Because by definition most historians tend to be preoccupied with the past, issues of contemporary and future significance rarely excite their academic concern. Such is the case with the preservation of new kinds of contemporary record material which are likely to prove of enormous benefit to future generations of historians. In the past century, the enormous technological advances in what Asa Briggs termed in the 1960s the 'communications revolution' have transformed our lives and the way we see the world around us. The pace of this transformation has been even more rapid in the past decade. It is sobering to think back to the Falklands War of 1982, which today seems even more like a nineteenth century type of conflict than it did at the time, fought as it was in an age before accessible domestic video cassette recorders, multi-channel satellite television, portable camcorders and satphones, laptop computers, fax machines and modems, let alone before most of us had heard of the like of 'CNN' , 'Microsoft ' , the 'Internet ' and 'information superhighways', digital data transmission or the global information infrastructure. Anglo-US deregulation in the area of communications and the media in the 1980s, coupled with the end of the Cold War, have encouraged technological trends which finally perhaps make the concept of a 'global village' realizable. During the abortive Moscow coup of 1991, an interned Michael Gorbachev in the Crimea could learn of events in Moscow by the BBC World Service while Boris Yeltsin at the White House could chart the progress of his supporters in the streets around him by tuning in to Atlanta-based CNN. By contrast to the Falklands, the Persian Gulf War, fought less than a decade later in 1991, could be fought out on real-time live global television, viewed by professors and printers from Vancouver to Vladivostock at the same time as presidents and prime ministers on both sides of the conflict. Converted American EC130 aircraft were capable of transmitting multistandard and multi-frequency radio and television pictures into the battle zones of occupied Kuwait while messages from one side to the other could be sent instantaneously, via electronic mail (e-mail). This indeed is the New World Information and Communications Order where the media act not simply as observers of events but also as participants and sometimes even as catalysts, as in the case of TV pictures of the Kurds prompting John Major to suggest Operation Provide Comfort to the Americans in 1991 or to Bill Clinton's reversal of American policy in Somalia after watching pictures of a butchered American airman being dragged through General Aideed's camp. All this has happened at such breathtaking speed that contemporary historians have inevitably struggled to grapple with its consequences. In Britain, at least, historians tend to be by nature a conservative profession--although this is changing because we have
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Nov 1, 1997
M A Kazaryan + 3
Open Access