GANDHI WITH SATELLITES
That more and more leaders of First Wave countries are aware of the importance of communications is clear from the fight they are waging for a redistribution of the world’s electronic spectrum. Because the Second Wave powers developed telecommunications early, they have captured control of the available frequencies. The U.S. and theU.S.S.R. alone use up 25 percent of the available shortwave broadcasting spectrum, and a bigger chunk of the more sophisticated parts of the spectrum.
This spectrum, however, like the ocean floor and the planet’s breathable air, belongs—or should belong—to everyone, not just a few. Thus many of the First Wave countries insist the spectrum is a limited resource and want to be assigned a share of it—even if at the moment they lack the equipment to use it. (They assume they can “rent out” their part until such time as they are ready to use it themselves.) Facing resistance from both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., they call for a “New World Information Order.”
The larger issue they face, however, is internal: how to divide their limited resources between telecommunications and transport. It is the same question that the most technically sophisticated of nations also must confront. Given low-cost ground stations, computerized kibbutz- size irrigation systems, perhaps even ground sensing devices, and super-cheap computer terminals for village use and cottage industry, it may be possible for First Wave societies to avoid some of the enormous expenditure for heavy transport that the Second Wave nations had to bear. Such ideas no doubt sound Utopian today. But the time will soon be on us when they are commonplace.
Not long ago, Indonesian President Suharto pressed the tip of a traditional sword against an electronic push button and thereby inaugurated a satellite communications system aimed at linking the parts of the Indonesian archipelago together— much as the railroads with their golden spike linked the two coasts of America a century ago. In so doing, he symbolized the new options that the Third Wave presents to countries seeking transformation.
Developments like these in energy, agriculture, technology, and communications suggests something even deeper—whole new societies based on the fusion of past and future, of First Wave and Third Wave.
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