Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, August 11, 1995 TAG: 9508110018
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARSHALL FISHWICK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The $19 billion Disney takeover - the largest ever - conjures up memories of Walter Elias Disney, who drove an ambulance in France during World War I and returned to draw sketches for farm magazines. Making little progress, he headed for Hollywood at age 26 to find work. On the train, he would later write, the wheels seemed to say, "Chug chug, mouse, chug chug mouse."
"I've got it!" he told his wife Lilly. "I'll do a series about a mouse called Mortimer."
"Mortimer's too dignified for a mouse. Let's call him Mickey." They did. A mouse was born. He soon conquered the world with new names like Michel Souris, Musse Pigg, Miki Kuchi and Mikkii Mausu. Mickey was tons of drawings transferred onto miles of film. Neither Disney's style nor his technique got beyond the 1940s. Like Henry Ford, whose career his strikingly parallels, Disney believed in small-town America and a Norman Rockwell utopia. His theme parks tried to duplicate that world. When he died in 1966, could he have had any idea what the Disney merger would mean in 1995? What would happen when his local went global?
The best single-word answers are big and electronic. Is big better? Is biggest best? Is everything old-fashioned, small-town and personalized expendable? Have we forgotten that small can be beautiful? Mickey, after all, was a very small mouse. Who dares draw the line between the silly and the significant, the wholesome and the hype, the new and the neurotic? Must we move without warning from the hemisphere to the datasphere? Is all information, all random data, sacred? Data, data everywhere and not a chance to think.
For those caught up in Hollywood hype, jargon and jingle, changes are occurring faster than we can even record, let alone absorb. We are like the old Red Ball Express, hurtling down the track with the throttle wide open but with no brakes.
Who will arbitrate, regulate, modify our Brave New World? The rules being suggested and debated are essentially unenforceable. Nothing is too slanderous, libelous or pornographic to be excluded from Internet.
There are millions of terminals all over the world, ready to carry any and all messages. Each terminal has a memory, and each has editing power. Any terminal receiving a message can send it to any other terminal. Anything and everything goes. There is no such thing as privacy. It has gone with our old typewriters and postal service.
We have sacrificed privacy for speed. Must the government step in?
In Areopagitica (1644), the English poet John Milton wrote his classic attack on government licensing of the press and on censorship. That became the accepted doctrine of free speech and the free press. But these doctrines don't fit the electronic media. The media over which messages and money flow are fluid and uncontrollable. Who then will be "in control?" Will the printed press be left free, but not the electronic media? What will happen to the freedom democracies have so prized for centuries?
Surely we don't want to halt the flow of information, any more than we want to deny access to water or electricity. We can no more block the incoming technology than King Alfred could block the incoming ocean tide. But we must look beyond the surface glitter and novelty. The new questions are not merely technical, but also social and ethical. What is at stake is human freedom and growth.
Who benefits from the new technologies, mergers, buy-outs? Are we creating a new overclass, which will usurp its power from old sources? Will we live in a technopoly? Will people unfamiliar with the electronic wizardry become a new underclass, underemployed or unemployable?
Communication is becoming compunication - the linking of computers, fiber optics, satellites and newly emerging items that will enter - ready or not - our homes, classrooms and offices. All the world will no longer be a stage. It will be a shopping center.
Massive glut will be inevitable; and clever advertisers will manipulate and exploit. Audiences will be fragmented, quality will be diluted, and technology will be trivialized. Children will be especially vulnerable, as the marketplace becomes their message even before they can read or write. Holed up with a home information center, cut off from community and friends, individuals will be lost in cyberspace, victims of a new pervasive unreality.
Of course we cannot be sure about these things. Revolutionary change is always frightening, especially for those raised in an earlier (print) culture. Machines can't control us if we control machines. We program computers - they need never program us. We don't have to be slaves to 200 new channels, half of which ask us to shop and consume. We can turn off the set.
Theories of energy, matter, space and time are in flux. What was once thought to be simple has become incredibly complex. Our future depends on our understanding the past, and those who have created and guided our democracy. Ralph Waldo Emerson told us more than a century ago what type of people we need to fulfill the American dream:
"Men and women of original perception and original action, who can open their eyes to new truths ... people of elastic and moral mind, who can live in the moment and still take a step forward."
Let us take that step forward thoughtfully - trying not to fall on our face.
Marshall Fishwick is a professor of humanities and communications studies at Virginia Tech.
by CNB