The Information Age: Television and Computers

Information technology powered change in the postindustrial period that began in the 1960s, just as innovations in textile making and the spread of railroads had in the nineteenth century. This technology’s ability to transmit knowledge, culture, and political information globally competed with mass journalism, film, and radio via television, computers, and telecommunications. Once-remote villages were linked to urban capitals on the other side of the world thanks to videocassettes, satellite television, and telecommunications. Because of technology, protests became media events worldwide.

Americans embraced television in the 1950s; between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, Europeans rapidly adopted television as a major entertainment and communications medium. In 1954, just 1 percent of French households had television; by 1974, almost 80 percent did. With the average viewer tuning in about four and a half hours a day, the audience for newspapers and theater declined. “We devote more . . . hours per year to television than [to] any other single artifact,” one sociologist commented in 1969. As with radio, European governments funded television broadcasting with tax dollars and controlled TV programming to avoid what they perceived as the substandard fare offered by American commercial TV; instead they featured drama, ballet, concerts, variety shows, and news. The welfare state, in Europe at least, thereby gained more power to shape daily life.

The emergence of communications satellites and video recorders in the 1960s brought competition to state-sponsored television. Worldwide audiences enjoyed broadcasts from throughout the West as satellite technology allowed for the global transmission of sports broadcasts and other programming. Soap operas, game shows, and situation comedies (sitcoms) from the United States arrived dubbed in native languages. Feature films on videotape first became readily available to television stations; then, in 1969, competition increased when the Sony Corporation introduced the first affordable color videocassette recorder to the consumer market.

East and west, television exercised a powerful political and cultural influence. Even in a rural area of the Soviet Union, more than 70 percent of the inhabitants watched television regularly in the late 1970s. Educational programming united the far-flung population of the USSR by broadcasting shows designed to advance Soviet culture. At the same time, with travel impossible or forbidden to many in the Soviet world, shows about foreign lands were among the most popular. Heads of state could usually bump regular programming. In the 1960s, French president Charles de Gaulle appeared frequently on television, using the grandiose gestures of an imperial ruler to stir patriotism. Increasingly, politicians needed media experts as much as they did policy experts.

Just as revolutionary as television, the computer reshaped work in science, defense, and ultimately industry. Computers had evolved dramatically since the first electronic ones, like the Colossus used by the British in 1943 to decode Nazi military and diplomatic messages. From the 1940s to the 1980s, computing machines shrank from the size of a gymnasium to that of an attaché case. They also became both far less expensive and fantastically more powerful, thanks to the development of increasingly sophisticated digital electronic circuitry implanted on tiny silicon chips, which replaced clumsy radio tubes. Within a few decades, the computer could perform hundreds of millions of operations per second and the price of the integrated circuit at the heart of computer technology would fall to less than a dollar.

Computers changed the pace and patterns of work not only by speeding up tasks but also by performing many operations that workers had once done themselves. Soon, like other outworkers, people could work for large industries at home, connected to a central mainframe. In 1981, the French phone company launched a public computer network, the Minitel (a forerunner of the World Wide Web), through which individuals could make travel reservations, perform stock transactions, and obtain information. Many observers believed that computers would profoundly expand mental capacity, providing, in the words of one scientist, “boundless opportunities . . . to resolve the puzzles of cosmology, of life, and of the society of man.” Others countered that computers programmed people, reducing human initiative and the ability to solve problems. Regardless of observers’ opinions, positive or negative, the information revolution was under way.