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Toward Theological Understanding: An Interview with Edward Farley

You've written that the first aim of theological education is not to teach pastoral skills or to mold scholars but to convey "wisdom" about "the believer's existence and action in the world." What do you mean by this?

My point is that theological education cannot be reduced to the learning of clerical skills or to scholarly knowledge. That's what's behind those negations. My assumption is that all Christians are inevitably engaged everyday in existential responses to the world, and that theology concerns the wisdom by which one brings the resources of a religious tradition to bear on the world. This task calls not for indifference or innocence or naïveté but wisdom--the ability to assess what is going on and to appraise new possibilities. To put it another way, in living out of the inherited symbols and narratives of one's faith, one isn't just applying dead truths to a living situation. Instead, one is embodying or incorporating oneself into a living tradition. That's a creative act and an interpretive act, an act of theological understanding.

Does this mean that the model of theological education that takes place in a seminary is not that different from the model of theological education that applies to all Christians?

I think that's true for the basic model. That's not to say there are no distinctive tasks for the seminary. Insofar as we are talking about people going into parish ministry, there are obvious topics that have to do with leadership in the parish that need to be engaged. But I would oppose a formulation of the seminary's task that construes it simply as a matter of providing training in certain pastoral skills. The primary focus of education should he on theological understanding. Therefore I see pastoral skills themselves as embodying theological understanding.

What do you see as the place of tradition in that task? As you know, the word "traditioning" has come into our language, and many observers believe that the church has lost touch with its tradition and needs to be "retraditioned."

I have to accede to the point, but I'm also suspicious about the trend. My suspicion has to do with the sense that, in a period of anxiety about the inroads made by secularism and about the loss of, say, a distinctive Reformed or Lutheran tradition, some would embrace "tradition" in an uncritical way. Some elements in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), for example, would make the detailed subscription to selected doctrines a condition of ordination. I think that would be a step back from both critical thinking and an openness to other traditions which it took hundreds of years to establish.

On the other hand, it's clear that there can be no religious faith without a sense of tradition. Without tradition, religion would disappear in a generation. We've learned from the sociologists that this is what happened in the so-called decline of the mainline churches since the 1960s. It wasn't so much that people left the church in droves, but that somehow the traditioning that went on in those churches didn't take hold in the next generation--that is, among adolescents and young adults. So we have the rather severe problem of an unfortunate choice facing many of the young: accept either a mystical and irrelevant religious tradition or a cynical secular environment.

How do we make the tradition vital, interesting and understandable? And how do we do it in a way that doesn't involve the rejection of evolution and modern science--which is the fundamentalist temptation? That is a theological problem for congregations.

Does this present a new task for seminary education?

I think it does. One of the features of the postmodern epoch is that certain deep cultural values that used to he taken for granted have eroded. Values such as tradition, reality, obligation, beauty; nature, transcendence, nature, mystery, hope--the things whose power makes a society work--are not operational in typical postmodern institutions, the workplace, the government, the media, the entertainment industry. This erosion of deep values seems to be culture-wide and thus applies to congregations and their members. If this is so, the preaching and education that take place in congregations cannot pretend that business is as usual.

Surely the whole situation deserves close attention in theological schools. When the problem of eroded deep symbols of tradition and culture is ignored, the discourse of the religious community turns into clichés banalities and sentimentalisms.

Some observers would say that theological education has been too much focused on the cognitive dimension of learning as opposed to personal and social transformation--doing and feeling. How would you respond?

I think it's an unfortunate dichotomy. Genuine knowing is always driven by a passion. Without a passion we won't submit ourselves to what it takes to really know something. Plato called this passion eros. Most people's knowing is already oriented by a passionate involvement in the world--it's already a matter of flesh and blood, of struggling with life's challenges.

Of course, any time you move into a course of study, the everyday involvement and struggle is going to be set aside to a degree. All real knowing involves a particular focus. Even a cooking class is going to have to come to terms with some particular bits of knowledge--otherwise you won't even get the water to boil. But we shouldn't take as our paradigm of knowing the most technical and rigorous kinds of focusing--like what scientists do when they're studying a virus. I don't see that kind of technical knowing going on in theological education. Faced with the complaint you mention, therefore, I would want to probe the meaning of the charge.

What changes have you noticed in the student population, and how have those changes affected the context of teaching?

Seminaries are more diverse institutions than they were ten years ago. To begin with, only a portion of the students are planning to go into parish ministry. This variety of vocational interests poses a lot of pedagogical issues. Seminaries are becoming multiple resource centers for laypeople and congregations. Also, the presence of women, plus racial diversity, and denominational diversity, makes for a student body that's different from what it was a generation ago.

I'm told that it's harder to attract really good students. If you compare, for example, the number of Phi Beta Kappa graduates going into ministry today with 40 year's ago, the number has dropped dramatically. One cannot assume that students in seminary are academically oriented enough to have the tools of reading and thinking that postgraduate education requires.

A perennial concern for observers of theological education is the perceived gap between the seminaries and congregations. What does that gap look like to you?

Because of the diversity of programs in seminaries and the number of students who are not oriented toward congregations, the seminary agenda is probably wider than it was a generation ago, when most students were bound for congregations.

A good bit of my writing has tried to discredit what I have called the "clerical paradigm" of the nature of theology. This refers to the notion that theology is a theoretical undertaking for professionals, and that therefore theology is not for laypeople. As I've said, I think theological education should be a phenomenon in congregations as well as seminaries. something like that could come about, a new continuity would be fostered between seminaries and congregations.

There has always been criticism of seminaries for not doing a good enough job teaching specific pastoral skills. This criticism has never made a lot of sense to me. This is not to say schools can't improve the way they prepare ministers. But behind that criticism is a distinction between theory and practice that corrupts theological education. It views the minister as a person who has various skills--such as in counseling, proclamation and organization--but not a whole lot of content or theological understanding. But without theological understanding none of the skills is that useful

So I'm back to my original point: theological understanding is what unites the various enterprises of seminary education. The skills in counseling, preaching and organization need to be informed by the great narratives and insights of the tradition. That describes the kind of leaders that congregations need. If these leaders introduced a genuine theological education into congregations, I wouldn't worry about a gap between seminaries and congregations.

What, specifically, are theological schools doing well? What not so well?

The mainline schools I know have responded fairly well to the issues thrust upon them: the issues of race, gender, liberation--the new diversity and complexity of the student body. They haven't just resisted all those developments, and that's to their credit. Also, they have not given up on scholarship. Most teachers have a mastery of their field, and the subjects are taught within integrity and an openness to the larger world of scholarship. This hasn't always been the case, and it's all to the good.

What don't they do very well? The "clerical paradigm" that defines theology as a clergy possession (thus theological education as simply clergy education) seems to be as powerful as ever. When it dominates a school, the theology student is seen as a future "professional" who must learn "theory" to be applied to "practice." This isolates theological wisdom into "academic disciplines" which then seem irrelevant, and it empties practice (what ministers do as ministers) of theological understanding.

Students, ministers, churches and schools all complain about this in a way that perpetuates it. That is, they want more ministry skills to be taught. I see this professionalist mind-set as still prevalent in schools. Insofar as it is, the students experience their education as a series of rather isolated academic studies, not as steps in the forming of theological wisdom. In other words, theological education still has not found a new paradigm for the nature of theology, reasons for the way it organizes its course of study, and a coherent version of the routes students take through their studies.

How can that problem be addressed?

I'm a little pessimistic, because faculty members come out of graduate schools with a loyalty to a particular field, and it's very hard to get their attention or arouse their passion for larger sets of problems, such as pedagogy or the reform of theological education.

Therefore it's very hard to get seminaries to really change what they do. I wonder, in this respect, whether seminaries are well served by the structural division between a chief executive, who deals primarily with the external constituency, and an academic dean, who deals with internal matters. This leaves the area of educational reform to a subordinate officer. Presidents have the power to bring about reform, but their focus is on a different area.

What other issues do you see on the horizon?

Schools have a great need for faculty in the "practical" areas, which constitute a large part of the curriculum but there are few credible graduate programs in areas like homiletics and pastoral ministry. And each of the practical fields is struggling for identity and is undergoing transitions. The very concept of "practical theology" is unclear. This makes it very difficult for seminaries to staff themselves and develop faculty in the "practical" fields.

Second, I wonder if it is possible for the schools to discover in themselves some social mechanism for creative change. Faculty members are "field" loyal and preoccupied, presidents have an eye on external resources, and deans work at institutional maintenance. This social structure has lent itself to perpetuating the status quo for many decades now, and there are not many signs of creative institutional change. So it seems to be the case that some altered social structure is needed in the schools if theological education is ever to be genuinely reformed.

Finally, with people talking these days about the growing isolation of seminaries from larger religious contexts, such as denominations, I wonder if some new structure needs to take shape that relates seminaries to local and national church leaders. This might involve reconceiving the makeup of the board of trustees. These boards are now primarily oriented toward fund raising. But one could require a proportion of the trustees to be selected from lay and clergy leaders, local and national, who could keep the seminary more engaged with the denomination and the congregations. Having that relationship built in might help.

 

Why Seminaries Don’t Change: A Reflection on Faculty Specialization

During the past 15 years, theological education has been the subject of intense inquiry. Research arising from social-scientific, theological, historical, feminist and curricular concerns has generated reams of paper and resulted in a significant literature of description and assessment. We probably now know more about theological education than we ever have.

While this literature offers no single recommendation, some themes have become familiar: the acquisition of ministerial skills should entail more than theological education; a coherent theological education must rest in some aspect of theology itself (God, redemption, church, moral life). At the same time, certain complaints recur: traditional curricula are rooted in precritical assumptions, serve academic guilds, pre-empt feminist or minority studies, and are built on unviable ways of relating theory and practice.

But has this intense scrutiny of theological education had any effect on the schools and their programs? My impression, confirmed by people who keep close tabs on the scene, is No. Despite all the studies and discussions, the schools are much the way they were 15 years ago. Schools have taken a close look at themselves. Many have conducted curricular reviews and added or subtracted this or that item. For example, the popular master of theological studies degree has added a new dimension and population to some schools. But little or no genuine reform has taken place in either seminary or graduate degree programs.

This is puzzling, since both society as a whole and the schools themselves have been rapidly changing. The large number of women and minority students has transformed the schools into new kinds of communities. New literary canons, issues, methods and themes have invaded various academic fields. Why, then, have the schools’ basic understandings of clergy education remained unchanged?

Perhaps the literature of reform has not been specific enough to be helpful. Perhaps American religion’s recent conservative shift has so affected the mood of the schools that denominational seminaries must now battle just to hold on to the gains made in the 1950s and ‘60s (such as commitments to practical theology, to historical-critical hermeneutics and to revisioning traditional dogmatics). But I think there is a third reason for theological education’s resistance to change: the social structure of theological schools as academic institutions tends to inhibit genuine reform.

Before proceeding, I need to spell out what I mean by genuine reform. Genuine reform means reconceiving an academic program’s overall aim so that its very structure is altered. It means altering the way students move through the sequence of requirements, and installing new criteria to measure the successful completion of the degree. It means that faculty will contribute to and participate in the program differently than before. Such reform can come about rather suddenly and in connection with the use of political power, or through exploratory and consensual processes over an extended period of time.

Institutions are difficult to reform, since their very function is to assist a human work to endure over time. Indeed, the first task of an institution is to perpetuate itself. Academic institutions are no exception. In devoting themselves to the necessary tasks of maintaining a degree program, they focus on teaching expertise, recurring courses of study, standards of student admission and symbols of adequate student performance. Since the task of educating future clergy has no foreseeable end, theological schools have an absolute orientation toward self-preservation.

To fulfill their assigned task, theological schools must survive in a competitive market. They are under constant pressure to offer an education that is perceived to be of high quality. These schools measure their quality not simply by academic standards but by such things as piety (spirituality), relevance and "professional" orientation. Indeed, their alumni and their affiliated denominations are especially concerned about these nonacademic criteria and tend to criticize the schools for being "too academic," straying too far from the canons of denominational belief, or being insufficiently practical.

But despite these recurring complaints, theological schools have more and more tended to make academic quality the central element in their reputations. Accordingly, faculty members are required to have earned the Ph.D. degree, and to be promising scholars who contribute to their fields and meet high standards for tenure and promotion. This commitment to having a first-rate academic faculty draws schools into the ethos of American higher education.

Because the faculty has an almost exclusive role in determining the content and standards for the degree programs, it tends to be the central source of a school’s ethos and standards. To the extent that seminaries imitate what American higher education expects of faculty members, they will require that faculty members be scholar teachers within the parameters of a specialized field, such as social ethics, or New Testament, or American religious history. Tenure and promotion depend on accomplishments within this specialized field. Standards for achievement originate in and are maintained by the field itself, operating as a guild of cooperating scholars. Thus, each faculty member represents a field using a special discourse, working within certain methods, and giving priority to certain issues. In large faculties a specialized field will have several representatives; in small faculties, perhaps only one.

The organization of faculties into specialty fields is more than a superficial strategy for the distribution of labor. It forms a large part of professors’ identities, determining their basic cognitive commitments, guild loyalty, career-long agendas and perceptions of other fields. This specialization begins in graduate school, or even before. Though all faculty members have responsibilities that draw them outside their areas of expertise—serving on schoolwide committees, for instance—in most schools these responsibilities are not very important for securing tenure and promotion.

Academic specialization entails more than an awareness of one’s expertise—the specific technical abilities and knowledge that one uses to teach or do research. It has some of the trappings of a worldview. To be closely and cognitively focused on, for example, a text, a literature, a historical period or a social entity tends to make one see that object of study as a paradigm of reality. Chemists, linguists, mathematicians, historians, behaviorists and phenomenologists are likely to view the larger world in terms of their own particular world and to suspect that genuine knowledge requires something like what they do. Because specialization sets the terms for a faculty member’s participation in the life of a school, it is perhaps the most powerful structure at work in faculty life: the faculty member’s existence and legitimation are at stake when his or her field is threatened. And the faculty member’s primary loyalty is more likely to be to the field than to the school itself, or to the school’s general aims or to higher education.

Specialization unavoidably inculcates a "hermeneutic of suspicion" toward other fields. Other fields are suspect both because their contents and methods differ, sometimes radically, from those of one’s own field and because threatening political possibilities reside in this difference. Different fields have different paradigms of knowledge, research and interpretation. Since people believe that their own paradigm properly expresses genuine scholarship, they tend to see other paradigms as dilutions and possibly even betrayals of scholarship. And they know that people in other fields view them with similar suspicion.

The feeling that other faculty members do not understand or fully appreciate one’s field and work is common. This suspicion, which taints faculty relations, spawns a second suspicion—of any and all potential leaders, administrative or otherwise. Deans, department chairs and ad hoc committee chairs are by definition oriented to broader agendas and operate under broader criteria than those of one specialty field. This concern for a broader welfare relativizes specialty fields and is, thus, suspect.

An unspoken mutual agreement keeps specialization from creating a paralyzing paranoia. This agreement can be called the "hands-off" principle. Like "councilmanic courtesy" in city governments, the hands-off agreement prompts faculty members to respect one another’s specialty fields and identities. The agreement to keep "hands off" each other’s specialties applies to both academic-pedagogical and political activities. Academically, faculty members refrain from questioning or discrediting one another’s fields. They rarely articulate their suspicion that another field is trivial and its methods bogus. Politically, faculty members agree not to pursue institutional or political issues whose outcome would have a radical effect on any specialty field.

A faculty member thus assures the continued existence of his own specialty by agreeing to protect the existence of others. Unfortunately, the hands-off agreement breeds a certain indifference to general concerns affecting the school’s health. The agreement to avoid field-threatening issues and the relative indifference to general institutional matters limit the faculty to assisting with the nuts and bolts of institutional maintenance. It becomes difficult for faculty to participate in grand designs, theories of educational transformation, or new pedagogical paradigms.

Something even more problematic than this has happened, according to Barbara Wheeler of Auburn Seminary. The splintering of fields in graduate programs has promoted such specialization that it is becoming increasingly difficult for faculty members even in the same field to converse with one another. Specialization in this case has gone so far that it entails alienation from the field itself. According to Wheeler, this spawns a new problem: the loss of the capacity to mount clear arguments and analyses on the basis of one’s field identity—something faculty traditionally could do very well.

This account of specialization and faculty identity needs some qualifications. First, specialization is not merely something to bemoan. It is the condition and the concomitant of virtually all creative and rigorous knowledge.

Second, my account does little justice to the differences between individuals, programs and types of schools. Clearly, the ethos of specialization is much more intense in large graduate programs staffed by research-oriented specialists than in small undergraduate programs in which most faculty members teach some introductory courses.

Third, we should be suspicious of any social-scientific account that interprets ethos, identity and institutional structure in such a way that it ignores the ability of many if not most faculty members to transcend their fields in a variety of ways. This is partly because most contemporary specialty fields are already "interdisciplinary," are already composites of a variety of methods and disposed to incorporate new approaches. (Nevertheless, these elements of transcendence are not strong enough to foster genuine reform.)

Fourth, the faculties of professional and graduate schools tend to see themselves as cognitively open, able to work amid cultural pluralisms and competing cognitive styles, and genuinely concerned for the school’s welfare. Insofar as these "liberal" virtues characterize faculty members, the ethos of faculty life is conflicted, caught in a tension between liberal impulses and the suspicions that come with specialization.

The power both to initiate reform and to make it work is in the hands of the faculty. For reform to take hold, a faculty needs to understand, participate in and identify with new aims, paradigms and structures. An extensive, facultywide discussion that analyzes and criticizes the current situation, reviews how things got that way, and explores new possibilities is essential to genuine reform. While students and administration may provide a stimulus to such a discussion, they cannot simply force reform. The instances in which school trustees and administralion work together to dismantle and replace a school’s faculty are rare. For the most part, genuine reform is brought about not by external administrative acts but by internal faculty processes.

Within faculties, both political coups and bureaucratic processes lead to program changes. Faculty power politics—relatively rare in theological schools—effects change when a self-conscious and politicized group outvotes or outmaneuvers opposing groups. Typically, these maneuvers result not in genuinely new paradigms, aims and structures but merely in the change of an administrative officer or department chair, or the approval or disapproval of specific courses, dissertations or promotions. Perhaps the reason faculty power politics is relatively rare is that it exacts such a high price. Power politics violates the hands-off agreement between fields and causes devastating and long-lasting injuries to community life.

More typically, faculty-originated change comes by way of bureaucratic processes. But because such processes are created to maintain existing programs, they are unlikely to bring about reform. When ad hoc reform-oriented groups do arise within the bureaucratic process, their work is tamed by the hands-off agreement and by the faculty’s suspicions of all activities that transcend their specializations.

Are we to conclude, then, that seminaries cannot reform themselves? I am not sure that even a threat to institutional survival is powerful enough to offset a school’s structural resistance to reform. Given the way educational institutions conserve themselves, rapid and self-critical reform, accomplished within and by the faculty in cooperation with students and administration, does not seem possible. Reform may be possible only to the degree that something takes place in the school that affects specialty identity, the intrinsic suspicion of other fields and of all leadership, and the hands-off ethos. Some element must be introduced into faculty life that draws professors toward modes of inquiry, interpretation and assessment that transcend academic specializations. This must not discredit focused and rigorous inquiry or cancel specialty fields, since to lose these would rob theological schools of the cognitive gains of two centuries of humanistic scholarship, gains which were very dearly won. Rather, faculty members must be socialized both into and beyond their specializations.

Faculties need to develop new social identities and ways of being together that transcend their specializations. Faculty retreats can be useful if they allow small groups to tackle general issues. Also useful are faculty seminars that encourage small groups to study a text from another religious tradition, or a current social issue, or a current American religious practice in such a way that transcends specialized fields. The Lilly Endowment once offered fellowships that enabled applicants to study and work outside their own fields. Providing such opportunities for seminary faculties also would promote a new environment. A professor of Hebrew Bible might study feminist theory, for example, while a professor of pastoral care might spend time in a Buddhist monastery.

Whatever the methods used, schools need to create a faculty accustomed to transspecialty inquiry and discussion. Such a faculty is the necessary condition for genuine reform.

