New telecommunications services and their social implications

Abstract

Abstract The various forms of message (alpha-numeric, audio, or audio-visual) and the various numbers of people receiving a single message produce a matrix of possible telecommunications services. The two main groups of existing service (wireless broadcasting and wired switched telecommunications) at present occupy separate parts of this matrix. Both groups of service will grow, and are likely to extend into new forms of message and audience size. In an increasingly information-based society, these developments in telecommunications seem likely to have profound social effects at the individual, organizational, national, and global levels. Any novelty contains powers for good or ill. The good or ill is in the usage not in the device. The providers of telecommunications do so within the mores of the society of the day and take note of those mores. It can be argued that those mores are influenced most by the climate of ideas and analysis that is created by writers, publishers, broadcasters, academics and politicians, and only secondarily by the devices and novelties of the telecommunications engineer.

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