Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age by Ithiel de Sola Pool

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 399 presents a valuable summary of major economic developments that shaped the postwar West. Gunther Barth Dr. Barth teaches cultural history, with emphasis on the westward migration and emerging urban societies, at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book, Fleeting Moments: Nature and Culture in American History, was published by Oxford University Press. Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age. By Ithiel de Sola Pool. Edited by Eli M. Noam. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Pp. xiii + 283; notes, index. $27.50. The study of telecommunications occupies a curious place in social science research. While narrow policy-related studies of telecommu­ nications proliferate, broader theoretical and sociological studies remain comparatively rare. For theoretically oriented social scientists, “communications” is generally taken to be synonymous with the mass media. In this context, Technologies without Boundaries is an exception: a book that attempts to provide a grand political theory of telecom­ munications and at the same time sheds light on a whole series of issues in contemporary telecommunications policy. Ithiel de Sola Pool’s grand political theory is unashamedly neolib­ eral and, indeed, unrepentantly American. The book essentially has two broad themes. First, a whole range of forms of national and international regulation of telecommunications are regarded at best as uneconomic, at worst as manifestations of bureaucratic self-interest and xenophobia. Attempts by first- and third-world countries to restrict the flow of U.S. media imports, for example, are simply mechanisms for frustrating consumer sovereignty, rather than legiti­ mate attempts to maintain national cultural identity or protect vul­ nerable local industries from multinational competition. “Govern­ ments everywhere,” the author writes, “have an inherent bias in favor of controls, restrictions, and provincialism” (p. 204). The book’s second theme concerns not bureaucratic interference with the economics of communications networks, but the political potential such networks embody. For Pool, telecommunications holds out the promise of being a truly democratic and liberal technology. On the one hand, the development of modern telecommunications leads to a homogenization of space and therefore, according to the author, to an equalization of differences within and between nations: everyone can talk immediately to anyone. On the other hand, contemporary telecommunications technologies have the potential to meet the specific and diverse demands of individual consumers. For Pool the old world of centralized, and often state-owned, communications networks is gradually being replaced by the brave 400 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE new world of a flexible and specialized communications services industry. This is a study of technology and culture, but one in which tech­ nology undoubtedly has the upper hand. According to the editor of this volume (Pool died in 1984), the author described himselfas a “soft technological determinist.” This is a reasonable description. For while there is some sensitivity in Technologies without Boundaries to the influ­ ence of politics and economics on the development of telecommuni­ cations networks, in the end it is the inherent (and benign) force of technological change that is seen as leading to cultural transformation. While it is tempting to dismiss this book’s arguments as overdeter­ mined by its neoliberalism, its scope and ambition are undoubtedly impressive. The impact of telecommunications on freedom of speech, on the environment, and on relations between developed and devel­ oping countries are all examined with equal vigor. The relation between telecommunications and global transformations in the spatial organization of social activity is explored at length. In an era when social science research has often retreated into the safety of policy analysis or the individual case study, Technologies without Boundaries has, at the very least, indicated a gap in the market. Andrew Barry Dr. Barry is lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. His current research is on the sociology of telecommunications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Olivetti: A Study ofthe Corporate Management ofDesign. By Sibylle Kicherer. New York: Rizzoli, 1990. Pp. 163; illustrations, notes, bibliography. $35.00. This book recounts in careful detail the evolution of Olivetti as one of Italy’s most respected companies, with a unique international identity between technology and culture. Sibylle Kicherer sympathet­ ically relates management design philosophy to corporate structures...