 

Transforming a Lukewarm Church

Since the mid-1960s, the mainline Protestant denominations have declined in membership, numbers of churches and church attendance. Statistical decline, cultural marginalization and religious displacement from the center is the recent story of the mainline churches. Conservative Protestant movements now occupy the religious center and constitute a good portion of the mainline denominations.

These rapid social shifts have evoked denominational self-examination and an at tending literature of historical and sociological inquiry. The books are familiar: The Gathering Storm in the Churches (Jeffrey Hadden), Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Dean Kelley), Where Have All the People Gone? (Carl Dudley); so too are the names of many other scholars who study the matter: Berger, Marty, Rieff, Hogue, Roof, Bellah and McKinney. Familiar also are a pair of widespread responses to the mainline's statistical decline: an increasing adaptation to conservative agendas and a growing enthusiasm for what some call the church growth movement. Conservative adaptation shows up in the studied silence (one writer called it trivialization) maintained on controversial issues, and in the pervasive rhetoric of retrieval -- the old ways, doctrines or distinctive denominational traditions. Church growth strategies would reverse the decline by new techniques of membership attraction and retention.

John B. Cobb Jr., one of this country's best-known Protestant theologians, offers a diagnosis and recommenced treatment for the mainline's plight. The five lectures collected here are not so much social science analyses as a mix of intuitive social discernment, historical tracking and theological thinking. That we have this analysis from Cobb should not surprise us. Stressing both global and local crises of social suffering, Cobb's recent writings have brought theological thinking into a variety of fresh engagements: with the sciences, other religious faiths, economics, theological education, and congregations. Furthermore, Cobb has prefigured the present book by two earlier works that urge lay Christians to take up theological thinking in a serious way: Becoming a Thinking Christian (1993)' and Lay Theology (1994). Three major themes interact in Reclaiming the Church: the loss of vitality (what he calls "lukewarmness") in the mainline churches, an inquiry into what brought about this condition, and a proposal about what a new vitality (Cobb's term is "transformation") would look like and what would bring it about.

To locate Cobb's book among the responses to the statistical decline of the Protestant mainline (despite the book's subtitle, Cobb himself prefers the term oldline) is somewhat misleading. Cobb's primary categories of analysis are not statistical or quantitative but theological. Lukewarmness and transformation are both theological notions; accordingly, his criteria for vitality are not statistical but theological and ethical. Conceivably, therefore, a denomination or religious movement can be vital in the statistical sense of new churches built and congregations expanded, yet still be lukewarm in Cobb's sense. That Cobb's analysis allows for such a possibility distinguishes it from the perspectives of the church growth movement.

What idea of ecclesial vitality does Cobb have in mind when he charges the mainline churches with lukewarmness? Cobb is clearly raising the issue of what used to be called piety, a spiritual quality of life in the church. To further delimit this spiritual quality Cobb introduces a Whiteheadian concept -- intensity. Lukewarmness means a low intensity of shared feeling. Low intensity is both a low degree of passionate interest -- the kind that generates real disagreement and dispute -- and a low valuation of faith and church on the full spectrum of held values. For Cobb, then, the idea of ecclesial vitality indicates intense passion or interest and also the retention of faith's centrality -- Seek first the kingdom of God."

But how do we know when faith is central and passion intense? Cobb provides us with some exemplary signs of vitality. First, a vital church is one that is culturally engaged. It may or may not be "established" at the center of society. It maybe sociologically marginal. Yet, if it is vital, it will be engaged with society's problems, crises, trends and sufferings. These problems include the wrongs done to various groups -- wrongs done to women, ethnic groups, regional peoples, and races. Since complicity in these harmful acts is part of the church's history, present-day repentance and redress of these wrongs is a sign of vitality.

Second, a vital church will respond to how the larger society challenges (criticizes, attempts to discredit) the convictions and beliefs of the world of faith. For Cobb the old- line churches displayed vitality when they seriously struggled with the evolution of species and historical ways of studying the Bible.

Third, theological thinking itself is a sign of vitality. A vital religious community will be ever at the task of resolving confusions and ambiguities about its own mission, which means especially how it conceives God and salvation.

According to these criteria, then, a lukewarm church will display the following profile: it will be indifferent to its own theological confusions, uninterested in responding to challenges that confront its traditions, and isolated from the major problems and issues of its social environment.

How did the Protestant oldline lose vitality? Cobb does not attempt a comprehensive answer to this question, but he does proffer two quite different kinds of explanation -- one historical, the other theological. Lukewarmness may characterize late 20th-cen tury oldline churches, but historical perspective shows that it has been long in coming. Fervent belief, passionate shared convictions, the central place of faith itself did not suddenly disappear. The last three centuries have spawned intellectual movements that challenged and eventually eroded many pre 18th-century religious certainties. In Cobb's view these challenges are not entirely bad. They confronted and weakened older fanaticisms and pressed the church to acknowledge that it was not in the business of astronomy, geology, biology and history. The Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, a new nationalism requiring new social loyalties, and historical consciousness all affected the church's traditional way of relating its beliefs to the world. But whatever bracing effect these challenges to tradition may have had upon the church, the ensuing relativism of cultural forms and world views eroded established beliefs and with that a certain kind of religious vitality.

Cobb's theological explanation of religious vitality's decline draws on a recurring theme in his recent works: the need for lay theology and theological thinking as part of the everyday life of every congregation and every Christian. Cobb assumes that a democratization of theology is the normal and desirable state of the oldline churches. Thus he can say that the "professionalization" that reduces theology to a specialized undertaking endemic to the seminary -- in general to the academic world -- contributes to the story of the church's abandonment of its theological vocation. Having given theology over to the professors, the church now struggles untheologically with it own malaise, crises and societal obligations, which means for Cobb that the church struggles without any distinctively Christian perspective to guide it. Theology is neither an academic discipline nor a set of doctrines for Cobb, but a thinking about anything and everything from a Christian perspective. If Cobb is right, then it follows that theology is a feature of the Christian life and is something that can and should be done by all believers and congregations. If theology is not part of the Christian life, then other perspectives will dominate the churches' responses (or nonresponses) to society and to its own challenged beliefs.

In the last three chapters of Reclaiming the Church, Cobb explores what a reclaimed church -- one restored to vitality -- would look like. Instead of exploring specific strategies of change, he describes the content of a transformed churchly life. But transformation is one of at least two ways in which the church can respond to the problem of lukewarmness. The church can also follow the path of renewal. Renewal is the term Cobb uses when the church focuses on its own interior problems and seeks to recover the church's authentic tradition in order to correct various cultural idolatries. Transformation, for Cobb, includes renewal, but fosters broader societal engagements and even global concerns. Since, for example, self-absolutizing religions are part of ethnic and intra national conflicts across the globe, the path of transformation attempts to understand and mediate the conflicts of other faiths. And because transformation calls for genuinely theological responses, it is important that the churches be as clear as possible about what they mean by salvation and about Cod. If the church is simply muddled about such things, then it will hardly approach churchly and worldly problems from a distinctively Christian perspective.

Cobb's book is less an academic than a proclamatory and even prophetic work. It offers a theological diagnosis of church culpability and possibility rather than a social explanation of decline. Cobb's theological approach to oldline decline lends the book power and relevance and at the same time raises questions and new issues. In that light, then, I would like to think with and possibly beyond Cobb, not to discredit his ideas but to clarify and supplement them. I begin with some queries.



1. What is the relationship between lukewarmness and statistical indications of denominational decline? Or to ask it differently, what is the relationship between Cobb's signs of genuine vitality (societal engagement, responsiveness to challenges, repentance for past wrongs) and sociological criteria of ecclesial vitality such as numerical growth and attendance? However much the oldline churches can be faulted when evaluated according to Cobb's signs of vitality, those churches still come off better than churches of the new conservative religious center. Thus we have the paradox that, judged by some of Cobb's criteria, the conservative center is more "lukewarm" than the oldline, yet it is these churches that have become numerous, large, wealthy and popular. By this line of reasoning, the oldline is said to be in decline, not principally on theological grounds but largely in terms of numbers.

The question is whether Cobb in the end measures ecclesial decline in theological or sociological categories. At one point he says that lukewarmness is the deepest reason for the churches' decline. But it seems that the very things that make a religious faith genuinely vital also make it unmarketable. If that is so, the oldline's problem with membership actually could be a signal of vitality. Is Cobb's idea of ecclesial decline in fact informed at some level by a church-growth way of thinking that defines that decline in statistical rather than theological ways?

In the final analysis the vitality of oldline churches may be better measured by another of Cobb's norms: the criterion of piety or intensity of conviction. According to that yardstick, vitality, at least intuitively, seems to increase with fundamentalism and decrease with the broadened perspective (some would say relativism) that comes with the oldline's historical consciousness and responsiveness to societal needs. It may well be that oldline churches are indeed lukewarm in terms of intensity of conviction and, relatedly, are in both theological and sociological decline. One still wonders, however, how compatible such a measure is with Cobb's signs of genuine vitality according to which the oldline may be said to be at least relatively robust. If the oldline churches are lukewarm in terms of intensity of conviction, can they really be doing even relatively well when it comes to such signs of vitality as societal engagement and response to external challenge?

2. What is the relation between lukewarmness or the loss of vitabty and the churches' abandonment of their theological vocation? Cobb seems to regard the absence of theological thinking in the church as a or the cause of decline. This would suggest that (lay) theological thinking is an important part of the numerically strong conservative and fundamentalist churches that occupy the religious center. Yet I myself find very little of what Cobb calls theology in these churches. And if Philip Rieff is right, most American popular religion is therapeutic in content, whatever its prooftexting and traditionalist language.

Further, I find it difficult to get hold of the lay theological thinking that was supposedly in place in the oldline denominations in the period (whenever it was) prior to its present-day loss or abandonment. With certain exceptions, the Protestant movement always relied on a strong clergy -- laity distinction and with that a distinction between theologically educated clergy who proclaimed the word and interpreted the scriptures, and laity who depended on such educated clergy. It is not easy to discover past texts on the Christian life for which theological thinking in Cobb's sense has a central place.

Cobb is right when he says that the term theology has increasingly narrowed in meaning to the point where it now refers to an academic specialty. But was a democratization of theology and genuine lax' theology ever really developed in the Protestant movement? Pietism and Quakerism may be instances of such a phenomenon, but the movements do not seem typical of most oldline denominations. The paradigm of the theological educated clergy and the passive laity is one of the reasons why the Protestant movement has never thought it necessary to regard church education as theological education, or education in theological thinking. And this absence is not a recent phenomenon. I am suggesting that for many reasons -- hierar chical, educational, doctrinal -- the Protestant movement has rarely democratized theology. Cobb, then, maybe calling not for a retrieval but for something new in the churches.

3. Cobb provides the reader with an illuminating account of the historical and recent setting of oldline lukewarmness. He reviews the distant past to trace how Western civilization's move into the modern era challenged traditional religious beliefs. And Cobb hints at a theory of our postmodern condition when he describes certain endings and new beginnings characteristic of our time: Eurocentrism, nationalism and Enlightenment rationalism. I have no disagreements with Cobb on these broad matters, but something seems to be missing in his account of the social forces at work behind the oldline's reduced vitality. I have in mind the sorts of analyses we find in thinkers such as Spengler, Nietzsche, Marcuse and Lyotard. That missing something falls into an area about which Cobb is both knowledgable and concerned: economics. Consider the way the predominantly marketing and consumer society in which most Westerners live has transformed virtually all traditional institutions (governments, corporations, universities) and created new or transformed institutions (the media, entertainment and leisure, professional sports, communications).

This massive cultural transformation, called by some the rise of the postmodern era, has transformed everything: travel and tourism, reading, the "high arts," popular arts, health care, gender roles, the places where "wisdom" is deposited and sought, the relation of religion to the state, family continuity, sexuality, patterns of physical activity. In and through these institutional changes, American religious life has been reshaped. This complex of economically driven changes has displaced religion as the primary location of values and institutional loyalty and as the primary community of human relations. And this displacement is true even for groups who claim that Jesus, religion and the Bible remain fundamental for their identity. The typical postmodern lives in and is influenced by a variety of institutions -- each one promoting its own world of meaning and value -- which compete with each other for the loyalty, time and energy of the population.

Moreover, the social shift I describe has isolated certain powerful institutions (corporate, military, governmental, media, entertainment) from the influence of the so- called normative institutions such as education, religion and the arts. Indeed, the great cultural transformation of our time has changed the character of these normative institutions, drawing them into the marketplace and the world of image-making, of salesmanship and of managerial orientations. This massive shift has had a devastating effect on the once-deep cultural values that exerted their force upon most of society's institutions -- values of truth, duty, discipline, reading, beauty, family, tradition, justice, among many others. To the degree that members of oldline Protestant denominations participate in this reinstitutionalization of society and in the consequent erosion of deep values, their loyalties will be dispersed over a number of different social worlds, they will exist without what JeanFrancois Lyotard has termed a societal "master narrative," and they will surely experience lukewarmness with respect to traditional faith.

4. Does Cobb's diagnosis and prognosis so privilege historical and theological modes of explanation that something much closer at hand is missed, namely religious insti tutional dynamics? Cobb approaches institutional analysis of religion when he complains about the professionalization of theology. That direction of thought could open up an important and complex phenomenon: the rise of distinctive institutions withih the church itself that are tied to the ways churches organize themselves to survive over time and get their job done. Once these institutional structures are in place they create in their members distinctive expectations and non-expectations, ideas of what is and is not possible, and loyalties to the structures themselves. For example, in order to attract or keep a membership, a typical congregation must make the Sunday morning event work, and to do that it must have a certain kind of minister, music, ethos and preaching.

This very focus on the urgencies of Sunday morning creates criteria for clerical leadership that downplay theological thinking, theological education as a church activity; and congregations' responses to societal problems. Another example: the relation between obtaining tenure in a seminary faculty and precise competence in an academic field creates faculty identities and lifelong work pattems that isolate them from concern about the problems other institutions face, such as the problems of congregations and denominational bodies. Yet another example: the monetary health of denominational bureaucracies is delicately dependent on harmony with the prevailing ethos of the culture with respect to "controversial issues." Consequently, its ability to provide leadership in restoring a theological vocation to the church, on these issues and others, maybe severely limited from the outset. When I look at oldline denominations, I am less worriedried about their numerical and demographic troubles than I am about the sorts of institutions they have become, especialli' as they struggle with their quantitative problems. I think Cobb has given us a prophetic if not always clear version of a transformative agenda for these churches. He has not focused on what the churches are specifically up against even if they were in agreement about restoring their theological vocation, conversing with other faiths and so forth. The church institutions now in place -- congregations, seminaries, church boards, as well as the multiple institutions of society -- are all oriented to sustaining the conditions of their own survival, and in most cases sustaining the conditions of survival means maintaining the status quo. An institutional momentum exists, in other words, that resists transformation. Recognition of such an institutional stasis moves us to think beyond Cobb.

Cobb makes no claim to be predictive. He is a ware that the oldline churches may not open themselves to transformation. I share his hesitance to make claims about the future. Pressed by global, economic and transition anxieties, Protestant America is in a conservative mood. In most settings, liberal and even theological are pejorative words. In this conservative mood the oldline churches resurrect issues and alienations they thought they had put behind them: issues of creedal subscription, of science and evolution, biblical inerrancy, and moral casuistry. As long as the mood prevails, I doubt that the churches are capable of responding positively to a strategy of transformation. I think Cobb is right to sense in the oldline a torpor, a certain failure of nerve, although it is very difficult to sharpen that perception into an argument without undue idealization of the past.

I must confess at this point that I do not have an explanation for low ecclesial vitality. To explain statistical decline by saying that, beginning in the 1960s, a generation of people in their teens and 20s more or less dropped out of the oldline churches is specific and clear. But how do we account for that? If the oldline has not retained its own young adults, is it because of "lukewarmness"? And if we grant that notion, what contributed to making lukewarmness the prevailing quality of oldline church life? Are the oldline churches, as nonfundamentalist, made up of people who so participate in the many worlds of American life that their religion is thereby rendered secondary, secular, irrelevant and therapeutic? I am not sure.

What intrigues me is that certain specific oldline congregations do manifest vitality and show the marks of transformation. Perhaps that is where the leaders of the oldline denominations should begin in their search for a strategy of change. How is it that some congregations turn their concerns away from their own survival toward the needs of their local situation, mount credible programs of education and retain an ecumenical spirit to the point of dialogue with Jewish and other faiths? If there are such congregations, the "lukewarm" church at large has in its mist some models of vitality. Close study of those models may he the best strategy for reclaiming the church.

 

The Shape of the Church: Congregational and Trinitarian

After Our Likeness: The Church in the Image of the Trinity, by Miroslav Volf. Eerdmans, 313 pp., $28.00 paperback.

Good books provide readers with fresh insight and useful information. Great books, especially in theology, range over several disciplines, revisit enduring human patterns and then weave new paradigms to explain old concerns. Miroslav Volf's book is both a good and great book. It is about the contemporary church, or, more pointedly, about what makes a congregation a Christian church.

Volf is a rising star in contemporary theology. His earlier and widely respected book Exclusion and Embrace (1996) was conceived soon after he witnessed chaos and suffering in parish and seminary life in Croatia. Nothing Volf writes is untainted by his memories of the "ethnic cleansing" and religious hatreds in the Balkans. Little wonder that he gravitated to the political theology of Jürgen Moltmann, his mentor at the University of Tübingen. Many themes from Moltmann's books echo through the pages of Volf's work. But After Our Likeness signals his move beyond the Moltmann circle. In this work Volf seeks to offer a newer, more inclusive, more rigorously constructive ecclesiology. It is an ecclesiology that is congregation-friendly. From beginning to end, this book links theological reflection with the nature and mission of the local or particular congregation. In a refreshing and impressive way, it is biblically sensitive, historically rich and ecumenically volatile.

Volf is very much aware of the seismic changes shaping the self-understanding of Christian communities around the globe. While Euro-American established and "mainstream" denominations appear puzzled and foundering, the "free churches" on multiple continents are flourishing. Their witness, in both postmodern and "Third World" societies, Volf finds remarkable. "Global developments seem to imply that Protestant Christendom of the future will exhibit largely a free Christian form." Affirming a judgment in Harvey Cox's The Silencing of Leonardo Boff, Volf points to a "restless spiritual energy splashing up from the underside of society and threatening to erode traditional modes of ecclesiastical government. This free church model, with its populist overtones, is being borne, Volf maintains, "by irreversible social changes of global proportions." In this light, Volf is miffed that the World Council of Churches' widely circulated document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1989) excluded the concerns and perspectives of the free church tradition.

Equally important for Volf are a "cloud of witnesses," both ancient and modern. Volf scans the writings of the early church to discern the nature of the church. More specifically, he wants to highlight how the early church rooted its ecclesiology within the theological context of the Trinity. Volf makes a critical but respectful assessment of the ecclesiologies of two contemporary and very influential theologians, the Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Orthodox metropolitan John D. Zizioulas.

While acknowledging traditional differences in the West's and East's understandings of the Trinity, Volf insists that Ratzinger's and Zizioulas's ecclesiologies correspond with their "monarchial" or hierarchical interpretations of the Trinity. As Volf sees it, their preoccupation with the one divine nature and the one "headship" of the Father leads inexorably to the one church and the one bishop. Revealing the influence of Moltmann, Volf argues that the modern church needs to look at God as the "social trinity." Through the lens of this particular interpretation of the Trinity, Volf sees the relationship of the persons of the Trinity as complementary. "If one starts from the trinitarian model I have suggested, then the structure of ecclesial unity cannot be conceived by way of the one, be it pope, patriarch or the bishop. Every ecclesial unity held together by a mon-archy is monistic and thus untrinitarian."

Volf believes that classical Catholic and Orthodox theologians have harnessed their trinitarian views to a certain kind of ecclesiology, resulting in two ecclesial practices that Volf finds unacceptable and potentially repressive: the exclusive and indispensable sacerdotal office of the bishop or priest and the disqualification of laity in the "order of salvation." By contrast, Volf maintains that every person -- male or female, tutored or untutored -- is ecclesially indispensable, since all bearers of Christ's Spirit are constitutive for the church and of equal import in the church's witness to the world. In this sense, Volf argues that the church's laity do not exist, ecciesially speaking, in the clergy but rather in immediate relationship with the triune God through Christ's Spirit and in direct fellowship with other Christians. The Spirit-blessed congregation, rather than the priest or bishop, represents the presence of Christ for Volf.

