satellites as worldwide change agents

1. SATELLITES AS
WORLDWIDE CHANGE AGENTS
Based on Joseph N Pelton’s paper published in Daya K
Thussu book
Delivered to II MA Mass Communication students on 25
Sep 2015

2. TIME AND SPACE ABOLISHED
The medium is the message means . …' that a totally new
environment has been created‘. We have extended our central
nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both
space and time as far as our planet is concerned'
Marshall McLuhan (1966, pp. ix, 19)

3. COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES HAVE REDEFINED
OUR WORLD
Satellites, for better or worse, have made our world
global, interconnected, and interdependent'
Worldwide access to rapid telecommunications networks
via satellites and cables now creates widespread
Internet links, enables instantaneous news coverage,
facilitates global culture and conflict, and stimulates the
formation of true planetary market.

4. TREATY OF WESTPHALIA – THE ORIGIN OF
NATION STATE
 Ever since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the world
has been defined by what is called nation state
 Under the Wesphalian system as it has become
known, the established authority of a state was
responsible for internal laws, national subjects,
national punishment, and even defined national
religious beliefs. No man is an Island, but under
international law countries were supposed to be.

5. INTELSAT 1
As Fernaud Braudel has explained in the massive trilogy
on life up through the 18th century, institutional
structure is key to the advance of civilization .
Until the 1950s, nations or national empires such as
those of Britain and France were amazingly well self
contained. Admiral Perry may have opened up Japan,
and Europe may be becoming a community of nations,
but prior to 1965, the date when Early Bird, or
INTELSAT 1, became operational – overseas
communications were incredibly limited and expensive.

6. INTELSAT 1 (EARLY BIRD)

7. MORE CHANGE EXPERIENCED IN THE LAST 60
YEARS
International commerce was quire sparse. And
multinational corporations were only just beginning to
emerge.
The world has certainly experienced more change on its
economic, cultural, social, scientific and political
systems in the last 60 years than at any time in history.

8. SHRINKING WORLD
When one considers that the value of global electronic
fund transfers in 2002 were about $300 trillion and ran
at over $1 trillion per day for 2003, it is hard to deny
that the world today is dramatically different than only
two generations ago.
In short, this is not an easy time for world shrunk by
technology and yet fractured by fundamental religious
beliefs and terrorism.

9. EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL
ENTERTAINMENT AND NEWS
Some would say that the _____ attacks on September 11
2001, and the US response to world politic.
Yet the rise of the world corporation, the emergence of
global entertainment and news, and the pervasive reach
of modern telecommunications and information networks
gave rise to fundamental shifts in the world community
decades before the Al Qaida attacks on World Trade
Centre buildings and the Pentagon.

10. GLOBAL TRANSACTIONS
 Over the past decade, space activities have
contributed nearly $ 1 trillion to the global economy.
 World’s hundreds of trillions of dollars in electronic
funds transfer as reported by the World Bank for 2003,
went via saltellite. This stunning amount represents a
figure that is more than four times the global GNP for
all countries of the world -- nearly a $100 trillion.

11. A NIAGARA OF INFORMATION
Satellites now beam down to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week – a Niagara of information, entertainment, and
business transactions. This massive dump of data is
now accomplished by means of over 12,000 satellite
video channels, produced not only in Hollywood, but in
Bolloywood, India.
An evangelist or a pornographer can reach a billion
people “live via satellites”.

12. THE ULTIMATE FORCE OF CHANGE
No other technology interconnects the world so incredibly
well and reaches so many remote locations.
The futurist James Naisbitt (1980) in his book
Megatrends, suggested that satellite communications,
by making modern electronic media “omnipresent” and
“instantaneously accessible”, was creating the
“ultimate force of change”, in modern times. In short,
Naibitt, argued that satellite systems were creating the
global village not TV by itself.

13. EARLY COMMUNICATION SATELLITES
Human civilization has changed in significant ways from
the days when we attempted to launch the first tiny
artificial communication satellites in early 1990s.
The first steps came quickly with the launch of
Score (1958)
Courier (1960)
Telstar (1962),
Relay (1962),
Syncom (1063) and
(Spring 1965) world’s first commercial communications satellite
Today’s largest and most powerful satellites are some
10,000 times more capable than the first small satellites
of the mid 1960s in terms of performance and lifetime.

14. INFORMATION OVERLOAD
An abundance of rapid information overloads our
sensory systems and compete attention.
The 1960 Olympics in Mexico city was in the first true
international electronic emdia event.
The Apollo Moon Landing in the middle of 1969 became
the world’s first truly global event.
Over a half billion people watched “live” what had
seemed pure science fiction only a decades before.

15. 1 BILLION +
By the time of the Montreal Summer Olympics in 1972,
satellite technology had made possible a global audience
of over 1 billion.
By the end of 1970s, they were commonplace
occurences, and the phrase “live via satellite’. Which
once inspired a sense of awe, began to disappear from
TV screens as irrelevant information.
Global interconnectivity is certainly one of the most
fundamental shifts that now separate us from our past
history.

16. INTERNATIONAL NEWS TRANSMISSION LIVE
Submarine cables and fibre optic networks have served to
integrate the most economically advanced countries together,
but they have not been at the core of creating true global
interconnectivity.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Sidney Pike of CNN almost
single handedly brought satellite TV to scores of countries that
had never seen international news transmission before.
Today, satellite systems such as Intelsat, Panamsat, SES
Astra, Eutelsat, Asiasat and nearly 100 other space networks
provide literally thousands of international connecting links
between the countries of the world.

17. POPULATION GROWTH VS
INFORMATION GROWTH
In face if we look at the 5 million year history of mankind
and proto humans as being represented by a 10,000
story building that is 20 miles high, we find that the last
40 years (the time that we have had broadband global
communication capability via satellites) represent only a
matter of some inches of space on the top floor of this
imaginary mega structure.
More simply, we can say that the generation of global
information is growing at least some 2,00,000 times
faster than our global population.

18. WORLDWIDE MIND
The satellite, other wireless systems, and fibre
communications networks will not only assist in creating
the oft quoted “Global Village”, but will soon start to
fashion what might be called a “Worldwide Mind”.
Marshall McLuhan, Fernand Braudel and other taught us
to analyse the relationship among communications,
technology and political history. They and others such a
sGeorg hegel, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Victor
Ferkiss, and Norbert Weiner, from widely different
perspectives, examined how technology has reshaped
modern life.

19. INFORMATION NETWORKS
Today, people in developed countries and a growing
umber of those in developing countries can quickly
connect to tens of thousands of “information networks” to
learn about virtually any conceivable subject or watch
any form of entertainment or amusement. Censorship will
have become obsolete.

20. INTELSAT’S PROJECT SHARE
There is only one evil, ignorance, and only one good,
knowledge. From this perspective, satellites represent
knowledge. When we at Intelsat began Project Share
(Satellites for Health and Rural Education) in the mid 1980s,
we did not know what to expect.
Little did we realize that the Chinese National TV University
experiment that we started with several dozens small earth
terminals would mushroom into a vast educational enterprise
operating in over 90,000 remote locations and supporting over
5 million students in rural China.

21. TELE-POWER, TELE-SHOCK
Technology provides a powerful duality. Its positive
impacts could be called tele-power, on the one hand and
the negative impacts might be called tele-shock, on the
other hand.
The Al Qaida and other fundamental extremists actively
use the tools of modernity and communications to
organise and fight “Western Influence”.

22. Thanks