Goodbye, and good luck

David Fisher retires after 37 years as Editor of Screen Digest. Given that the monthly magazine chronicles all aspects of media and telecommunications, Fisher has become a living encyclopaedia and a sharp observer of global trends. In a valedictory column for the publication, he looks back and forward.

The opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001, A Space Odyssey depicts a group of earth-bound apes jumping around until one hurls a bone spinning into the sky, ready to transmute into a space station. The image stands as a good metaphor for the time between your editor first entering the yet-to-be-hallowed portals of Screen Digest and going out now wherein he came.

Only five issues old when his efforts as news editor began in February 1972 and only a little more than two years on until he was editor, this journal has chronicled an unprecedent, unforeseeable, even unimaginable transformation in the media. (It is no longer breaching a confidence to report that Mr Kubrick was one of the first subscribers to Screen Digest).

Picture, if you can, the media landscape in 1972. We had cinema in inexorable decline in most Western countries, analogue broadcasting limited by shortage of frequencies: the UK had three television channels and that was more than its European neighbours. Those services more or less filled the capacity of copper-wire cable networks where they existed. Audio records were barely 15 years on from the transition from shellac 78rpm to vinyl 45rpm singles and the more upmarket 33rpm LP. Home video was imminent, but still several years from becoming a mainstream consumer item.

Computers were exotic, expensive items for adventurous corporate users. Satellites gave a brief window for communication as they passed overhead. Only radio, which in Europe has recently come through the era of commercial pirate stations, was arguably emerging into a new era.

For anyone starting 39 years earlier still, in 1933, the world of 1972 would not have seemed so different. The change from a world that was moving out of deep recession, through a world war into an era of Armageddon-threatening Cold War and, at least in the West, relative prosperity, provided a background to media developments that followed a steady continuum.

Today ... where to begin? Perhaps with the 472 issues of Screen Digest? Yet their steady, detailed progression partially hides the great leap forward, so does not begin to define the enormity of what has happened in a mere 39 years. Perhaps to have an inkling of that we need to contemplate how the world and the media will develop over the 39 years from now to 2050. Not even worth trying, is it? Five years out is probably the practical limit, especially allowing a significant margin of error. You only have to look back over the past five years to realise that.

Looking back to look ahead To some extent the simple acts we take for granted now – downloading an MP3 podcast to a memory stick, for instance – could have been anticipated, at least as concepts, decades ago. Indeed, in the magazine’s very editorial space, allusion was being made in the 1970s to a future of solid-state memories with no moving parts to go wrong, no tapes to snag on the capstan.

But technological change today is sudden, abrupt, chaotic, unlike the steady progression of earlier times. The spinning weights and flywheels that regulated steam-driven machinery have given way to binary states. On is on, off is really off.

The editorial shelves contain a number of books about the future – not about what is still to come from our current perspective, but about what thinkers and writers of the past thought was to come and which for us is already history – or, more likely, not. Even the best of them are frequently wide of the mark, even in broad-brush terms, let alone detail. From the perspective of the late 1960s, for example, it was perhaps difficult to imagine that Soviet communism was not as durable as American capitalism. Yet within little more than 20 years it was to crumble.

Interestingly, The Year 2000, written by Herman Kahn and Anthony J Wiener of the Hudson Institute in 1967, saw both political archetypes as potentially vulnerable to decline. One has faded, what price the other? (Kahn and Wiener identified European disillusionment as a trigger for the loss of American influence.)

A radical change that would see the power of American audio-visual media decline (outside America, of course) has been a generally unrealised aspiration for 100 years, since European film producers met in Paris in 1909 to debate the prospect of the lucrative transatlantic export market for their films being closed off, as indeed it was by a combination of an illegal cartel, a surge of anti-European jingoism and then war. Will globalism ever transform into a multi-way exchange between media cultures?

More to see, less vision
By the 1970s, the one forecast that all seemed to agree on was the accelerating rate of change. That prospect was scary then because of the ever-present risk of escalation into nuclear war. One important reaction at the time was the 'small is beautiful' syndrome. Peter Goldmark, the inventor of the LP, the CBS colour television system and EVR, wrote an article in the July 1972 issue of the Journal of the SMPTE on 'Communications for a New Rural Society'. After demonstrating the dramatic rate of change in the 20th century in such fields as the speed of transport, communications and destructive power, he developed a notion (which might be seen as a parallel with hippy ethics) of using communications to allow a movement of populations from the major conurbations back to smaller communities.

In the wider world (Goldmark wrote only about the US) there were similar plans, such as the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) in 1975/76 to install dishes in Indian villages to provide a great leap forward through education in farming techniques, healthcare and family planning for populations that had never escaped from rural environments that were a long way from the pastoral idyll of New England.

The technology has more than caught up with those visions, and occasionally the visions have been fulfilled. Some societies, such as the artificially designated BRIC bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China), have taken those giant leaps forwards, even if most third world countries trail behind at some distance. Something akin to Goldmark's William Morris-like ideas of a less metro centric life, for example, are part of UK government policy, which supports the spread of broadband to the entire population and, most recently, has re-discovered the potential of local television – just like the 1970s.

The 1960s and 1970s were an era of visions. Were those aspirational visions a counterbalance to the apocalyptic visions? The threat of global war no longer casts such a long shadow. Instead we are told to be afraid of terror, which is about as intangible as any 'war' could be. Yet in this (relatively) more peaceful and certainly more plentiful world a generation or more on there is a distinct shortage of visions. Where such goals exist they are recycled versions of earlier visions and are not as prominent in the short-termist everyday agenda as they once were.

Media technology evolves because it can. And nothing intrinsically wrong with that. (Not even 3D, ahem.) Yet, the idea is hard to shake that technology is now driving society and not the other way round. E-mail was a massive leap forward from snail mail. People are finding uses for Facebook (sort of). Twitter is clever, but mostly pointless. On the other hand, the internet as a whole is no less revolutionary for civilisation now than steam power was 200 years ago or electricity 100 years ago. So, instead of riding off into the sunset, your editor stares into the sun at the dawn of an almost limitless future. Hi ho Silver!
Contact: www.screendigest.com...

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