In short, Volf is at odds with all ecclesiologies that presume an "episcopocentric" ministry. Not all will accede to Volf's assessment, and I have not yet seen in print a response by either Zizioulas or Ratzinger. Few can doubt, however, that the bar has been raised in the current discourse about ecclesiology.

Volf joins a widening cadre of Christian theologians who seek to anchor the nature and mission of the local church in trinitarian thought rather than the shifting sands of cultural practices or the muddy bottoms of tired cultic traditions. Volf insists that a "constructive ecclesiality" requires us to get to the prior and bedrock realities of the Christian doctrine of God. Volf writes straightforwardly about the methodological limits of imagining the church in a way analogous to the Trinity. Nevertheless, "if Christian initiation [i.e., baptism] is a trinitarian event, the church must speak of the Trinity as its determining reality. Because churches, in the power of the Holy Spirit, already form a communion with the triune God, ecclesial correspondence to the Trinity can become an object of hope and thus also a task for human beings."

In the second half of the book, Volf turns from heady polemics to a more constructive effort. He wants to explore what "makes the church the church," or what he calls the "ecclesiality" of the church. His short answer to this inquiry is based on an often quoted New Testament text: "Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them"(Matt. 18:20). In light of that pivotal text, Volf understands the church as "a community of grace" which gathers in Christ's name in a particular locality. In such a summoned, gathered, confessional community "not only is Christ present among them, but a Christian church is there as well."

But Volf's inquiries also point to a longer answer. One way to summarize this more elaborate effort is the following quote:

Wherever the Spirit of Christ, which as the eschatological gift anticipates God's new creation in history, is present in its ecclesially constitutive activity, there is the church. The Spirit unites the gathered congregation with the triune God and integrates it into a history extending from Christ, indeed from the Old Testament saints, to the eschatological new creation. This Spirit mediated relationship with the triune God and with the entire history of God's people -- a history whose center resided in Jesus' own proclamation of the reign of God, in his death and resurrection -- constitutes an assembly [congregation] into a church (p.129) [italics mine].

To trace how Volf identifies the church with the local congregation, one needs to unpack these shorter and longer criteria.

His first move is to argue for an ecclesial community that is modeled after the triune God. Assuming the so-called "social" understanding of the Trinity, the "koinonia" of the triune God is both the source and goal of the church. As a colleague of mine recently wrote, a true church emerges when Christ's Spirit empowers human participation in the life of the triune God's and all living as Christ's disciples is lived as outgoing, self-giving love to others. A true church, in Volf's view, corresponds to and is modeled after the relationship of the persons of the Trinity.

At its best, a congregation is to become a community of grace, a welcoming and embracing community, a community that derives its mission from the missio Dei, a community that is both identified, reconciled and nourished at the Eucharist, a community that remembers its past and hopes into its future. A congregation simply misunderstands God if it becomes exclusive or self-absorbed or ethnically enclosed or hierarchically structured. It is in this trinitarian sense that Volf links the congregation's nature and mission.

A second move, intricately woven with the first, is that this community of grace is simultaneously a confessional community. A church is appropriately constituted when it confesses its faith in "the name of Jesus Christ." Such a confession plants a particular congregation in a wider history that looks to its Hebrew past as well as to an eschatological future, a history in which Jesus Christ is the center. Not only are the members of a particular, local confessing community linked with all of the history of the people of God, this confession also integrates (Volf's word) them into that "heavenly city" where all of God's people dwell in communion with the triune God, an inclusive community that will not need the light of the sun or moon, for God and the Lamb will be our light (Rev. 21). Here, especially, Volf relies heavily on the federal or covenantal theology of the English Puritans, notably that proto-Baptist, John Smyth (d. 1612).

A third and crucial perspective follows. Volf repeatedly insists that the experience of salvific grace (faith) is inherently communal. "Salvation is communion with God and human beings." Christian faith for Volf is not the "flight from the lonely to the lonely" nor is it an experience that is uniateral and self-enclosed. To the contrary, "because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons. . . communion with this God is at once also communion with those others who have entrusted themselves in faith to the same God." In this sense, the old dictum "Outside the church there is no salvation" takes on new meaning for Volf. Such a commitment places Volf at odds with two formidable rivals in the contemporary world: (a) those ecclesial traditions (Roman Catholic and Orthodox) that insist that the "constitutive presence of Christ is given only with the presence of the bishop standing in communjo with all bishops in time and space" and (b) those postmodern cultural and social standards that are grounded in individualistic and consumer-driven life styles and that simultaneously relegate all religious experience to the nether regions of the privatized soul. Volf finds counterproductive and unbiblical the theologies implicit in both of these adversaries.



For Volf these three moves or perspectives are both sufficient and necessary for an "ecclesiality of the church," and he labors to make his case for the local congregation as the true church. "In every congregation assembling in Christ's name to profess faith in him, the one and whole Christ is present through his Spirit. For this reason the congregation is not a part of the church, but rather the whole church." While students of ecclesiology will recognize in these perspectives an unflagging congregationalism, Volf is sensitive to areas in which the free church tradition is especially vulnerable: the unity within the Christian communities; the bonds that connect one congregation to others; the accountability of congregations and clergy; and the ever-present threat to neglect or abandon the apostolic tradition.

Volf is more provocative when he wades into the swirling waters of organizational structures of particular congregations. He knows that many an ecumenical conference has capsized in the crosscurrents of church polity over the nature of the pastoral office. He restates ideas that are well known in the free church tradition, ideas that go back as far as John Smyth in England and the early Anabaptists in Germany.

Here are a few of those affirmations: all baptized Christians have Spirit-granted charismata assigned to them; offices are a particular type of charismata; there is no ontological difference between officeholders and other members of the congregations; the priesthood of all believers does not divide a congregation into distinct groups (laity and clergy); ordination is a public attestation to the presence of the particular charismata by the whole congregation; ordination is not necessarily an irrevocable appointment to a lifelong task. In this sense, officeholding and ordination do not belong to the esse (essence) of the church (as explicit in Catholic and Orthodox traditions and implicit in many Protestant ones) but rather to the more practical bene esse (well-being) of the church.

Volf adds little that is new to classical congregationalist views about ordination. Of course, these free church views present a sharp contrast to Catholic and Orthodox views of ordination which are rooted in apostolic succession. Absent from Volf's discussion, however, is still another view of ordination prevalent among "mainstream" and free church Protestants in North America, namely, that ordination that blends a mystical clericalism and credentialized professionalism, a hybrid ordination graphically symbolized by clergy who lead public worship while wearing academic hoods and doctoral stripes on the sleeves of their robes. It is not clear how Volf's perspectives about ordination address this "culture of professionalism" in modern churches that draws a sharp demarcation between clergy and laity and pays no mind to the doctrine of the Trinity.

In the final chapter Volf seeks to justify the catholicity of the particular congregation. For many this phrase is an oxymoron: local and catholic appear to be opposites. Volf does not back away from this usual criticism of "free church" ecclesiology. He argues that the local church, in which the whole and true church can be located, can and indeed must be "open" to all other churches. "Openness to all other churches is a formal identifying feature of catholicity, and to this feature we must add loyalty to the apostolic tradition."

Such a defense seems to come down to this: the local church is preserved from suffocating provincialism when it intentionally engages in dialogue with other churches and when it remains steadfast in appropriating and witnessing to the "apostolic tradition." Given the "cocooning" tendencies of congregations in these postmodern times and given the theological amnesia in most modern Protestant churches that I know, I am not so reassured by Volf's defense of the kind of catholicity that he believes is attainable in local churches.

Volf's discussion of the structures and catholicity of the free church prompts a final observation about this seminal book. It's startling that Volf neglects to consider the theological dilemmas associated with locating a congregation (free church or other) in specific and variegated sociocultural contexts. Not everything that a congregation embraces is tried before the jury of the "apostolic tradition." As one who has written so poignantly about the horrors of exclusion in religious communities in our own day, Volf is surely not maintaining that local congregations can somehow become hermetically sealed off from their immediate cultural influences or ideological contexts.

After Our Likeness becomes more enigmatic when one recalls how carefully Volf has considered the historical studies of scholars such as Yves Congar, the theological insights of Reinhold Niebuhr and the ecclesial analyses of feminist and liberation thinkers. Volf knows that modern congregations, like older ones, have uncritically incorporated cultural, racial and political strategies to define and direct their own institutional identities and agendas. He knows that many burgeoning "free church" congregations in North America, for example, are often conditioned by class orientation and entrepreneurial ideologies. Yet, as I read him, Volf provides little or no compelling argument as to why or how the free church tradition resolves better that other ecclesiologies this enduring dilemma of all Christian congregations, namely, how the church is to be in the world but not of it. Until we have the pleasure of reading the promised sequel, we will have to wait for a fuller resolution of this pressing predicament.

 

Church Market: Investing in Congregations

Book Reviews:

A Field Guide to U.S. Congregations: Who’s Going Where and Why.

By Cynthia Woolever and Deborah Bruce. Westminster John Knox, 96 pp., paperback,

Bridging Divided Worlds: Generational Cultures in Congregations.

By Jackson W Carroll and Wade Clark Roof Jossey-B ass, 268 pp.

Congregations in Transition: A Guide for Analyzing, Assessing and Adapting in Changing Communities.

By Carl S. Dudley and Nancy T Ammerman. Jossey-Bass, 181 pp., paperback.

Cracking Your Congregation’s Code: Mapping Your Spiritual DNA to Create Your Future.

By Richard Southern and Robert Norton. Jossey-Bass, 208 pp.

Leading Congregational Change: A Practical Guide for the Transformational Journey.

By Jim Herrington, Mike Bonem and James H. Furr Jossey-Bass, 186 pp

.

Until recently, studies of church growth examined why -- why denominational growth is happening in some places and not in others. In their search for answers, experts contrasted conservative with nonconservative denominations and examined ideological and theological distinctions. Now the focus is on congregations and how to make them grow. The new language is one of promotional methods and congregation-building processes, all of them designed to exploit a highly segmented religious marketplace and capture a market niche of church members.

All the books reviewed here take pains to say that congregational size is not a measure of success or failure. But the implicit message is unmistakable: congregations must come to terms with their changing social contexts or pay the price of numerical decline. And if congregations find themselves in the midst of numerical decline, it’s because they have failed to come to terms with their changing circumstances.

Cynthia Woolever and Deborah Bruce are researchers at the Louisville headquarters of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Their Field Guide, a slim but fact-filled volume, is modeled after an exhaustive study of congregations in Australia. Woolever and Bruce paint a portrait of U.S. congregations based on the questionnaire responses of over 300,000 worshipers in over 2,000 congregations.

Among their findings is the "50-40-10" pattern. Fifty percent of all churchgoers are involved in roughly 10 percent of the congregations; conversely, 10 percent of churchgoers are enrolled in 50 percent of the congregations. This means that half of all congregants are in the largest congregations, while half of all congregations (often churches of under 75) claim only 10 percent of congregants.

A series of sidebars warns against "myths," and one of them is that "congregations grow by attracting new people who are not attending religious services elsewhere." Actually, only 7 percent of congregational "newcomers" (members for under five years) are first-time members. The overwhelming majority of newcomers are transfers (75 percent) or returnees (18 percent). And newcomers make up only one-third of the respondents, which means that first-time members account for only 2 percent of the churchgoing population.

Another myth is that "congregations have difficulty adapting to the changing world around them because the majority of worshipers are not open to change." In fact, six out of ten respondents felt their congregations were willing to try new things, and more than half indicated that their congregations are "already considering or implementing new directions." Finally, one in three members have been involved in their churches for fewer than five years -- a mobility rate that makes ongoing institutional adaptation essential.

The authors include a description of the typical worshiper: female, 50 years old, employed, well educated, married and white, What the typical worshiper values most in the congregation is "sharing the sacrament of Holy Communion, the sermons or homilies, and traditional worship and music.

Jackson W. Carroll and Wade Clark Roof, researchers in the sociology of religion (at Duke University Divinity School and at the University of California -- Santa Barbara), analyze three age categories -- pre-boomers (born prior to 1946), boomers (born 1946-1964) and Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1980) -- who according to Carroll and Roof have profoundly different expectations of the church and of religion. Nine case studies from North Carolina and southern California form the core of the book.

Some congregations ignore the generational rifts. These traditional or "inherited model" congregations are often faced with an aging population of pre-boomers and an increasingly restive junior contingent. Other congregations "blend" generations by designing programs that appeal to multiple groups. Boomers and Gen Xers are the most similar and are most likely to be served by blended congregations. But blended congregations often bifurcate into groups with separate worship services and separate constituencies uneasily housed in the same setting.

A third cluster of congregations is generation-specific and caters to the cultural and devotional needs of a particular age group. The most progressive of these churches target Gen X adults, many of them single, who seek contemporary worship and music as key elements of their spirituality. Small groups, directive but nonjudgmental Bible study, and activity-based undertakings are essential for this audience.

While these authors approach congregations with the semidetached perspective of concerned observers, other writers seek to present paradigms for transformation and renewal. Carl S. Dudley and Nancy T. Ammerman, both professors at Hartford Seminary’s Institute for Religion Research, run workshops on congregational change, and they bring together the analyst’s sensitivities and the consultant’s enthusiasms.

Congregations in Transition is the most engaging of these "how to" guides. It celebrates congregations as layered communities thick with cultural baggage and tradition as well as promise and challenge. While acknowledging that change is necessary and usually conflict-producing, they invite their readers (and their congregations) into a process marked by "playfulness" and humor. They suggest strategies for calling the historical culture of a congregation to the fore and then challenge congregants to weigh that endowment in the face of current demands and possibilities. "Use your congregation’s history as a resource for change, to explore together your past and to weave these facts, events, and stories together to explain the present and open new options for the future. Have fun . . ."

Differences of opinion, vision and memory will sometimes lead to open conflict. The authors encourage congregations to deliberately acknowledge conflicts, seek out their sources and their implications. Why do people view their common experiences with such contrasting lenses? What implications do those perceptions have for the future?

Dudley and Ammerman offer exercises for congregations facing change. In each case, the contingent nature of the experience is held up: this may work; some people may want to participate. One exercise involves creation of "timelines" that trace the history of the congregation, its ministry and its community. These visual histories -- complete with news clippings, photographs, and vignettes of personal experience -- should be displayed for the congregation to observe and discuss.

Dudley and Ammerman recognize that congregations morph into all kinds of futures. They lay out five options that congregations follow, among them "moving" and "dying." Their stark acknowledgment of a congregation’s death is consistent with the authors’ commitment to celebrating the peculiar culture of each congregation. Some change into something new; others close their doors in God’s good time. Churches that die are not failed" congregations, but churches that have chosen a particular transitional route. The authors want churches to choose with their eyes open and their hearts light.

As the title suggests, Cracking Your Congregation’s Code assumes that each congregation has its own inherent identity. Richard Southern and Robert Norton, who co-founded Church Development Systems and have counseled hundreds of congregations in renewal and growth, want to lead congregations to "successful" change. Success implies institutional growth; death is not an option. Southern and Norton are committed to reaching a broad-scale religious audience, and claim that their principles work across the theological spectrum. But they have a special affinity for the mainline.

Southern and Norton propose an exercise of self-discernment as a way to identify a congregation’s true "spiritual DNA." They teach congregations to find their essential character and then to build on it. Having captured this character, congregations are invited on a WelNES journey, which leads from Welcoming through Nurturing and Empowering to Service. In contrast to the playful tone of Dudley and Ammerman’s exercises, the model of change here is carefully orchestrated.

Subheadings suggest their painstaking thoroughness. "What Are Small Groups Called?" asks one such subheading, then answers with "covenant and care group," "connections circle," "TLC group," "heart-to-heart group" and many others. Every congregation should hammer out a consensus-based "mission" statement and an accompanying "vision" statement. A vision team will consider congregational progress in light of the mission and vision statements. How is the congregation doing? What adjustments need to be made?

Echoing Carroll and Roof, Southern and Norton suggest that one of the challenges facing congregations is a generational one. They discourage readers from trying to make easy bridges or blends. Pick a target generation, they suggest, and work with it.

Instead of looking to the culture of the congregation as key to change, Jim Herrington, Mike Bonem and James H. Furr focus on leadership. Beginning in the Greater Houston area with a program called "Mission Houston," they have promoted congregational renewal through entrepreneurial leaders who feel themselves to be Spirit-led. Given the waves of change that course through the larger society, they reason, it is inevitable that congregations will be buffeted. Visionary leaders are needed to anticipate those currents and get ahead of them.

Although they say they do not intend for the minister to dictate his aims for the church, the thrust of Leading Congregational Change is that the pastor or transformational leader brings a vision that must be promoted, first to a chosen group of disciples, then to a "vision community," and then -- only when fully developed and plotted out -- to the congregation. Each step will lead through eddies and undercurrents, they warn. Movements of change provoke resistance, which must be met with greater resolve. The leader must be ready to take considerable heat along the way, but the God-centeredness of the leaders vision will prevail.

Much of their narrative anticipates and even revels in the cultural clash "caused by" those who feel threatened. The authors recommend that such defensive souls are better off elsewhere, and suggest that people’s resistance to the divinely inspired vision raises questions about their faithfulness.

One of the authors’ examples is Glenwood Community Church, founded in 1986, which grew to 225 people in worship by 1991. The pastor felt that the church was neglecting the unchurched, and he came back from a seminar at Saddleback Community Church with "a clear sense of God’s mission." He was surprised when many in the congregation responded with anger and frustration. Attendance dropped to 80 people during the next year, and the congregation was deeply in debt. But the pastor’s vision prevailed, and "by 1998, the church was averaging 50 baptisms per year and 635 in attendance." One wonders about the religious fate of the 145 parishioners who were not moved by the pastor’s vision.

At times Leading Congregational Change reads like an unwieldy meeting of personal-pietist and secular-organizational sensibilities. It bogs down in a rhetoric that reflects both management and church growth gurus. Peter Senge, Steven Covey, J. R. Katzenbach, D. K. Smith, George Barna, Speed Leas and Lyle Schaller make appearances, as do biblical church planners Isaiah, John, Paul, Luke and (especially) Nehemiah. The forced analogies between Bible passages and modern principles of management are awkward and seem like holy window-dressing.

In a culture in which change is a constant, churches must consider how they can transform themselves to meet their missions. But it is arrogant to suggest that the only authentic condition of congregational life is one of perpetual -- especially artificially engineered -- change and to think that one can measure a congregation’s faithfulness by its capacity to leave its tradition behind. And it’s presumptuous to suggest that "transformational leaders" are imbued with an elevated insight into the divine order of things. As congregations take the measure of carefully chosen market niches and strive to spin effective recruitment strategies, they must also claim their own cultural contexts, complete with human foibles and nuances. Otherwise process will overwhelm substance.

Cash and Character: Talking About Money in the Church

BOOK REVIEW:

The Crisis in the Church: Spiritual Malaise and Fiscal Woe.

By Robert Wuthnow. Offord University Press, 291 pp., $30.00.

In this his most prophetic book, Robert Wuthnow grieves for the lack of economic and stewardship visions in the contemporaiy church and for its antecedent failure of spirit. He places much of the responsibility at the feet of pastors.

Wuthnow draws on a wide range of sources to reflect on the fiscal and economic models clergy and laity follow in their private and public lives. His principal evidence is a Gallup-conducted survey of 2,000 working Americans. The survey’s quantitative data are richly augmented by interviews with pastors and lay leaders from 60 churches—large and small, conservative and liberal—scattered from coast to coast, and by an analysis of more than 200 sermons on stewardship, money and work delivered by the pastors of those congregations. In all, Wuthnow has compiled his usual formidable collection of testimonies, here gathered into a resounding call for the church to take action.

