Policy: INTELSAT, Politics, and Functionalism (Mt. Airy, MD: Lomond Books, 1974); and John Robinson Pierce, The Beginning of Satellite Communications (San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Press, 1968).
42. For discussions of the military uses of satellites, see Paul B. Stares, The Militarization of Space: U.S. Policy 1945-1984 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); A. Nejat Ince (ed.), Digital Satellite Communications Systems and Technologies: Military and Civilian Applications (Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Press, 1992); and the IEEE Military Communications Conference, Conference Record/MILCOM 95 (New York, NY: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1995).
43. Estabrooks, p. 73.
44. Ibid., p. 73.
45. See for example Bruno Lanvin (ed.), Trading in a New World Order: The Impact of Telecommunications and Data Services on International Trade in Services (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).
46. For discussions of different types of organizational structures of multinational corporations, see Robert Howard (ed.), The Learning Imperative: Managing People for Continuous Innovation (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1993); Michael Raymond and Alan Rinzler (eds.), The New Paradigm in Business: Emerging Strategies for Leadership and Organizational Change (New York, NY: J.P. Tarcher/Perigee, 1993); and Daniel S. Papp, Contemporary International Relations: Frameworks for Understanding (Fifth Edition) (Boston, MA: Allwyn and Bacon, 1996), Chapter 4.
47. For a discussion of the Association for Progressive Communication, see Howard H. Frederick, Global Communication and International Relations (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1993), p. 97.
48. James Robinson, "Technology, Change, and the Emerging International Order," SAIS Review (Winter-Spring 1995), p. 156.
49. For Gorbachev’s rationale for reform, see Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1987).
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