Wuthnow begins by highlighting the financial currents swirling around American churches. Parishioners’ expectations for bigger and better buildings, staffs and programs combined with their uncertain giving patterns and shaky or minimal institutional commitments produce an unstable situation. These congregational factors are complicated by a fast-changing economic environment and unpredictable social and cultural trends. Jobs are in jeopardy; parishioners are underemployed or overworked or both; dual-career families and single-parent households have diminished volunteer time and donatable funds; competing special-interest groups—inside and outside Christianity—are making demands on discretionary funds. All these factors are squeezing the fiscal lifeline.

While some congregations may appear to be weathering the waves, the storm is still brewing, Wuthnow contends, and it will swamp all churches unless dramatic changes are initiated immediately. When pressed, even pastors of "successful" churches concede that they have had to restrict or even reduce their staff or programs in order to meet budget constraints. They must leave exciting plans waiting in the wings until additional resources can be found. This fiscal storm has no regard for theological creed or ideological camp. In contrast to his earlier writings (such as The Struggle for America’s Soul and The Restructuring of American Religion), which focused on ideological differences among churchgoers, Wuthnow here sees the current crisis as all-encompassing. Denominations and congregations from the theological left (principally the Protestant mainline) as well as from the center and right (including various Protestant groups and the Roman Catholic Church) are all subject to the same maelstrom.

Wuthnow describes the churches’ "fiscal woes" in great detail. He suggests, however, that they are mere symptoms of the real issue, which "is a spiritual crisis [that] derives from the very soul of the church. The problem lies less in parishioners’ pocketbooks than in their hearts and less in churches’ budgets than in clergy’s understanding of the needs and desires of their members’ lives." Sadly, many clergy simply don’t understand that the core problem is a "spiritual malaise."

The carrier of that disease is middle-class culture. The middle-class ethos, the cultural ecology within which the church exists, is replete with themes that have stifled parishioners’ spirit. As members of the middle class themselves, clergy are blind to the cultural motifs that threaten their parishioners’ well-being and the churches’ survival.

Middle-class people feel overwhelmed by demands. At work, at leisure or at home, people can barely contend with all that is expected of them. From the proverbial "soccer moms," to the overextended professionals and managers, to blue- and white-collar workers facing the abyss of unemployment, middle-class Americans are riven by angst over what lies before them and by guilt over what they have left undone.

And they can’t even talk about their predicament, since financial matters are considered private, not to be spoken of even to one’s pastor or fellow parishioners. Christians lack an effective vocabulary for discussing with each other the economic and financial pressures on their lives. Lacking a theological framework, clergy too easily lapse into the saccharin reassurances of a gospel of happiness," which stresses health and wealth and simplistically equates faithful living with economic success and personal happiness. Or they proclaim a message of passive dependence—"God will provide"—which fosters complacency and inaction. Neither the gospel of happiness nor the gospel of dependence offers practical hope.

Clergy ignorance and anxieties about the mechanics of the economy confound these problems. Wuthnow points out that many clergy are highly suspicious of the "secular" world of work. For most pastors, this cardinal context of human endeavor has been thoroughly desacralized. To the many who have never been employed outside the church, the world of secular employment is foreign, perhaps hostile, territory. Second-career pastors have generally felt themselves "called out" of the secular work force. Consequently, too often they do not see the work environment in positive theological terms. Clergy suspicions of the work world have been reinforced by their counseling of parishioners who have been wounded by overwork, unemployment, absentee parenthood or other malignancies related to work.

Wuthnow points out that the vast majority of Americans love their jobs and find their identity inextricably wrapped up in them. Their occupation is where their heart finds its home, a place of considerable reward and fulfillment—a place begging for theological definition. So tied are most people to their occupations that their fear of losing their jobs has as much to do with its threat to their identities as with the loss of income. Because clergy do not fully recognize this reality, Wuthnow argues, they do not realize the importance of thinking theologically about work.

Wuthnow wants the church to reclaim the concept of vocation as it applies to the work life of each Christian. Since clergy regularly refer to their own "calling," they should readily understand vocation’s potential value to the identity—both secular and sacred—of their parishioners.

In a particularly insightful analysis, Wuthuow distinguishes between the church’s ambivalence about the world of work and its equally uncertain understanding of money. "A large share of the clergy’s ambivalence toward money stems from the assumption that financial realities are simply the facts of life to which we all must adjust. God cuts no special deals for people of faith. There is little to be said other than try hard, do your best, and use common sense." While clergy bemoan the role that consumerism plays in our lives, they have no ready theological framework for advising parishioners on how to understand or use their money. Moreover, since clergy are enjoying the material benefits of our society, they find it awkward to criticize the economic engine that provides those benefits. To be anticonsumerist or antimaterialist is easily perceived as being anticapitalist and therefore un-American. Since this easy equation of consumerism with patriotism makes criticism particularly difficult for many clergy, they are reduced to vague denunciations of money as "a stumbling block along the road to personal salvation"—a position that offers little help to people struggling to pay bills and worrying about retirement pensions.

An undercurrent of Wuthnow’s book is his challenge to megachurches to engage in theological reflection about work and money. Megachurches represent a "new wave" of congregational structures that are bringing a variety of programs to the church marketplace. They are also bringing large mortgages, high-cost staffing and programming expenses (and, although Wuthnow does not say it, a heightened aversion to talking about money). Many megachurches have resorted to a "fee for services" approach that fits nicely with a middIe-class penchant for purchasing services. But this approach necessarily limits participation to those who can afford particular programs, and it creates competition among church subgroups for consumers.

Wuthnow is most persuasive when he makes prophetic connections between failures of the spirit and flagging church resources. His book is more problematic when he gets down to the priestly task of suggesting remedies. Among other things, Wuthnow urges churches to develop programs that theologize about middle-class realities—including seminars about appropriate use of funds and financial management; small discussion groups that educate parishioners about spiritual and personal values that help to combat the allure of Madison Avenue; sermons about stewardship that resonate with parishioners’ lived reality and make the connection between work and vocation, money and Christian charity.

While seemingly simple, these remedies are difficult for clergy, who so often feel inadequate to talk about such mundane issues as retirement, rising medical costs, the financial and spiritual burdens of unemployment, and the untenable pace of work and leisure. It is much easier for pastors to remain silent on economic and fiscal matters affecting their parishioners while emphasizing the cause of "the poor" outside the church’s walls.

Yet this route is self-defeating. Wuthnow shows that people who have dealt with issues of family stewardship and the meaning of money and work in their own lives are also the strongest advocates for and supporters of benevolence to others. Respond to the problems of the middle class, Wuthnow concludes, and the needs of the poor will be more fully and meaningfully met. Conversely, if the church refrains from ministering to the central concerns and needs of its middle-class parishioners, it will throw away its chance to minister to others in need.

Wuthnow’s effort to return the discussion of churchly fiscal matters to the realm of meaning and faith is admirable, but his argument is not fully persuasive. It is not always clear what the direction of the faith-finance relationship is. Do people hold back in their giving because their faith is unhinged (Wuthnow’s model), or does the church’s handling of money matters raise suspicion and frustration among parishioners? They may wonder, for instance, how funds are spent or feel they are not receiving the services they need. These frustrations may weaken their allegiance to the church. The two issues certainly are intertwined, but the patterns of cause and effect remain unclear.

Wuthnow is calling for theological reflection and renewal in key areas: the meaning of stewardship; the nature of believers’ relationship with the created order and the creator of that order; the concept of vocation and the connection between employment and spiritual identity; the future of the family in the light of massive role changes; the meaning of money and fiscal justice; the future of ecclesiology. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton’s entourage reminded itself about the key issue: "It’s the economy, stupid!" Wuthnow offers quite a different view: respond to the wounds of the spirit and the economy will take care of itself. Good advice for both the church and the nation.

Is Willow Creek the Way of the Future?

Lyle Schaller calls Willow Creek "the most influential church in North America." Judged by the amount of ink it has received, this assessment is believable. The terms "seeker service" and "believer’s service," which originated at Willow Creek Community Church (located northwest of Chicago in South Barrington, Illinois), show up in the discussions of many congregation leaders and at planning sessions of Willow Creek-inspired churches. Variations on the seeker theme make up a new vocabulary: services are "seeker sensitive" or "seeker friendly." The Willow Creek Association, a network of congregations that seeks to minister to the unchurched, is growing rapidly.

Gregory A. Pritchard describes Willow Creek church, its ministries and its leaders, then offers a critique. He acknowledges that he has provided something for everybody—advocates of Willow Creek like the first part and lose interest in the analysis; detractors prefer the analysis and are impatient with the description. Pritchard describes himself as an evangelical whose basic discipline is sociology. Though his book was published in 1995. the research was done in 1989-90 for his Ph.D. dissertation at Northwestern University, so some of the data are probably out of date.

The discussion provides a springboard for the major question underlying the Willow Creek phenomenon. Is this pragmatic, consumer-oriented approach to the unchurched the way of the future for churches in North America? If so, what is the cost to traditional understandings of church and ministry?

My bias is similar to Pritchard’s—I’m an advocate of the intent but question aspects of the delivery. If I were 25 years younger, I would undoubtedly be an enthusiastic member of the Willow Creek Association. But I am older. In addition to worrying about straying over some theologically important boundaries, I have pragmatic reservations. My training in organizational behavior and experience with "planting" churches also provide me with a distinct perspective.

No, I don’t think Willow Creek in its present form represents the future. Healthy congregations in the 21st century will undoubtedly be more "seeker friendly," but they will balance marketing efforts with a more judicious use of traditional understandings of the church and its ministries. "Theological engineering" will catch up to church marketing. But then Willow Creek itself will probably look different in 15 years. Using their market-driven approach, its leaders will likely learn to address the current weaknesses. Pritchard discusses what I consider to be Willow Creek’s most important innovation: its marketing focus on "unchurched Harry." Unchurched Harry is an important guy. He and unchurched Mary personify the baby boomers that Willow Creek is committed to reaching. The first step in reaching them is to understand them—how they feel and think, what they need and how they will respond. If an idea can’t pass the Harry test, it doesn’t go far in the seeker service. In some ways, Harry is in the driver’s seat.

Personifying the person to be reached is a helpful staffing point, and a valuable corrective to doctrinaire approaches to outreach and worship. Effective church leaders of previous generations usually had a good intuitive feel for the people they wanted to reach. Today’s marketing emphasis relies on more explicit ways of identifying what innovative pastors used to assess instinctively.

One of the most visible market researchers for churches is George Barna. He did some of his early research at Willow Creek and shares many convictions of its leaders. He is certainly a competent pollster. But I find that he overgeneralizes his data to fit with his agenda. The "market" for Christianity in America is undoubtedly changing for a significant part of the population, but there are many more "niches" out there than appear in usual discussions of baby boomers.

Unchurched Harry and Mary, as they appear in Willow Creek discussions, represent only a limited segment of the boomers that churches talk about trying to accommodate—specifically, the well-educated, professional, unchurched whites in upscale Chicago suburbs. The term for them in the ‘80s was Yuppies. Although Willow Creek leaders encourage other churches to find the comparable profile for their own communities, much of the discussion among followers repeats the South Barrington impression of Harry and Mary.

In Pritchard’s assessment, unchurched Harry represents only about 15 percent of those attending Willow Creek on a weekend. Most are what Pritchard terms "superficially churched Larrys." The pursuit of hypothetical Harry means that the spiritual needs of a lot of Larrys are often missed.

A second Willow Creek innovation is to conceive of the major Sunday morning service as a time to reach seekers instead of believers. When criticized for leaving out components of a traditional worship service, Willow Creek responds that this is not a worship service; it is a seeker service. Wednesday evening is the time for the believers’ worship service, which includes the Lord’s Supper.

The freshness of this approach is appealing. The problem of a society rapidly becoming unchurched deserves a radical solution. If Sunday morning is prime time for believers, why not recognize it as prime time for seekers? They too face the least competition for their time at these hours. Let the people who’ve made a commitment come at a less convenient time.

This would be a reasonable accommodation if those involved in seeker services remain conscious that it is not yet worship as it ought to be. In practice this distinction often gets blurred for leaders in congregations that model themselves after Willow Creek. One result is what Sally Morganthaler, in her book Worship Evangelism; sees as a nonworship epidemic. How many of those efforts will ever get to the next step? Will those Willow Creek followers even remember what the next step is?

In a true seeker service, attenders are not called on to participate or directly respond in worship. The theory is that Harry doesn’t sing any place else and resists having words put in his mouth. What Harry wants and gets is a polished professional performance. What he doesn’t get is a chance to see people like himself engaging in a worship relationship with God.

Is a seeker service the best introduction to what a Christian church stands for? Addressing such reservations has led many churches to settle for being "seeker sensitive" or "seeker friendly"—arranging the service to be more accommodating to the unchurched, but still retaining the focus of a worship service. Helping churches be sensitive in this fashion is Willow Creek’s lasting contribution.

A third innovation is Willow Creek’s use of multimedia on Sunday morning. Sophisticated lighting, sound and visual imagery seem a prerequisite in this media age. I have heard of Willow Creek-like churches that have invested more than $100,000 in stage and sound equipment.

Drama is not new to churches, of course. Willow Creek’s special contribution is to use theater as a springboard to the sermon. The five-minute drama that winsomely introduces the theme of the day is being increasingly utilized by churches concerned about effective communication. This is a plus, for any kind of service.

Two other areas that Pritchard highlights in the descriptive part of his book are the emphasis on programs that appeal to the emotions and the packaging of the gospel as user-friendly Christianity 101. Both are noteworthy adaptations of basic church ministry to the Harry/boomer part of our culture. But probably neither will stand the test of time well.

Reasons for such pessimism are underscored in the analytical portion of Pritchard’s book: "Evaluating the Willow Creek Way of Doing Church." He questions whether the Willow Creek activist, pragmatic approach sufficiently recognizes the limits of the current cultural tools and ideas that are allowed to dominate its message. He worries about superficiality that can accompany a media emphasis on image, a simplistic self-help psychology, an uncritical marketing view of success, and displacement into the background of God’s demanding transcendence.

There are two possible negative consequences. One is that biblical truth and power will be so diluted that the Christian church will lose effectiveness at ministering the gospel. This is the easiest criticism to make, and it may not be the most important. God has a way of raising new leaders and ministers to meet the needs of a changed day.

The more worrisome consequence is that when the culture changes, as it will, Willow Creek may lose its effectiveness and not know how to adapt. Perhaps the folk in South Barrington will recognize what is happening and figure out how to change. But what about the hundreds of imitators who lack the creative drive, flair and energy to adjust?

In a world of Willow Creeks, pop psychology can invert and ambush biblical truth about the relation between people and God. A firm foundation in scripture and in research-oriented psychology would generate a clearer recognition of the limits of such approaches. But cautions are not likely to receive much attention because of what Pritchard identifies as a strong pragmatic bias toward what is immediately useful. What doesn’t work now is not important. Will the Willow Creek way generate enough intellectual grounding among followers to help them spot and avoid the problems in the long run that come with attention only to quick fixes?

The same goes for the attitude toward marketing. It is a tool that ultimately has to serve the higher truths of those using it. When I taught church marketing, I stressed the need for careful, informed engineering of the product chosen for the intended market; it has to perform as promised. Letting marketing techniques and vocabulary dominate church thinking, without critically assessing how needs will be met, is a good prescription for driving "customers" away and running the enterprise into the ground. It happens regularly with businesses that give engineering short shrift.

"Theological engineering" is what seminaries, at their best, are supposed to teach. At least they offer plenty of exposure to how theology and churches can go wrong. At the time of Pritchard’s research, few of the top leaders at Willow Creek had finished a seminary education, and this was considered a strength. More seminary-trained people have come on board since then.

Those with a vested interest in theological education can’t help wondering how a church can remain effective over the long haul without a solid foundation of scriptural interpretation, church history and systematic theology among its leaders. Time will tell.

It is interesting to compare Willow Creek with Robert Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church. Twenty years ago everybody was talking about and criticizing Schuller, his Hour of Power television show and his "possibility thinking." Dennis Voskuil did an analysis of that ministry in Mountains into Gold Mines. Church growth was a new and radical concept for many. The shallowness Schuller was accused of, caricatured as the Gospel of Success, revolved around his preaching of self-esteem without reflecting on sin and judgment, and his avoidance of controversy through relinquishing a "prophetic" role. Schuller’s Institute for Successful Church Leadership did (and does) fill the role for an older generation of church leaders that the Willow Creek Association now fills for the younger.

Schuller considers Willow Creek founder Bill Hybels his leading disciple, but Hybels is less excited about the relationship. As he once told Schuller, "At Willow Creek I preach about sin. I use the ‘S word,’ Bob."

Is Willow Creek an improvement over Schullerism? Is this church phenomenon of the ‘90s a better model for the church at large than the phenomenon of the ‘70s? Willow Creek is less of a personality cult; you can talk about its ministries without talking about Bill Hybels, and that’s a plus. Willow Creek has not opted for national TV, even though it is very media-oriented. It considers itself primarily a community ministry—another plus for church modeling. And Willow Creek is more effective at reaching the boomer generation. Schuller’s packaging reaches the boomers’ parents, but has not broken the generation barrier very well.

In terms of modeling how to understand a church’s target market, however, Schuller’s approach is more helpful. Those who want to learn about the people they are trying to reach should get out onto the street talking to hundreds and even thousands. This makes a more constructive impression than reading statistical trends and developing hypotheses about a mythical Harry.

Willow Creek loses out in the comparison because of a serious basic weakness: its leaders have not yet worked out how to move seekers beyond self-fulfillment to a thorough grounding in scripture and ministries. In recent years they have developed hundreds of need-meeting small groups and now offer some seminary courses, but one wonders where they will find the determination and example needed to move into disciplined encounters with the full word of God. Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church, on the other hand, is a full-service congregation with an extensive adult education curriculum that traditional churches would be proud to claim. Before they can serve, volunteers must complete many hours of course work on Christian topics. There is depth, with effective ways to involve the "loosely churched."

To these reservations I can add some specific comments from my own experience. I’ve spent six years on the front line of church planting. In 1991 I became a mission developer and established a suburban congregation that aimed to attract the unchurched. A few years later, I left behind a healthy but decidedly small congregation that is now calling a new pastor.

My effort was the fourth church plant in the community in seven years. The first was a traditional conservative Presbyterian church that had limited growth. The second was an Evangelical Friends restart that offered a seeker service; it achieved Sunday morning attendance of several hundred but has had to contend with conflict and lost momentum. A "community church" with unstated Southern Baptist backing (the SBC’S fifth try in the area) is doing very well with a highly contemporary "seeker sensitive" approach. It is a textbook example of a good plant. The congregation’s motto is "Making a difference for those who’ve almost given up on church," and it regularly advertises that its service and message are not boring like those of other churches. I attended one of these services before starting mine and had to acknowledge that they were doing everything I came to do, and doing it well.

I have learned that developing topical events with contemporary music and coordinated drama is hard and demanding work—far different from picking three hymns to insert in the same liturgy with the assigned texts for the day. It calls for high energy from the pastor and many others as well.

Keeping everyone motivated and inspired is a challenge in itself. New members and rapid growth can help stimulate energy, but rapid growth remains more the exception than the rule. If the reason for all the extra effort is to attract the unchurched and the results are spotty then this approach seems a prescription for burnout. How often does this happen among the leaders of churches in the Willow Creek Association? Will many last ten or 15 years, let alone 20 or 30?

Pastors and leaders in this movement must be exceptionally competent at their contribution, whether oral communication, contemporary music or drama. A part of the Willow Creek success, according to Hybels, was staffing with a musician, a media person and a drama person who were each of national caliber. I am embarrassed to think about my initial contemporary music efforts; it took our church years to become reasonably good at it, but by then the first impression had been made.

I discovered firsthand that church planters tend to attract people of their own age, and that means leaders need to be the age of the people they are trying to reach. Traditional churches worked when participants of all ages were willing to adapt themselves to church culture. In those days, an older pastor was often seen as a better representative of the tradition. But when the explicit intent is to adapt church culture to a distinct culture of a specific age cohort, the leaders need to be born into that culture. This may partially explain the strong Willow Creek preference for leaders who have not been shaped by a different, seminary culture.

Being so culturally bound, will the Willow Creek way work with the next generation? Or will the typical Willow Creek audience 15 years from now have the same prevalence of gray hairs one sees in a Crystal Cathedral audience today? Willow Creek leaders have responded to the generational challenge by adding programs for Generation X, and they are reporting effectiveness. Time will tell.

Is any one way of doing church the wave of the future? Is there any one set of techniques that will open the door to reaching the unchurched?

I’ve come to believe that there is more randomness than method to church planting and growth. More than anything else, having the right people at the right time is what matters. Success does not depend only on the personality and competence of the pastor. Three or four other leaders with the right competence and connections can significantly alter the outcome. Great things can happen if these people show up and little if they don’t. Getting access into networks of friends and acquaintances is the most important door to growth. That is why momentum is so important. New people bring new people, and losing momentum is a major setback.

Will technique assure that the right people show up when needed? Techniques and methods can increase the chances, but the specifics depend much more on God’s providence. We can celebrate those churches where everything comes together, but imitating their approach offers no assurance of a second success, because the mix of people and circumstances will be different. Churches grow where a lot of people are excited about what they are doing and are doing it well. One practical implication for church bodies wanting to plant congregations is that they need to sow three or four seeds in the hope that one will grow.

Apparent randomness can be explained as the movement of the Holy Spirit, who calls and gathers the church. The Spirit wind blows where it will, without our knowing where it comes from or where it is going.

Digital Advantage for Development

Promises

Digital Information-Communication Technologies (ICTs) promise the world a "new civilization", an "information revolution", or a "knowledge society". Once ICTs have realized worldwide access for all to information, new social values will evolve, new social relations will develop, the "zero sum society" comes to a definite end.

According to the digital utopists the ICTs will create more productivity and improved chances for employment. They will upgrade the quality of work in many occupations. They will also offer myriad opportunities for small-scale, independent and decentralized forms of production. Poor countries that are still in the agricultural age can now leapfrog into a post-industrial society bypassing all the trouble of the industrial revolution. The utopists also predict that ICTs will strongly reinforce current processes of democratization in many countries. The increased access to information flows will undermine official censorship and empower movements in civil society.

Digital utopias disagree with those who worry about scenarios of worldwide cultural homogenisation, they see the emergence of new and creative lifestyles, vastly extended opportunities for different cultures to meet and understand each other, and the creation of new virtual communities that easily cross all the traditional borderlines of age, gender, race, and religion.

It is obviously true that ICTs can perform tasks that are indeed essential to democratic and sustainable social development.

They can provide low-cost, high speed, worldwide interactive communications among large numbers of people, unprecedented access to information sources, alternative channels for information provision that counter the commercial news channels, and they can support networking, lobbying, and mobilizing.

Educational facilities can be improved through using ICTs to facilitate distance learning and on-line library access. Electronic networking has also been used in the improvement of the quality of health services, since ICTs permit remote access to the best diagnostic and healing practices and, in the process, cut costs. Digital technologies for remote sensing can provide early warning to sites vulnerable to seismic disturbances, and can identify suitable land for crop cultivation. In addition, computer technology can assist in the development of flexible, decentralized, small-scale industrial production, thus improving the competitive position of local manufacturing and service industries. In a number of countries (Singapore, Brazil, Hong Kong) the introduction of computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) technologies in small-scale industries has been very successful.

There is also an environmental advantage in such developments. As the World Commission on Environment and Development noted in its report Our Common Future, decentralization of industry reduces levels of pollution and other negative impacts on the local environment. Another important digital advantage is the relative ease with which new public spaces can be created in cyberspace. Through digital networks new global communities are being established. Increasingly, organisations in developing countries are integrated into these webs of horizontal, non-hierarchical exchange that have already proved themselves able to counter censorship and disinformation. Members of ecological movements and women's organizations, human rights activists, senior citizens and many other groups have made impressive use of digital technology.

The growing ICT-demand in developing countries finds expression in long waiting lists for telephone connections, growing use of cellular systems and expanding numbers of Internet users. To meet this demand, consideration of ICTs is increasingly becoming an integral part of national development agendas. In fact, there is currently a phone frenzy in the developing world. The planned increase in telephone lines within the Third World for the next five years will require some $200 billion in investments. This is expected to be achieved largely through a massive inflow of foreign capital. And to encourage the latter, countries are deregulating and opening their markets for equipment manufacturers and service providers.

 Problems

The realisation of the digital advantage that ICTs can offer requires however that some serious problems are addressed.

Access to the digital advantage requires access to electricity. A serious problems is that in many rural areas energy is unavailable or very limited in supply. In many urban areas the provision of electricity is highly unreliable. With an expanding use of ICTs the energy requirements will only increase and will require planning and budgeting for electrification and such alternative energy sources as solar power.

The extent of telecommunication grids is very limited in most of the developing countries. There are 1 billion telephones in the world and the 48 least developed countries have some 1.5 million of them. Some 15% of the world's population has access to over 70% of the world's telephone lines. More than 50% of the world's people have never made a phone call. The costs of providing adequate telecom-infrastructures are considerable and cannot be met by national budgets alone. To address this obstacle considerable financial and technical assistance is required.

An obvious question regarding the financial obstacles is whether the international community is ready to provide the massive investments needed for the expansion of networks in developing countries. By way of illustration of the scope of funds involved: it would take some US $ 12 billion to get 50% of the Philippine population on the Internet. To increase teledensity from 0.46 lines per 100 inhabitants to 1 per 100 in Sub-Saharan Africa would require an investment of some US $ 8 billion. It also needs remembered that investments are also needed for the digital upgrading of most of the analog, copper-wired networks in developing countries.

In response to the challenge of the info-telecom gap many public and private donor institutions (including the World Bank, the ITU, the Teledesic Corporation, AT&T, Siemens, Alcatel, and the USAID) have designed initiatives to provide telecom connections to Third World countries. Apart from the question whether there will be sufficient funding for all these plans, they also raise the critical issue of the appropriateness of the technologies transferred and the capacity of the recipient countries to master them.

The present discussion on the gap provides no convincing argument that the technology owners will change their attitudes and policies towards the international transfer of technology. Throughout the past decades the prevailing international policies on transfer of technology have erected formidable obstacles to the reduction of North-South technology gaps. Today, there is no indication that the current restrictive business practices, the constraints on the ownership of knowledge, and the rules on intellectual property rights that are adverse to developing country interests are radically changing. There are presently no realistic prospects that the relations between ICT-rich and ICT- poor countries will change in the near future.

When energy and telecom infrastructures are in place, there are still the costs of actual usage of ICTs to address; in order to meet these expenses taxation and subsidization strategies are needed that allow individuals and institutions to access digital networks.

The effective operation of ICTs also requires a whole range of skills and adequate mechanisms for the training in these skills. Technical skills are needed for the maintenance of hardware, the modification of software, and the manufacture of electronic goods. Managerial skills are essential to the operation of networks, information systems, and databases. Information skills are crucial to the processing of all the information made available through the ICTs. This needs planning and funding of extensive educational programmes.

It also needs to be realized that national efforts to attain the digital benefits, are part of a global environment. Scope and direction of national ICT-strategies are strongly influenced by the emerging global system of governance for the info-com sector. The bottom-line of this system proposes the deployment of ICTs should predominantly if not totally be a matter of market relations. Global policy making addresses primarily the removal of all obstacles that might stand in the way of the unhindered operation of the major ICT-investors on markets around the world. A landmark in deregulatory policies is the WTO telecom agreement of early 1997. The agreement requires signatory countries (68 countries that represent 98% of the $600 billion telecom trade) to liberalize their markets to foreign competition. The agreement has seriously compromised the chances for universal network access as national policies may be considered anti- competitive if governments intervene in the market to guarantee universal service.

In the present system of global governance the interests of industrial countries and transnational corporations are usually better served than the prospects for developing countries. A more adequate representation of all the parties affected by global governance needs to be attained if ICT-advantages are to be equitably shared.  

Creative Strategies

The most immediate challenge for national governments and the international community is the insight that the use of ICTs for sustainable development will not be determined by technological developments but by political decisions. The realisation of the digital advantage requires creative styles of governance that are not merely inspired by visions of digital benefits but also address the serious obstacles that hinder attaining the digital advantage.

For national governments and agencies of the international community this implies the design of policies that leave the realisation of ICT-potential not exclusively to market interests, a substantial allocation of public funding for the costs of accessing and using ICTs, and a massive effort in human resource training for the mastery of ICT-related skills.

It would seem appropriate -in the context of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights- to emphasize that the deployment of ICTs should be primarily guided by respect for such universal standards as human security, autonomy, and equality. The most perplexing question ICT-strategists may face is whether such people-centred ideals can be achieved in a global order that is increasingly directed by market-centred realities.

 

 

 

 

 

Trends in World Communication

 

CONTENTS

1. Introduction.

2. The trend towards digitization.

        1. What is digitization?

        2. Digitization: The Issues.

            Privacy

            Security.

        Activity I.

3. The trend towards liberalization.

      1. What is liberalization?

      2. Liberalization: The Issues.

           Universal Service.

           Market access.

     3. Activity II.

4. The trend towards consolidation.

4.1. What is consolidation?

4.2. Consolidation: The Issues.

4.2.1. Implications for consumers.

4.2.2. Independence of performance.

Activity III.

5. The trends towards globalization.

         What is globalization?

         Globalization: The Issues.

                How global is 'global'?

                Towards a global culture?

         Activity IV.

 

6. Summary of main points.

 

7. References.

8. Bibliography for further reading.

 

9. Terms and abbreviations used (indicated by *).

  

TRENDS IN WORLD COMMUNICATION

 

1. INTRODUCTION.

In the past decades world communication* has developed into a rapidly expanding field with a large number of players. Communications across borders consist of flows of words, images, texts and data that move between and among individuals, governments, social movements, and business organizations. Flows of world news are carried across the globe by the major printed news agencies (Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France Press) and the leading agencies for visual news (Reuters Television and World Television Network, and to a lesser extent CNN and the BBC). Flows of entertainment and educational materials, which include recorded music, feature films, textbooks, and TV entertainment are provided by the world's largest entertainment media companies. (see Table 1.) Flows of promotional messages, which consist mainly of commercial advertising in international newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media across the globe, are produced by the world's largest advertising agencies. (see Box 1). Flows of data, like in electronic data exchange, electronic funds transfers, remote resource satellite sensing, electronic mail and database searches, are carried by worldwide computer networks such as the Internet, or such inter-firm networks as the largest interbank network SWIFT*. Flows of voice messages -for both private and commercial applications- are facilitated by such major players as the world's largest telecommunication service providers. (see Box 2). Flows of text messages are transported through such media as telefax, telex and the mail services. The major players are the telecommunication service providers, the postal services around the world, and the leading courier companies.

Together the message producers, network operators, and equipment manufacturers that facilitate these flows represent a multi-billion dollar world communication market.

 This market is largely shaped by four major trends that originate in the 1980s and mature in the 1990s. These are: digitization, liberalization, consolidation, and globalization.

 

2. THE TREND TOWARDS DIGITIZATION.

2.1. WHAT IS DIGITIZATION? The term digitization refers to the growing significance of digital technologies in the recording, storage and transmission of images, words, text and data. These technologies (such as digital cameras, digital computers, or digital discs) encode information in binary form. This means that information is represented in yes/no or on/off signals. This makes the recording, storing and transmission of information much easier, faster, and more reliable than is the case with more conventional analogue technologies. In the analogue technologies information is represented by continuously changing signals. As a result, digital music recordings, for example, are more reliable and last longer than the analogue recordings.

 

Digitization means that technologies for the processing and transmission of information have begun to use the same language. This facilitates the convergence of telecommunications, computers, office technologies and assorted audio-visual consumer electronics. This integration offers speed, flexibility, reliability, and low costs. The leading maxim of the digitization trend is 'faster, smaller and cheaper'. (Business Week, June 13, 1994, p. 48). Digitization means better technical quality at lower prices. Communication channels expand their capacity, there is scope for more consumer choice and more possibilities for inter-active systems. Digital technologies create multi-media interactive systems with a great variety of applications. Ranging from virtual (i.e. electronic) shopping in the world's largest department stores to instant audio, visual, and text and data communications between scientists in distant locations. Today's largest users of world communication (e.g. transnational corporations in manufacturing or services such as banking) are demanding broad, affordable, reliable, and flexible electronic highways around the globe. Only a digital global grid can meet these demands. This implies the development of new hardware and software. The digital grid will be expected to transport all signals that can be digitized: from the human voice to High-Definition TV imagery. This requires the replacement of conventional carriers such as copper wires with optical fibre cables, it means new switches, and new software to control the unprecedented large flows of information across borders.

Digitization provides the technical infrastructure for the much heralded "global information superhighway". This is a project that is strongly promoted by the Clinton- Gore administration in the USA where in 1993 an action plan for a National Information Infrastructure was adopted. According to Al Gore (in a speech on March 21, 1991 to the International Telecommunication Union conference in Buenos Aires), 'The President of the United States and I believe that an essential prerequisite to sustainable development, for all members of the human family, is the creation of a Global Information Infrastructure. This GII will circle the globe with information superhighways on which all people can travel'.

In response to the US initiative a frantic activity arose in other countries. In Japan the Telecommunications Council of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications published in May 1994 a report entitled 'Reform towards the Intellectually Creative Society of the 21st century'. In Canada the Information Highway Council was established. The European Union appointed the Task Force on European Information Infrastructure.

During a Summit of the G-7* on the information superhighway in February 1995 at Brussels it became abundantly clear that the information superhighway project receives strong support from the world's top political leadership. The political summit agreed to close cooperation in the development of a global information society. There was however some disagreement about the speed at which this would be established. The USA pleaded for fast liberalization of markets and open competition. Japan and Europe were more cautious and preferred a slower pace. The G-7 Final Declaration stated that key elements are dynamic competition and private investment. Although it is expected that the information society will enrich people worldwide, there are also serious concerns about the disparity between the information- rich and the information-poor and about future employment.

 

2.2. DIGITIZATION: THE ISSUES.

2.2.1. PRIVACY. Digital technologies expand the capacity to capture, process, and store information in dramatic ways. A precise tracing of an individual's movements has become possible through the "electronic trace" we leave behind as we use credit cards, rent cars, buy airline tickets, and purchase items in department stores. Data about people's conduct on the digital superhighway will be accessible in unprecedented ways.

The digital age arrives with a monumental invasion of people's privacy. Rapidly increasing volumes of personal information are collected, stored, and sold through vast electronic systems that are operated by governmental agencies (tax, security, police, etc) and by private firms. Early 1992 a scandal erupted in Spain when the police arrested Joaquin Gonzalez who had built up a very lucrative trade in privacy. His business was buying personal data from public and private electronic databases and selling them to marketing companies. Gonzalez's database had intimate knowledge about which Spanish men had mistresses. His data collection covered some 21 million Spanish citizens.

In order to make or cancel connections between subscribers in a network an extensive exchange of data is needed between subscribers and exchanges and between different exchanges. In digital networks all these data are easily recorded in a socalled Call Detail Record. This Record provides precise information about the ways in which individual subscribers use the network . The development of the Integrated Services Digital Network in many countries is another area with very complex privacy aspects. One of the possibilities of ISDN is automatic caller identification.

For example the call can be automatically connected with a computer database. ISDN facilitates the connection between two databases and thus the combination of separate collections of personal data. ISDN facilitates networks through which data banks with name-linked data can be remotely accessed. Digitization has expanded the range of information-related activities people can engage in while at home: telebanking, teleworking are some examples. This home-telematics opens up new risk of privacy infringement.

Very illustrative are the dangers involved in teleworking. "Because the teleworker is beyond the range of the employer's physical supervision, the necessary supervision of the execution of the work will take place via the on-line telecommunication connection with the worker's terminal. Consequently, the worker is subject to the possibility of continuous supervision by an invisible employer. Moreover, the fact that the worker's terminal is located at home means that the employer can also monitor certain aspects of the worker's daily routine". (De Vries. 1990: 202).

Although privacy legislation is on the increase around the world, it fails to address the basic problem. It leaves the massive collection of data untouched. It does not stop the increasing surveillance of citizens by public and private entities. It only provides you with the right to know that information is collected and possibly allows you to correct it if it is inaccurate. Against the fact that so much detailed, personal information is collected and that one day a less benign state may abuse this, there is presently no legal protection. The violation of people's private sphere follows the spread of advanced digital technology around the world. Admittedly, people have very different conceptions of privacy. In most Western societies there is a much stronger emphasis on the protected individualistic life- world than in many Third World societies. Yet, across the globe people know that information about them can be used against them and that surveillance by powerholders is a worrying development. Moreover, privacy protection does not only concern individual citizens, it concerns whole nations. Digital technology creates transparent societies, 'glass-house' countries that makes them very vulnerable to external forces and that undermines their sovereign capacities.

 

2.2.2. SECURITY. The use of digital technologies involves risks. If they are tampered with, airline passengers may die in a crash, patients may be seriously injured, or companies may go bust. In many social areas (such as international finance and transport) there is today a strong dependency upon technology. This dependence creates a serious vulnerability to the failure of technology. The inherent unreliability of digital computers exacerbates this. Forester and Morrison argue in this connection that computers are inherently unreliable as "they are prone to catastrophic failure; and .... their very complexity ensures that they cannot be thoroughly tested before use". (Forester & Morrison. 1990: 468). Digital systems can suddenly fail totally or behave erratically. This is different in analogue systems (for example a simple thermostat) that have few discontinuities and that are unlikely to stop functioning totally or to operate in totally unpredictable ways. In digital systems, however, there can be numerous discontinuities since the execution of each state of the system depends upon the earlier state to be correct. And each state of the system represents a potential point of error. The magnitude of possible errors is therefore almost beyond imagination. Software bugs, systems malfunction, computer crime and hacking can cost millions of dollars and human lives. Computer software errors may cause over-billing, false arrest, but also loss of life and grave injury.

A special danger for computer systems is posed by socalled virusses. A virus is a computer programme that causes serious damages to hard disks or floppies by erasure or distortion of files. A virus can infect other programmes by copying itself on to them. When in November 1988 a computer virus disrupted the US nationwide ARPANET computer system this forced some 6,000 computers to be shut down for two days leading to a total damage of over US $ 99 million. (Russo, Hale, & Helm. 1989: 4-13). (New York Times, 1988: B-1). The Michelangelo virus of early March 1992 did not create as much damage as it could have since there was a timely warning across the world. Several reports did mention however that some 10,000 computers had been hit worldwide. The virus did wipe out contents of hard disks of the infected computers. A telling illustration of very real damage is the case of a Nevada woman, a Ms Julie Engle. Ms Engle underwent routine surgery in hospital. The operation was completed without complication. However, soon afterward Ms Engle was administered pain relief by a computerized dispensing machine. Unfortunately, the system mistakenly instructed hospital staff to pump more than 500 mg of pain-relieving drugs into Ms Engle's body and within 390 minutes of the successful completion of the operation, she was found to be in a coma. Five days later, she was pronounced brain dead. A damages suit was launched for incorrect and irresponsible use of an expert system. (Forester, 1990: 467). Somewhat similar cases occurred in 1986 when in Texas through computer malfunction lethal overdoses of radiation were given to cancer patients. An obvious manifestation of security issues is the possibility, and increasingly the reality, of computer abuse for criminal purposes. Several highly publicized cases in the late 1980s (such as access to computer systems in Canada from New York or access to NATO information systems in Norway from the USA) have shown that "the prevention of computer crime is of great significance as business, administration and society depend to a high degree on the efficiency and security of modern information technology". (Sieber. 1986: 119). With the proliferation of computer users and the growth of knowledge about computer operations, the chances of computer abuse have drastically increased. There are however no reliable data on the spread of computer crime or on the extent of possible damage caused by it. There is a relatively small number of known computer offences and a likely much higher figure for undiscovered abuses. Sieber attributes this "first to the low proportion of computer offences which become known due to the specific difficulties of detection and proof in the DP sector. Second, many of the offenses that are discovered are subjected to the internal disciplinary procedures of the companies concerned rather than being reported, due mainly to a fear of damage to the company's reputation and loss of confidence by investors, shareholders, and customers or in order to facilitate the compensation for the damage done. Third, cases reported to the law-enforcement agencies are not always systematically prosecuted since effective treatment requires special knowledge as well as high expenditure in terms of time and money. Finally, it is a matter of chance whether reported cases of computer crime are discovered among other cases of fraud and breach of trust, because the criminological term "computer crime" does not appear in official legal administration statistics". (Sieber, 1986: 33). Studies indicate that "losses in computer crime are much more severe than those in traditional crime" (Sieber, 1986: 34) and "the problems caused by computer crime are bound to intensify in the future". (Sieber, 1986: 35).

Among some of the earlier signals that pointed at the problem of technology- vulnerability is the 1978 report by the Swedish Ministry of Defense Committee on the Vulnerability of Computer Systems (SARK) "The Vulnerability of Computerized Society". In 1981 the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development (OECD) held a workshop in Sigueenza (Spain) on the Vulnerability of the Computerized Society. In 1984 the American Federation of Information Processing Societies published a report on the matter and in the same year the Information Task Force of the Commission of the European Communities published "The vulnerability of the information-conscious society-European situation." In 1986 the Norwegian Vulnerability Commission presented a report called "The Vulnerability of a Computer Dependent Society". In 1989 a committee of the British Computer Society reported that current skills in safety assessment were inadequate and therefore the safety of people could not be guaranteed.

These various commissions and reports began to identify the risks that the use of international computer systems entailed. Such risks could be incorrect transmissions either by technical malfunction or by the intentional act of an intruder. Incorrect transmissions could include the transmission of data to the wrong computer, or of the wrong data, or of both. Transmissions could also be afflicted by delays or by the unexplained loss of data. Another risk could be the unauthorized access to the data traffic or the data themselves or both. A third type of risk could be the possibility of communicating with fraudulent persons. Risks could also be caused by malfunctions of networks that take care of Electronic Funds Transfers and such malfunctions may be caused by environmental factors, by equipment failures, errors in design architecture, or by human errors in data processing. Such errors could cause inadvertent changes in the contents of payment instructions. Vulnerability for societies can also be a result of the increased speed of transactions. As businesses use greatly reduced response time to lower their stocks of goods (spare parts, components) a computer virus could close down a factory if something goes wrong in the electronic communications between manufacturer and supplier. Since the risks of digital technology may lead to considerable damage a call for international rules that would establish liability and damage compensation has emerged. This concern for the adoption of international arrangements on data security confronted a host of complex problems. In conventional practice, for example, the operators of international networks could not be held liable for damages caused as a result of transmissions. In many countries the PTT has been the main network operator and in most national legislations the PTT cannot be held liable. The Convention of the International Telecommunication Union (in art. 21) simply excludes any liability for international connections. (ITU, 1989). There is recently, however, an awareness growing in the international community that the interests at stake may demand rules on the liability of network operators.

 

2.3. ACTIVITY I.

Take 15 minutes.

During the Summit of the G-7 on the Information Society (in February 1995 at Brussels) US Vice President Al Gore said that the biggest concern about the Global Information Superhighway was the protection of privacy. " We must protect the privacy of personal data and communications. Government and industry need to work together to develop new technologies, new standards, and new policies that will provide the necessary security and privacy protection".

How do you respond to this statement? Has digitization made the protection of privacy an illusion? Can policies be developed that make the Global Information Highway secure and reliable?

 

3. THE TREND TOWARDS LIBERALIZATION.

3.1. WHAT IS LIBERALIZATION? The trend towards digitization goes together with political and industrial pressures to shift from public-service type information and telecommunication services to a competitive environment for the trading of these services by private market operators. Liberalization refers to the introduction of competition in the supply of information and telecommunication services. The High-level group on the information society -chaired by European Commissioner Martin Bangemann- reported in June 1994 to the European Summit at Corfu that the information society is coming, whether we like or not. The process should be driven by the market and the market should be open. Liberalization is the key word for the future information society. One of the recommendations of the Group was to accelerate the continuing process of liberalizing all telecommunication infrastructures and services still under monopoly. (Bangemann, 1994). As many countries around the world are revising their communication and information structures, the leading stratagem seems to be "more market, less state" and the buzzword is "deregulation". Deregulation became the key policy orientation of the 1980s. The concept is somewhat misleading as deregulation in practice tends to imply re-regulation and it often leads to more rather than to fewer rules. The first period of deregulation commenced in the late 1950s within the USA. As telecommunication users "became aware of their growing dependence on telecommunications, they organized to lobby government authorities for specific, far- reaching change in the rules governing domestic telecommunications provisions". (Schiller & Fregoso. 1991: 198). By and large the telecommunication regulators affirmed business user's demands. In the 1980s telecommunications systems in the USA, UK and Japan shifted to deregulatory policies. On January 1, 1984 the mega-telecommunication operator AT&T was broken up into its 22 local companies. In exchange AT&T was now at liberty to enter new types of business. In 1985 the sale of 51% of Britain's nationally owned British Telecom shares to private sector interests was authorized by the UK government. Also in 1985 Japan developed a new policy towards the liberalization of its telecommunications operations. The largest operator Nippon Telephone & Telegraph lost its monopoly in exchange for the permission to begin new competitive lines of communication business. Part of the government's ownership of NT&T was sold to the private sector and new local voice carriers were allowed in the market place. A key policy issue in the GATT Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations -which ended in December 1993- was the liberalization of markets around the world for providers of services (among them telecommunication services and audiovisual services).

 

3.2. LIBERALIZATION: THE ISSUES.

3.2.1. UNIVERSAL SERVICE. Already in the early history of telecommunications a key notion was "universal service". This means that telecommunication should be available to all people at reasonable charges. A critical question is whether liberalization is compatible with universal service? What will happen to universal service in the competitive battle between private entrepreneurs? Given the levels of expenditure, will private entrepreneurs continue to meet the common standard of availability? The standard of availability obviously demands international coordination. It requires that telecommunication networks are technically compatible and that common rules are adopted about access to and use of these networks. From the mid-nineteenth century through to the 1970s this coordination was governed by a stable and robust multilateral accord. The world community had adopted common standards on the technical compatibility of networks and the price setting for access to and use of these networks. This public-service type agreement was based upon the principles of natural monopoly and cross-subsidization. Monopolies of equipment and services were seen to provide efficient and equitable public service. Cross-subsidization meant that tariffs for small users were not based upon real costs, but were kept affordable by subsidies from such revenue generating operations as international telephony. This arrangement was fundamentally challenged by the deregulatory reforms of the 1980's. The large users discovered that cost reductions were possible if they used alternatives to the networks controlled by the national monopolies. In some countries strong pressures to base telecommunication tariffs on a cost-based system began to have an effect on national policy. This new pricing policy raised serious problems for the availability of telecommunication for residential users at reasonable charges. As Hills observes, "Under liberalization cost-based pricing involves a reduction in long- distance tariffs, an increase in local call charges and an increase in the charges levied on individual subscribers (these subscribers being once again made responsible for meeting the cost of the local loop". (Hills, J. 1989: 134) The liberalization argument responds to this by stating that "if individual subscribers are too poor to meet the increased costs of access then they must forfeit telephone service and drop off the network. If governments wish the network to be 'universal' then they must pay a subsidy to have these people kept on". (Hills, J. 1989: 134). Although there is not sufficient strong evidence on large numbers of subscribers being forced off the network, there is evidence that liberalization has not increased the penetration of telephone networks. This is largely due to the fact that deregulation tends to increase costs of connection, rental and usage. "In the USA consumer groups argue that the divestiture of AT&T has disenfranchised groups of consumers from use of the telephone by the rebalancing of charges and the liberalization of the local network monopoly-these groups are the elderly, the poor and those living in high-cost rural areas". (Hills, J. 1989: 139). There are a number of initiatives developed to address this, such as subsidization schemes for emergency services. However, consumer groups argue that these measures are not adequate.

They provide access to the 'emergency box', but this does not constitute universal service. "The argument adopted by consumer groups in the USA is that access is not universal service - that the telephone should be priced at a level which makes it possible for disadvantaged groups to use it for social reasons rather than simply as an emergency service". (Hills. 1989: 141). The data on penetration in the USA suggest that since the AT&T divestiture national telephone penetration has not decreased (Fuhr. 1990: 187), but this may be different for actual usage. "Consumer groups claim that usage of the telephone has decreased among lower-income groups, such as the elderly. The American Association of Retired Persons argues that one in five people over the age of 55 years have had to reduce their telephone usage". (Hills, J. 1989: 142).

Deregulation of telecommunication may also have an impact on international tariff structures. The concern has been raised that the new competitive climate for Intelsat* could lead to so called 'cream-skimming' on the dense routes and consequently problems for the financing of the thin routes (in particular for Third World traffic). Although opinions are divided on the effectiveness of this policy, there has been since the beginning of Intelsat operations a level of cross-subsidization. "Intelsat is currently responsible for the delivery of approximately 70% of the world's international telephone calls and virtually all international television transmission. Since its very beginning Intelsat has enjoyed a near monopoly status in the delivery of satellite communications. Through an economic policy of global price averaging, Intelsat has ensured affordable communications on a worldwide basis. To accomplish this, Intelsat takes revenues derived from high-traffic routes (eg the North Atlantic region, USA to Europe) and subsidizes the less profitable traffic routes that interconnect geographically isolated and/or developing nations". (Gershon. 1990: 249). By the mid-1980s a number of applications for the provision of satellite services had been received by the US Federal Communications Commission. Applicants were Orion Satellite Corporation (March 1983), International Satellite Inc (August 1983), RCA (February 1984), Cygnus Corporation (March 1984) and Pan American Satellite Inc (May 1984). Only the PanAmSat application asked authorization for international carrier services between the USA and Latin America. The others were only interested in the provision of private satellite services (information traffic within a network owned or leased by the customer) in the North Atlantic region. Intelsat clearly began to feel uneasy about the prospect of cream-skimming competitors. In 1985 the then Intelsat director general Richard R. Colino wrote "While deregulation and free- market competition are suitable in some business environments, in others they can cause ruinous failures with devastating social implications if not carefully and effectively managed". (Gershon. 1990: 252). In November 1984 the Reagan administration launched its "Open Skies" policy that would promote international competition in telecommunications as well as maintain the viability of Intelsat. If Intelsat will have to compete with other satellite operators, but also increasingly with fibre optic cable operators that will apply high-density routes based pricing systems, will the integrated global pricing system of Intelsat survive? (Gershon. 1990: 249).

 

3.2.2. MARKET ACCESS. What is the impact of a worldwide liberalized trade environment upon the markets of developing countries? What are the effects on infant service industries in Third World countries? What are the consequences of global open markets for local cultural production? Will trade liberalization benefit those countries that have large trade deficits in services? When the costs of telecommunications go down, one can expect a rapid growth of information-based services that are supplied by telecommunication-based delivery systems. The operators of such services will press for far-reaching regulatory changes to remove international trade barriers. One of the problems is that the regulation of service activities is often closely related to specific national goals. This is evident in such cases as the regulation of banking and insurance and the operations of airlines and telecommunications. Here considerations of national security or public interest have an import on regulatory measures. A principal question is when are national rules reasonable, and when do they constitute protectionism? Discrimination against foreign suppliers may be considered inappropriate and protectionist. However, particular countries may intentionally discriminate against foreign suppliers of cultural goods (such as films, television programmes, or advertising) that can be seen as eroding their cultural identity. It may also be that national policy makers want to tie foreign service providers to concessions in the field of the transfer of technology or employment. The policy challenge will be to find the equilibrium between the legitimate domestic concerns of national governments and the free trade rules of multilateral arrangements such as concluded by the GATT negotiations.

In the GATT multilateral negotiations on traded services much emphasis was laid on such standards as 'market access', and 'national treatment'. The latter means that foreign companies should be treated like national firms. This rules out any local protection of domestic service industries, inhibits the development of indigenous service industries, and diminishes local control over key service industries. Once one realizes that among such industries are the mass media, telecommunication services, advertising, marketing, and tourism, it is clear that the application of these norms reduces local cultural autonomy. Local cultural markets are monopolized by transnational corporations that leave little space for local cultural providers. Liberalizing world trade to the extent that smaller and less resource-rich countries open their services markets to outsiders, erodes the competitive capacity of people's own cultural industries. Providing open access to local markets has promoted in many countries the commercialization of their information systems. Where public broadcast systems have gone commercial, the issue has arisen whether this leads to a massive inflow of US produced TV materials or to increased opportunities for domestic TV production. It is likely that at least in the short term the creation of free TV markets would reinforce the controlling position of US exports of TV and film. This dominance to a large extent follows fairly simple economic mechanisms. The US exporters operate from a very large domestic market that provides the economic resources for a level of investment that facilitates the production of feature films and series that easily have a competitive edge in the world market. Commercialization may lead to price wars for the acquisition of successful foreign programmes. This could benefit the foreign sellers, but could also make the domestic alternative an attractive proposition. (Waterman. 1988: 147). It could be that commercial broadcast systems yield improved revenue bases as channel capacity increases. Initially this could indeed lead to more foreign imports, but with more advertising capacity it could create the resource base for more domestic productions. Waterman argues this on the basis of the premise that audiences prefer programmes produced within their own country. (Waterman. 1988: 144).

Liberalization has also facilitated the developments of markets for pay-TV. It is likely that in most pay-TV operations the dominant programme fare will be movies made in the USA. This is so because the USA still maintains a strong competitive advantage in markets for motion pictures and pre-recorded video-cassettes.

In any case it is likely that the pressures of liberalization will lead to more commercial programming to meet the demand of advertisers for large audiences. It will also render the public interest aspirations sought by broadcasters in many countries ever harder to attain. An important policy issue in this connection is whether measures to establish national or regional import quotas are effective in stimulating more domestic production. "In order for import quotas governing one media to be effective, alternative delivery systems must also be controlled. A profound blow to this possibility has been forever dealt by the videocassette recorder, a technology whose diffusion and usage is defiant of public control". (Waterman. 1988: 150).

Liberalization stimulates an explosive growth of communication markets and thus the question arises which companies will win the race. Many of them are looking for alliances that would give them a better position in the market. As a result, liberalization may not necessarily mean de-monopolization. It may in fact lead to more concentration. As the technological convergence leads to institutional convergence the outcome may be that a whole range of formerly separated communication channels (phone, broadcasting, computers, publishing) end up under the umbrella of one mega-conglomerate.

 

3.3. ACTIVITY II. Take 10 minutes for each comment.

Comment on the following statements:

A. 'Liberalization of the world communication market will lead to more competition and thus benefit consumers worldwide'.

B. 'Liberalization will benefit the largest operators more than consumers. It will consolidate their control over products and prices on the world communication market'.

 

4. THE TREND TOWARDS CONSOLIDATION.

4.1. WHAT IS CONSOLIDATION? All signals, whether they carry sound, data, or pictures, converge into the digital format. They become, however different in substance, identical in the technical sense. As a result, telecommunication and broadcasting integrate, i.e. telecommunication services can be provided by TV cable networks or TV signals can be carried by telecommunication operators. Although today it is still possible to distinguish computer manufacturers, telephone service companies, publishing houses, broadcasters, and film producers as separate industrial actors, they are rapidly converging into one industrial activity. Increasingly, control on the world communication market is consolidated in the hands of a few mega-conglomerates. The emerging mega-industries combine message production (ranging from digital libraries to TV entertainment), the manufacturing and operating of distribution systems (ranging from satellites to digital switches), and building the equipment for reception and processing of information (ranging from HDTV-sets to telephones). Illustrative is the Japanese company Sony which was already active in the equipment sector when it acquired through Columbia Pictures and CBS-records access to the message component.

Business Week has christened the early 1990s 'the Age of Consolidation. "Everywhere you look these days, archrivals are falling into each other's embrace". (Business Week, 1991: 40). Megamergers in both manufacturing and services sectors are emerging. Particularly the US economy provides stark illustrations in such sectors as banking and aviation. As Business Week describes consolidation "It was inaugurated during the dealmaking 1980s, which left airlines, tires, and appliances in the hands of virtual cartels. And it's being propelled by ferocious foreign competition, a sluggish and capacity-glutted U.S. economy, and swelling research-and-development costs. Now, the wave is rolling into fresh sectors of the economy -banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, retailing, commercial real estate. It's even touching youthful industries such as software and biotechnology". (Business Week, 1991: 41).

In the mid-1990s there is worldwide evidence of a new merger boom across old and new industries that also affects the communications market. In all its segments there are clear trends towards a high rate of concentration and all indications are that this will continue throughout the 1990s. Companies are looking for alliances and create new combinations, like in the most publicized deal of 1994: the Viacom, Paramount and Blockbuster US$ 8.5 billion merger.

Some examples will illustrate concentration in the markets for audiovisual products, international news, telecommunications and computers.

Audiovisual Market. On the world market for AV products (estimated at US $ 156 billion in 1992) the top 12 AV companies control in 1993 over 40%. (see Table 2).

 

In 1994 the market shares of major Hollywood companies were:

 












BUENA VISTA DISNEY 19%PARAMOUNT VIACOM 15% 
WARNER BROS TIME WARNER 14%UNIVERSAL MATSUSHITA 13%
20TH FOX NEWS CORP (MURDOCH)NEWS LINE TURNER BROADCASTING 6%
TRISTAR SONY 5%COLUMBIA SONY 5%
  

Source: Daily Variety, 1995.

 

News Market. Also the international news market demonstrates a strong trend towards consolidation. For printed news there are on the world market (after the sales of UPI to Middle East Broadcasting), only Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France Press. For visual news there are two leading agencies Reuters Television (the former Visnews) and World Television Network. Reuters TV supplies TV news to over 40 broadcasters in 85 countries reaching almost a half-billion households. WTN provides to 100 broadcasters in 85 countries reaching an audience of some three billion people. Second in line for international TV news production and distribution are BBC World Service and CNN. CNN distributes around the clock to over 200 subscribers. Per average day some 160 items are broadcast of which about 30 are international. CNN is available in over 700 million households worldwide and thousands of hotels. For the provision of TV news programmes to European audiences new alliances have been built between Reuters Holdings and British Sky Broadcasting (owned by Murdoch), Pearson and the BBC, and NBC and the Financial Times.

Telecommunication Market. The world telecommunication market generated US $ 535 billion in 1992. The top ten companies had a 45% share. Market analysts expect that by the year 2000 only five telecommunication megacompanies will control global networks. These are: AT&T, Cable & Wireless, MCI, United Telecom, and British Telecom.

Computer Market. The world market for computer hardware yielded in 1992 US $ 114 billion. The twenty biggest companies represented an 80% share of the market. Among them are IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Apple Computer, Unisys, and Compaq Computer.

Among the key factors that explain consolidation are the following. 1. Recent years have seen a considerable increase in the scale at which the world communication market operates. In order to remain competitive on this market, many companies have begun to integrate formerly distinct operations. As a result conglomerates emerged that combine the production and distribution of hardware products (such as videocassettes) with the related software (movies). 2. In order for companies to operate competitively on global markets, they need to achieve dominance on domestic markets and thus shake-out domestic competitors. 3. In recent years some sectors of the industry, such as the publishing houses, have been particularly profitable, and had to find investments for their cash-flows. Acquiring competing companies did seem an attractive strategy. 4. In some cases (for example the merger between Time Inc. and Warner Communications) a mega-merger would seem the only option against the foreign invader on the home-market (in this case the German firm Bertelsmann).

Consolidation is not without its problems as the case of Sony has demonstrated. In late 1994 Sony disclosed it had written off US$ 2.7 billion from its acquisition of Columbia Pictures. In dealing with the complexities of Hollywood the company had made some very expensive mistakes in film projects with high costs and poor box office results. In the early 1990s most mega-companies had very large debts to cope with. Time-Warner for example had a 16 billion dollar debt on its books, Murdoch's News Corp. had 8 billion dollar debt and Sumner Redstone' MTV faced a debt of US $ 2,4 billion.

 

4.2. CONSOLIDATION: THE ISSUES.

4.2.1. IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSUMERS: ACCESS AND CHOICE. A key question is what consolidation means for consumers' access to the products of the world communication market and how much choice they will have.

Consolidation hinders competition as it effectively creates monopolies or oligopolies.* In most sectors of the economy this is to the disadvantage of the consumer. Conglomerates that control a market can use their market power to 'price-gouge consumers'. This means that in the initial stages of consolidation prices go down, but once the market is settled, there is a strong likelihood of rapidly increasing costs to consumers. This may easily mean that the access to information becomes dependent upon the level of disposable income. This implies that income differences exacerbate already existing disparities between information-rich and information-poor within and between nations.

Another problem is that -ideally- consumers should have access to a large variety of autonomous media managed by a diversity of individuals and groups. Consolidation may effectively diminish the number of channels that people have at their disposal to express or receive opinions. In consolidated markets it thus becomes easier for the controlling interests to refuse the distribution of certain opinions.

It is therefore relevant to question whether consolidation does guarantee sufficient independent locations for media workers, does it guarantee enough channels for audience reception and/or access, does it provide adequate protection against price controls on oligopolistic markets, and does it permit newcomers on markets? Even if the oligopolist would demonstrate quality, fairness, diversity, critical debate, objectivity, investigative reporting, resistance to external pressures in his offerings to the market place, there would still be reason to provide regulatory correction as the market place would effectively be closed for newcomers and thus not constitute a free market.

Is consolidation incompatible with the freedom of expression? The Strasbourg Court of Human Rights has judged (November 23, 1993, in Informationsverein Lentia a.o. vs. Austria) that the Austrian public broadcasting monopoly is incompatible with the freedom of expression. The Court stressed that states have a responsibility to guarantee an effective pluralism of information. If private broadcasters could use this principle against state monopoly, the question arises whether it could also be used against private monopolies?

Consolidation can erode the diversity of informational and cultural production. However, this is not always the case. It can be attractive for the oligopolist to bring competing products on the market. We see this happening quite commonly in such sectors as cosmetics or detergents. This intra-firm diversity helps to erect very effective obstacles against the market-entry of newcomers. This is important since market diversity frequently originates with new entrants. It is also true that large firms may support loss-making operations by compensating the losses elsewhere in the company accounts. In this way newspapers, for example, that otherwise would have disappeared can be maintained. However, the length of time this compensation will be acceptable to shareholders (and in particular institutional investors) is limited. Moreover, losses accumulate over time and in the middle- to longer term, products that are not profitable will have to be removed. In cases where consolidation occurs as vertical integration, meaning that production and distribution are controlled by the same actors, the real danger exists that they will exclusively offer their own products to the market. A common example is the newspaper that as part of a conglomerate places mainly reviews of its own books. The growing influence of institutional investors and commercial interests not genuine to the information sector tends to lead to an emphasis on the profitability of the commodity, rather than on its socio-cultural quality. As a result there is a preference for products that can be rapidly sold on mass markets. Illustrative of this is the tendency among film production companies and recorded music producers to concentrate on "blockbusters". This "Rambo" and "Madonna" tendency reinforces a homogenization of markets as the less profitable products are avoided. Markets tend inevitably towards identical, though marginally distinct, products since they address of necessity the largest possible number of buyers. Allowing competition on the marketplace does not necessarily lead to more diversity. There is some evidence that the deregulated, competitive broadcast systems of West European countries reflect less diversity in contents than the formerly regulated, public monopolies. This is largely due to the fact that on a competitive market the actors all try to control the largest segment by catering to rather similar tastes and preferences of that market segment.

 

4.2.2. INDEPENDENCE OF PERFORMANCE. An important issue is also the level of independence in information provision. Industrial concentration inevitably implies the establishment of power. The mega- mediacompanies are centres of power that are at the same time linked into other circuits of power, such as the financial institutions, the military establishments, and the political elite. A problem arises when the mass media that provide news and commentary are part of an industrial conglomerate. The conglomerate may engage in activities that call for critical scrutiny by the media, but that the controlling actors prefer to protect against exposure. The close interlocks between the US media and the military contractors may have contributed to the partisan way in which the Gulf war was reported. The National Broadcasting Corporation (one of the three leading US networks) is owned by General Electric. "As it turns out, GE designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every important weapons system employed by the USA during the Gulf War, including the much-praised Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, the Apache and Cobra helicopters and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. Few TV viewers in the USA were aware of the inherent conflict of interest whenever NBC correspondents and consultants hailed the performance of US weapons. In nearly every instance, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries". (Lee. 1991: 29.). As a former NBC employee observed, "The whole notion of freedom of the press becomes a contradiction when the people who own the media are the people who need to be reported on". (Lee. 1991: 29). The independence of information provision is particularly important for democratic societies. At the core of democracy is the presence of a public debate about the distribution and execution of power. It is crucial for democratic arrangements that choices made by the power holders are publicly scrutinized and contested. In the public debate the informational and cultural products play a significant role. If the interests of the information and culture producers and the powers that be are intertwined, a society's capacity for democratic government is seriously undermined.

 

4.3. ACTIVITY III. Take 10 minutes.

Describe in a brief statement how you think the world communication market will look in the year 2025.

 

5. THE TREND TOWARDS GLOBALIZATION.

 

5.1. WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION? Globalization means that the world communication market expands and affects more and more local markets.

America's hottest export item to-day is pop culture. US movies, music, TV programming and home video now account for some US $8 billion trade surplus. Top sellers are Mickey Mouse, Madonna, Michael Jackson, McDonald's Burgers, Levi's jeans and Cola. In the past five years the overseas revenues of Hollywood studios have doubled. The US $20 billion music industry collects some 70% outside the USA. There is world-wide a clear trend towards an increasing demand for the American-brand entertainment. As the Fortune magazine observed "Around the globe, folks just can't get enough of America". (Fortune, 1990: 28). A remarkable feature of this trend is that Europeans and Japanese are buying into this successful export commodity. Of the five global record companies, Warner, CBS, EMI, and Polygram, only Warner is still an American corporation. The Japanese have invested in the past years some $12 billion in the US entertainment companies. In November 1990 Japanese hardware manufacturer Matsushita bought MCA for US $ 6 billion and acquired with this purchase: Universal Studios, Universal Pictures and MCA Records. Foreign investors have acquired traditional US film "majors", such as Twentieth Century Fox (acquired in 1985 by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation) and Columbia Pictures (purchased by Japanese Sony in 1989 for 3,4 billion US dollars).

The very big media companies have outgrown their saturated home markets and the logical way towards further growth is cross-border expansion. In particular West European and Japanese firms entered the US market loaded with cash from very stable and profitable revenues. There are obviously also movements from US companies towards European markets. European and US firms have also begun to invade the promising consumer markets of the Asian region. Murdoch's News Corporation provides an excellent illustration. On July 26, 1993 the owner of Star-TV Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing sold 64% of this first Asian satellite TV network to Murdoch for US $ 525 million. As Business Week projects, "With Star, Murdoch now has a signal that will reach 70% of the world's population by 1995, from Japan to the Middle East". (Business Week, 1993: 21). The deal between Li Ka-shing and Murdoch was largely motivated by the pressure on his network caused by the announcement of Turner (CNN which spends some US$ 15 million to develop production capacity in Asia), Time-Warner's Home Box Office (on cable in some eight Asian countries), Capital Cities/ABC ESPN (the sports network), the Discovery Channel, and Hong Kong-based Television Broadcasting Inc. to compete with Star TV in 1994 after the launch of a Chinese communications satellite. Other companies entering the huge Asian markets are Dow Jones & Co. and NBC. Both firms are interested in promoting business broadcast news from operations based in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Among the driving forces of the globalization processes, we find the following factors.

Technological development. Technological innovations, especially in the field of informatics, telecommunications and their convergence have largely facilitated processes of globalization. In fact, one could argue that communication/information technologies provide the essential infrastructure for global transactions.

Financial markets. In the 1970s financial markets began to expand and offshore financial operations proliferated across the globe. As a result vast amounts of money began to circulate outside the jurisdiction of national governments. This triggered off the acceleration of globalization processes. The enormous growth of trade. Sweeping reductions in costs of air travel and shipping have facilitated phenomenal expansion of cross-border trading. In the process, not only has the volume of trade enormously increased, but also its character has considerably changed. The steeply rising costs of developing new technologies and new products have forced companies to employ on the emerging global markets the use of global brand-names and global advertising. Politics. Increasingly in many countries the political climate is very supportive of globalization processes. The creation of global electronic networks, for example, is largely facilitated through the privatization of public telecommunication services, the liberalization of electronics markets, and the deregulation of tariff structures. All such political and regulatory measures are intended to accommodate the claims of the large corporate users of world communication.

 

5.2. GLOBALIZATION: THE ISSUES.

5.2.1. HOW GLOBAL IS GLOBAL? There are undeniably globalization processes at work today. However, despite these realities, there is a strong likelihood that we currently see the emergence of a "fragmented globalism" of the world economy (Lanvin. 1991: 99). A remarkable feature of much discourse on globalization is that it completely bypasses the fact that the world is very starkly divided and fractured on many counts. Highly visible fissures are present in the growing economic disparities between both the North and the South and between different social groups within nations. In the field of world communication, one certainly has to ask 'how global is global'? There remains today in the communication field a stark disparity between the affluent industrial nations and the countries of the Third World. The availability of telephone lines provides a good illustration.

 

The distribution of telephone lines in the world (1992)

 

REGIONS % OF THE WORLD'S TELEPHONE LINES

 

Europe 31.9

North America 30.2

Japan 10.5

Asia 8.7

Latin America 3.8

Africa 1.7

Middle East 1.6

 (SOURCE: International Telecommunication Union).

 

If there is a global communications party, the majority of the world's population has not yet been invited to join. As Vijay Menon asks, "But how much a part of the global village is Asia?". (Menon. 1993: 29). As the technological infrastructures remain very expensive to acquire and maintain, an important issue will be the possibility that only a limited number of actors will have access to the emerging global circuits. It may well be that the developing countries will experience a "selective short-circuiting" (Lanvin. 1991: 99) of their trading opportunities.

 

5.2.2. TOWARDS A GLOBAL CULTURE? As the communication conglomerates extend their activities to more countries, the production of culture and information takes on a cosmopolitan hue and suggests the emergence of a global culture. The worldwide proliferation of standardized food, clothing, music, TV drama, Anglosaxon business style and linguistic convention, creates the impression of an unprecedented cultural homogenization.

We can indeed observe a rapid transnational proliferation of mass-market advertising and electronic entertainment produced by a handful of mega-conglomerates. There is a worldwide spread of commercially packaged cultural products. A uniform consumerist lifestyle is aggressively marketed across the globe. One could, however, argue that this 'McDonaldization' of the world does not yet create a uniform, global culture. And one could correctly point to the distinct cultural entities in the world to which the manifold inter-ethnic conflicts are ever so many dramatic testimonies. Or, one could cite the fact that non-Western values are by no means extinct and that an impressive volume of local customs is very much alive around the world. But even if "global culture" is not an adequate category of analysis, there is undoubtedly a process of "cultural globalization". A lively expression of this process are the Disney amusement parks, whether in Tokyo Disneyland or Paris Disneyland that opened in the spring of 1992. "We're going to be American because America sells really well", says Robert Fitzpatrick, president of Euro Disneyland, the 5,000-acre park just East of Paris. The French who occasionally have expressed strong fears of US cultural imperialism have received "this shrine of American pop culture" enthusiastically despite some critics describing the Disney invasion as a "cultural Chernobyl" (Marguerite Duras). As a matter of fact the French government has reduced the value added tax on theme parks from 18.6 % to 7%, lent 4 billion francs at preferential rates and provided 2.7 billion francs in infrastructure improvements, such as highways and rail roads. (International Herald Tribune, 1992: 1). Ironically, it turns out that Euro Disney is not very successful and has lost already over US$ 1 billion. Among the arguments for the limited interest that French people show for the American project, is that no wine drinking is allowed in the amusement park.

Probably the greatest success story of the process of cultural globalization is its marketing of consumerism. "McDonaldization" teaches people around the world very persuasively how to be consumers. The aggressive around-the-clock advertising, the promotion of resource-intensive lifestyles, the competitive advantage against local cultural providers, and the obstruction of local initiative, all converge into a reduction of local cultural space.

The process of cultural globalization has given rise to a concern about the nationality of media-ownership. Ironically, particularly in the USA, there has been an expression of serious worry about the Japanese take-over of traditional Hollywood companies. However, this concern tends to lead attention away from the more basic problem: globalization increases the mega-corporate control over the provision of information and culture. As Schiller writes, "The daily instruction of most Americans is now in the hands not of the schools but of the corporate multimedia packagers". (Schiller. 1990: 829). There would seem a very realistic chance that the "Lords of the Global Village" (Bagdikian. 1989) will control before the turn of the century most of the world's expression, creativity, and instruction. With the globalization of informational and cultural production, not only US transnational companies, but equally Dutch, German, or Japanese firms use information and culture to sell consumerism across the globe. Maintaining American style and production values, media products have now become "the generic material for all transnationals, whatever their ownership base". Fusing different sources of capital, the global transnational information and cultural producers are "turning the world into a shopping mall for those with sufficient disposable income". (Schiller. 1993: 29 and 40).

In the past years global operators have understood that adaptations to local taste make their exploits even more successful. The performance of the music television station, MTV, on the Asian markets is a good case in point. MTV beams its signals to Asian audiences through one of the channels on Satellite Television Asian Region (STAR TV). This Hong Kong based satellite operator reaches out to some 3.75 million households in Asian countries. With many Asian youngsters ready to spend on global tastes this is clearly a promising market for MTV advertisers. In order to accommodate local taste, some 20% of MTV programming is Asian. This includes the promotion of Thai and Chinese pop stars and Mandarin sung Mando-Rock music. MTV's products may be regionally customized, but its prime orientation remains to offer advertisers a profitable market for consumer products and to lure consumers, particularly young ones, to watch its programmes and in the process influence their tastes, life styles, and moral values.

This cultural adaptation is also a concern of those TV companies that are trying to cash in on the expansion of payTV markets in Latin America. Among the contenders are Turner Broadcasting, ESPN, NBC (with 24 hour Spanish-language news), MTV Latino, and Murdoch's Fox Latin America channel. Although payTV only reaches a limited portion of Latin American TV households, it represents an affluent and a growing market for advertisers. In order to make the programmes more acceptable to local audiences, they are given Latin looks. As the vice-president of Fox Latin America commented, "you have to add the salsa to it". (Fortune, 1990: 34). Opinions differ regarding the effect of cultural globalization. For the Asian region one finds those defending an optimist position, "We in Asia have a particular advantage..nobody has yet moulded us....even in the most economically advanced Asian societies, we are a very tradition-minded people". (Joseph Wang, advertising expert from Hong Kong quoted by Menon. 1993: 31) against anthropologist Santasombat from Thailand (Yos Santasombat, quoted by Menon. 1993: 31) "Thai society today is indeed in a state of confusion and expedient westernisation. McDonalds, Burger King, Dunkin Donuts. Fast foods and fast profits--Thai culture and traditions are becoming obsolete and irrelevant, if not outright obstacles to modernisation and westernisation".

The concern about the cultural and economic impact of cultural globalization is not restricted to Third World countries. The expansion of the US cultural industries has become a hot political issue in Europe. In September 1993 the French audiovisual industry took the initiative to protest against the inclusion of audiovisual products in the final text of the Uruguay Round GATT negotiations. In these negotiations, the USA demanded that the world trade in audiovisual products follows the principles of a free trade regime. This implied that a variety of protectionist measures (such as national import quota and state subsidies) which are common in European countries would have to be abandoned. The European film industry was concerned that subjecting its sector to free trade would promote a global spread of Hollywood materials and the effective annihilation of European culture. European concerns about Hollywood films are largely based upon the existing trade deficit with the USA in audiovisual trade and the fact that over half of the movies exhibited in European cinemas are made in the USA against only 2% European films released in the USA. For example: in the UK US-made movies get 84 % of box office receipts, in Germany this is 82%, and in France 58%. The GATT accord that was concluded in mid-December 1993 did not include the sector of audiovisual services. The most powerful players were divided between a free trade perspective promoted by the USA and a cultural policy perspective defended by the European Union. In the course of 1994 the key US actors (such as the Motion Pictures Export Association) and the European Commission began to negotiate a reconciliation of positions.

 

5.3. ACTIVITY IV. Take 10 minutes to answer the following question:.

Is the European (and especially the French) concern about US cultural imperialism justified?

 

6. SUMMARY OF MAIN POINTS.

Flows of words, images, text and data across the globe have become the arena of a major commercial activity. A multi-billion dollar world communication market has developed that is still expanding. The key trends on this market are: digitization, consolidation, liberalization, and globalization.

Digitization means that the processing of information is increasingly done with digital technologies (which represent signals in digital form, i.e. with the use of digits). Digital technologies are the backbone of the projected global information superhighway. The main issues in connection with digitization are: the protection of privacy and security.

Liberalization is the regulatory effort to promote open and competitive markets. It represents the position that there should be no trade barriers for the world communication market. The main issues in connection with liberalization are: the protection of universal service and infant markets in less powerful countries and the commercialization of information services.

Consolidation means that fewer companies control a greater share of the market. The main issues in connection with consolidation are: the accessibility and the diversity of supply on the communication market as well as the independence of information providers.

Globalization means that the world communication market extends to and affects more and more local markets. The main issues in connection with globalization are: the persisting communication gap in the 'global village' and the process of cultural globalization.

 

7. REFERENCES.

 

Bagdikian, B.H. (1989) The Lords of the Global Village. In The Nation. June 12. 805-820.

Bangemann, M. (1994) Europe and the Global Information Society-Recommendations to the European Council, Brussels.

Business Week, 1991. October 14. Business Week, 1993. August 9.

Forester, T. & Morrison, P. (1990) Computer Unreliability and Social Vulnerability. In Futures. Vol. 22. No. 5. 462-474.

Fortune, 1990. December 31.

Fuhr, J.P. (1990). Telephone subsidization of rural areas in the USA. In Telecommunications Policy. Vol. 14. No. 3. 183-188.

Gershon, R.A. (1990). Global cooperation in an era of deregulation. In Telecommunications Policy. Vol. 14. No. 3. 249-259.

Hills, J.(1989). Universal Service. Liberalization and privatization of telecommunications. In Telecommunications Policy. Vol. 13. No. 2. 129-144.

International Herald Tribune, 1992. April 9.

ITU (1989). The Constitution of the International Telecommunication Union. Article 25.

Lanvin, B. (1991). Information, strategies and infrastructures for international trade. In Communications & Strategies. No. 1. 97-102.

Lee, M.A. (1991). Arms and the media: business as usual. In Index on Censorship. 10. 29-31. Menon, V. (1993). Tradition meets modernity on the path to the global village. In Intermedia. Vol. 21. No 1. 29-31.

New York Times, 1988. November 13.

Russo, J., Hale, T.C. & Helm, R. S. (1989). Computer Viruses: New Potential Liability for Software Developers and Expert System Providers. In International Computer Law Adviser. 4-13.

Schiller, D. & Fregoso, R.L. (1991). A private view of the digital world. In Telecommunications Policy. Vol. 15. No. 3. 195-208.

Schiller, H.I. (1990). The Nation, December 31.

Schiller, H.I. (1993). Mass Communications and American Empire. Revised edition. Boulder: Westview.

Sieber, U. (1986). The International Handbook on Computer Crime. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Vries, H. de. (1990). Home-telematics and Privacy Protection. In Kasperen, H.W.K. & Oskamp, A. (Eds.). Amongst Friends in Computers and Law. Deventer: Kluwer. 201-212. Waterman, D. (1988). The Economic Effects of Privatization and New Technology. In Telecommunications Policy. Vol. 12. No. 2. 141-151.

 

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING.

 

ON WORLD COMMUNICATION IN GENERAL:

Frederick, H.H. (1993) Global communication and international relations, Belmont (CA), Wadsworth Publishing Company.

Hamelink, C.J. (1994) Trends in World Communication, Penang, Southbound Publishers.

 

ON TECHNOLOGIES OF WORLD COMMUNICATION:

Forester, T. and Morrison, P. (1990) Computer Ethics. Cautionary Tales and Ethical Dilemmas in Computing, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

Tehranian, M. (1990) Technologies of Power, Norwood, Ablex Publishing.

Mansell, R. (1993). The New Telecommunications. A political economy of network evolution, London, Sage.

 

ON THE POLITICS OF WORLD COMMUNICATION:

Hills, J. and Papathanassopoulos, S. (1991) The Democracy Gap. The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies in the United States and Europe, London, Greenwood Press.

Hamelink, C.J. (1994) The Politics of World Communication, London, Sage.

 

ON THE ECONOMICS OF WORLD COMMUNICATION:

Sanchez Tabernero, A. (1993) Media concentration in Europe, London, Libbey.

Barnet, R. and Cavanagh, J. (1994). Global Dreams. Imperial Corporations and the New World Order, New York, Simon & Schuster.

 

ON CULTURE AND WORLD COMMUNICATION:

Hamelink, C.J. (1988) Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications, London, WACC.

Tomlinson, J. (1991) Cultural Imperialism, London, Pinter.

Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization. Social Theory and Global Culture, London, Sage.

 

9. TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS USED.

Throughout this text the term world communication* will be used. I prefer this term against other concepts such as 'global communication' or 'international communication'. The adjective 'international' is too restrictive. What I address goes beyond the relations between states. It involves the interactions of both states and non-state actors. The arena of these interactions is more adequately described as 'world politics' than as 'international relations'. Cross-border politics can no longer be understood as relations between nation-states as exclusive actors. The world political arena counts today multiple actors. They include intergovernmental organizations, transnational corporations, social movements and individuals. But why not use 'global communication'? In my view there are certainly processes of globalization for example in the cultural area, but there is not yet a global culture. Globalization suggests the movement towards a one-world community. We are only on the way and the use of the term 'global' suggests we have achieved this condition. A global society is an aspiration, not yet reality. Global communication represents a goal rather than a reality.

GATT* stands for General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. This multilateral organization for international trade policy was established in 1948. The basic aim of GATT is to liberalize world trade. Seven major negotiating conferences (known as 'Rounds') have brought about far-reaching reductions in tariffs and other trade barriers. In September 1986, the GATT ministers of trade launched at Punta del Este, Uruguay, the eighth Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations. This Uruguaya Round was concluded in December 1993 and the final agreement was signed by Heads of State in April 1994 in Morocco. The agreement will be administered by the successor to the GATT: the World Trade Organization.

INTELSAT* stands for the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization. Intelsat was established by international agreement on Fenruary 12, 1973. The prime objective of the organization is to provide -on a commercial basis- satellite services for public telecommunications. Its main policy making body consists of all the member States. Although Intelsat is a commercial operation it is not a profit-making organization. SWIFT* stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. SWIFT was established in May 1973. To-day it handles most of the world's financial traffic through operating centres in Belgium, the Netherlands and the USA.

Oligopoly* this term refers to a situation in which a market is controlled by only a few operators. In a monopoly situation a market is controlled by only one operator.

The G-7* consists of USA, Japan, UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada.

 

Table 1 The top fifteen media conglomerates in the world

 

Media revenues in 1993 in million US$


















MATSUSHITA JAPAN 22.732PHILIPS NETHERLANDS 10.008
BERTELSMANN GERMANY 8.682TIME WARNER USA 7.963
SONY JAPAN 7.305 NEWS CORP.[MURDOCH] AUSTRALIA 7.129
MATRA-HACHETTE FRANCE 5.214HAVAS FRANCE 4.938
CAPITAL CITIES/ABC USA 4.663PARAMOUNT USA 4.434
TIMES MIRROR USA 3.714WALT DISNEY USA 3.676
FINIVEST [BERLUSCONI] ITALY 3.663CBS USA 3.510
THORN-EMI UK 3.326 

 

Source: Statistical Yearbook 1994-1995, Cinema, Television, Video and New Media in Europe; European Audiovisual Observatory, Strasbourg, Council of Europe, 1994)

 

Box 1. The world's largest advertising agencies

 

  1. WPP(UK) includes Ogilvy & mather, J. Walter Thompson.

  2. Saatchi & Saatchi (UK) includes Backer, Spielvogel, Bates.

  3. Interpublic (USA) includes McCanErickson, Lintas

  4. Omnicom (USA) includes BBDO, DDB, Needham

  5. Dentsy (Japan)

  6. Young & Rubicam (USA)

  7. Eurocom (France)

 

 

Box 2.

The world's largest telecommunication operators

Revenues in US $ billions

 










AT&T USA 67,2N.T.T. JAPAN 60
DEUTSCHE BUNDESPOST GERMANY 35FRANCE TELECOM FRANCE 23
BRITISH TELECOM UK 21 MCI USA 11,9
SPRINT USA 11,4

 

 

 

  

Table 2. The twelve top AV companies in 1993

AV revenues in millions US$

SONY JAPAN 7.320

TIME WARNER ENTERTAINMENT USA 5.755

ARD GERMANY 5.581

NHK JAPAN 5.254

CAPITALCITIES/ABC USA 4.663

MATSUSHITA JAPAN 4.352

FUJISANKEI JAPAN 4.155

TELE-COMMUNICATIONS USA 4.153

PHILIPS [POLYGRAM] NETHERLANDS 3.993

WALT DISNEY USA 3.673

CBS USA 3.510

TIME WARNER USA 3.334

 (Source: Statistical Yearbook 1994-1995, Cinema, Television, Video and New Media in Europe; European Audiovisual Observatory, Strasbourg, Council of Europe, 1994)

Human Rights in Cyberspace

Cyberspace is the virtual communicative space created by digital technologies. It is not limited to the operation of computer networks, but also encompasses all social activities in which digital information and communication technologies (ICT) are deployed. It thus ranges from computerised reservation systems to automated teller systems and smart cards. With the ‘embedding’ of digital facilities in more and more objects (from microwave ovens to jogging shoes), these acquire intelligent functions and communicative capacities and begin to create a permanent virtual life-space.

The issue of the governance of cyberspace emerges in many current ICT-debates at different levels.

There is the staunch anarchistic position that considers cyberspace a totally new and alien territory where conventional rules do not apply. For those holding this cyber-libertarian view (represented by visionaries like John Perry Barlow) no governance is the best governance.

But, however attractive this approach may seem, if more people are to use cyberspace this is likely to need public and corporate policymaking. This is equally the case if cyberspace is to be protected against unprecedented opportunities for criminal activity.

Moreover, cyberspace technology does create a virtual reality, but this is not altogether de-linked from politics in the real world.

Opposed to cyber-anarchy are those governments who would want a strict regime for activities in cyberspace in order to control not only the pornographers, and neo-Nazis but also the copyright pirates or just anybody who holds politically subversive aspirations.

Then there are the cyberspace citizens who feel they can best police themselves and who discuss among themselves a variety of forms of self regulation ranging from Parent Control software to CyberAngels, Codes of Conduct and Netiquette.

Cyberspace is perceived by the digital settlers as the last ‘electronic’ frontier, but cyberspace also colonizes our non-virtual reality and lest it totally controls daily life it needs to be governed by norms and rules.

A re-current question is whether cyberspace gives rise to new forms of democratic [electronic] governance, which are less-territory based, less hierarchical, more participatory, and demand new rules for political practice.

Whatever position one may take regarding future governance of cyberspace, it can not be denied that in any case (moral) choices have to be made and are being made since inevitably the proliferation of cyberspace technologies implies like all technological development a confrontation with moral issues on different levels.

These relate to -among others- choices about the way the technology will be designed; choices among possible applications and the responsibility for certain applications; choices about the the introduction and the use of applications. They also address issues such as the unequal distribution of harm and benefit of applications among social actors; the control over technology and its administration; and the uncertainty about the future impacts of technology.

The specific question that concerns me here is whether the current international human rights regime can provide us with meaningful moral and legal guidance for the solution of these moral choices.

The international human rights regime

In response to the assaults against human dignity during the Second World War, the United Nations began to develop a universal framework of moral standards. This was to become the international human rights regime.

Before 1945 there were human rights declarations, such as the Magna Charta of 1215, the British Bill of Rights, the American Declaration of Independence and the French D=82claration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. In 1945 this long history of the protection of human dignity acquired a fundamentally new significance.

The novelty of the international human rights regime -as it was established after 1945- was the articulation of the age old struggle for the recognition of human dignity into a catalog of legal rights. Moreover, the political discourse shifted from "rights of man" to the more comprehensive "human rights".

The protection of human dignity (earlier on mainly a national affair) was put on the agenda of the world community. Herewith, the defense of fundamental rights was no longer the exclusive preoccupation of national politics and became an essential part of world politics. The judgement whether human rights had been violated was no longer the exclusive monopoly of national governments.

More importantly yet, the enjoyment of human rights was no longer restricted to privileged individuals and social elites. The revolutionary core of the process that began at San Francisco - with the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945- was that "all people matter". Basic rights were to apply to everyone and to exclude no one.

The new regime would evolve around a set of basic texts (some codified as legally binding instruments and some adopted as customary law) and mechanisms for their enforcement. The foundation for the regime was laid down in United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted on December 10, 1948 by the UN General Assembly) and the two key human rights treaties, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (in force since January 3, 1976) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (in force since March 23, 1976).

In these three documents (commonly referred to as the International Bill of Rights) one finds seventy six different human rights. If one were to take totality of some fifty major international and regional human rights instruments the number of rights would obviously increase even further. There is also presently a tendency among human rights lobbies to put more and more social problems in a human rights framework and thus to add to the number of human rights.

Since this proliferation of rights does not necessarily strengthen the cause of the actual implementation of human rights, various attempts have been made to establish a set of core human rights that are representative for the totality. One effort concluded to the existence of twelve core rights (Jongman, A.J. and Schmid, A.P., 1994: 8).

These are:

1. The right to life

2. The right not to be tortured

3. The right not to be arbitrarily arrested

4. The right to a fair trial.

5. The right not to be discriminated against

6. The right to freedom of association

7. The right to political participation

8. The right to freedom of expression

9. The right to food

10. The right to health care

11 The right to education

12. The right to fair working conditions

 

These rights are the legal articulation of fundamental moral principles and their implied standards of human conduct.

These principles and standards are:

  • Equality and the implied standard that discrimination is inadmissible.

  • Security and the implied standard that intentional harm against human integrity is inadmissible.

  • Liberty and the implied standard that interference with human self-determination is inadmissible.

 

The universal validity of the human rights regime and its basic moral categories has been a contentious issue for some time.

However, the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights (at Vienna in 1993) has stated in its unanimously adopted declaration, "The World Conference on Human Rights reaffirms the solemn commitment of all States to fulfil their obligations to promote universal respect for, and observance and protection of, all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, other instruments relating to human rights, and international law. The universal nature of these rights and freedoms is beyond question". This recognition of universal validity does not mean that all local forms of implementation will be similar. A variety of cultural interpretations remains possible. This has provoked the question of the degree to which local cultural interpretations can be accepted. There is increasing support for the view that culturally determined interpretations reach a borderline when they violate the core principles of human rights law. Moreover, this view holds that the admissibility of the interpretation should be judged by the international community and not by the implementing party.

How are the basic human rights standards relevant to cyberspace?

A first issue that emerges concerns the observation that the human rights regime is firmly embedded in modernist, Enlightenment thought that seems to collide with the view that cyberspace is "a manifestation of the postmodern world" (Loader, 1997: 8).

Characteristic of the modern world are the physical categories, such as location, gender, ethnicity, appearance, from which cyberspace seems to liberate us.

There is a pragmatic answer to this question. Even if the international human rights regime is affected by the flaws of modernity in today’s reality the regime is more noted for its violations than its respect, and the world would undoubtedly be a safer place for the world’s majority if its provisions were implemented.

Moreover, cyberspace itself it solidly rooted in and connected with the forces of modernity. It originates with the military establishment (that created the predecessor of the Internet) and is strongly promoted by the world’s leading financial and industrial corporations.

It seems however necessary to expand the discussion with a conceptual critique of the conventional human rights discourse. The real significance of human rights standards can only be uncovered if a number of theoretical inadequacies are addressed and remedied. Conventional theories on human rights imply limitations to the understanding of human rights that erode the effective implementation of the very basic claims they enunciate. These theories are characterized by their exclusive emphasis on individual rights; their limited interpretation of the concept ‘freedom’; their limited understanding of the concept ‘equality’; their limited scope for ‘horizontal effect’; and their lack of institutional consideration.

Individual and collective rights.

Human rights have both individual and collective dimensions. "There are also rights which present individual and collective aspects. Freedom of religion and freedom of expression are cases in point" (Van Boven, 1982: 54). Rights to language and religion are enjoyed in communities. They cannot be implemented by protecting individual rights only. Also the right to development demonstrates this relationship. UNGA Res. 34/46 of 1979, states that "the right to development is a human right and that equality of opportunity for development is as much a prerogative of nations as of individuals within nations". As a result, in the discussion on the locus of human rights the individual and the community cannot be separated. Individuals do not exist in isolation and are members of communities. Communities do not exist outside the individuals that make up the collective. Sanders concludes that "individual rights and collective rights are distinct ideas, they are separate categories. Some individual rights can be vindicated without reference to collective rights...But other basic rights -such as freedom of religion-cannot be effectively vindicated without the recognition of collective rights" (Sanders, 1991: 383).

This does not exclude that in different cultural and ideological traditions there are conflicting emphases on the individual versus the collective. There may be conflicts between individual and collective rights. This needs careful balancing. For example, in the case of the collective right to cultural autonomy of a group that practices sexual discrimination through the practice of female circumcision. A guiding principle here is the provision of Art. 5 of ICCPR and ICESR which prohibits any collective to engage in acts that are "aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms" recognized in the Covenants. The exercise of collective rights cannot imply the destruction of individual rights. In international law there has been a remarkable evolution from an exclusive emphasis on sovereign nation-states, to individuals, to non-state social groups (peoples) and to humankind. There is still a strong tendency to give priority to individual rights, and states tend to be inclined towards the recognition of the collective rights of minorities and usually favour assimilation over cultural autonomy. Even so, there is increasing recognition of collective rights. Following Sanders (1991) collective rights are claims on behalf of communities (for example ethnic minorities) that seek to protect their specific features, such as cultural or linguistic characteristics. Sanders distinguishes collective rights from group rights, "the major limitation of group rights is that they only exist while the discrimination continues" (Sanders, 1991:

369). Groups are joined because of external discrimination, whereas collectivities are joined by internal cohesiveness. "Collectivities seek to protect and develop their own particular cultural characteristics" (Sanders, 1991: 369). For example, "cultural minorities seek more than the right of their individual members to equality and participation within the larger society. They also seek distinct group survival" (Sanders, 1991: 370).

 

Negative and positive freedom.

The basic assumption of conventional human rights thinking regarding the freedom of information is that freedom of expression as such is given and that there should only be protection against the danger of interference by the state. This assumption glosses over the fact that in the reality of unequal societies this freedom does not exist for everyone. In almost every society individuals and peoples are silenced. Therefore, the right to freedom of expression would have to rather focus upon the provision of access to the public expression of opinions than on the prevention of restricting opinions.

Moreover, conventionally, the concept of freedom is constructed in a negative sense only. The classical right to freedom of expression is a good illustration. It provides a freedom from interference of the state with the expression of opinions, ideas, and information. Complete freedom, however, also encompasses the freedom to emancipation and self-development. It implies a process of human emancipation.

Conventional human rights conceptions do not provide this positive extension of the basic norm of freedom. The ‘freedom to’(positive freedom) points to a process of empowerment through which people liberate themselves from all those forces that hinder them in taking decisions concerning their own lives. This interpretation of freedom implies a process of emancipation that should be guided by the basic norm of the sovereignty of individuals and peoples.

The liberal right to freedom of expression does not imply that everyone acquires equal access to the means of expression. An important element too is that the freedom of information in the liberal tradition is not directly linked with the principle of equality. As a result it offers insufficient support to the "information-poor" who claim that their freedom of information can only be realised in case adequate means of expression are available. The liberal interpretation does not favour the use of preferential measures ("positive discrimination") in situations of social inequality.

Equal entitlement.

Conventional human rights theories are biased towards a European tradition in which it is assumed that all human beings are equally capable in asserting their rights and in which the legal system is formally based upon the assumption of the initiative of free citizens to defend their rights. These liberal foundations of human rights law tend to neglect the reality of the widely differential capacity to such initiative. In reality, the powerful are always better in asserting their rights through litigation than the less powerful.

Whenever the concept of equality is used this usually pertains to the Lockean interpretation of "one rule for rich and poor" or to the Kantian interpretation of non-discrimination: the law should treat all citizens as equals.

In these interpretations the law recognizes a formal concept of equality that is related to the perception of inequality as a form of social differentiation which can and should be corrected. Law is anti-discriminatory in the sense of repairing social disadvantage by the equal treatment of unequals. This however does not change the structurally unequal relations of power. The equal treatment can even reinforce the inequality. Providing equal liberties to unequal partners functions in the interest of the most powerful.

In a more adequate interpretation of ‘equality’, the concept means equal entitlement to the social conditions that are essential to emancipation and self development.

Horizontal effect.

Conventional human rights thinking mainly focuses on the vertical state/citizen relation and the basic moral standards almost exclusively focus on the political sphere. This ignores the possibility that concentration of power in the hands of individuals can be as threatening as state power. Whenever citizens pursue different economic interests, individual human rights will be under serious threat. Citizens also need to be protected against each other.

A concept like of equality should therefore be extended to all those (socio-economic and cultural) spheres that are essential to human emancipation and self-development. Beyond the concern to realize equal voting rights in democratic societies, for example, the need to create equal participation in cultural life, should receive similar emphasis.

Institutions.

Human rights cannot be realized without involving citizens in the decision-making processes about the spheres in which freedom and equality are to be achieved.

The idea of human rights has thus to extend to the social institutions (the institutional arrangements) that would facilitate the realization of fundamental standards. This moves the democratic process beyond the political sphere and extends the requirement of participatory institutional arrangements to other social domains.

It claims that also culture and technology should be subject to democratic control.

This is particularly important in the light of the fact that current democratization processes (the "new world order" processes) tend to delegate important areas of social life to private rather than to public control and accountability. Increasingly large volumes of social activity are withdrawn from public accountability, from democratic control, and from the participation of citizens in decision-making.

How does this apply to cyberspace?

Collective claims.

Human rights in cyberspace should not only be articulated as individual rights, but should be recognized both as individual and as collective rights.

To put human rights exclusively in either category limits unduly the rights of individuals as members of a community or the rights of the collectivity. Collective claims to cyberspace communications require provisions on the access to public communication on behalf of social groups. This is particularly important as so many social groups, eg women, ethnic minorities, or poor communities tend to be excluded from cyberspace communications.

In addition to this right of access for communities, collective claims also include the right to development, and the recognition of communal knowledge resources.

The recognition of the development principle in world communication politics implies the entitlement to the development of communication infrastructures, to the procurement of adequate resources, the sharing of knowledge and skills, the equality of economic opportunities, and the correction of inequalities. The communal claim to intellectual property recognizes that knowledge resources are often a common good owned by a collective. Knowledge as common heritage should be protected against its private appropriation by knowledge industries. Collective claims also imply provisions on cultural identity, on the recognition of cultural diversity and linguistic variety, or on the cultural autonomy of communities.

Liberty.

What does the positive interpretation of "freedom to" imply for cyberspace?

Following Bourdieu’s use of the terms ‘cultural’ and ‘social capital ) "The position of a given agent within the social space can thus be defined by the positions he occupies in the different fields, that is in the distribution of the powers that are active within each of them. These are, principally, economic capital (in its different kinds) cultural capital and social capital, as well as symbolic capital, commonly called prestige, reputation, renown, etc, which is the form in which the different forms of capital are perceived and recognized as legitimate". (Bourdieu, 1984).

Information capital refers to the motivation and the interest to be informed, the capacity to process and apply information resources, the technical skills to manipulate ICT and the financial means to secure access to and use of digital networks. In national and global social realities the distribution of information capital is highly skewed.

This is reinforced by growing income inequalities across the world (by what could be termed the "globalisation of poverty") and the concurrent lowering of educational standards (and decline in status and salaries of teaching staff) and shifts in educational programmes from critical reflection to training for economic productivity (Postman) and the dramatic loss of credibility political institutions face almost everywhere. The "freedom to" implies the entitlement to those socio-economic conditions that support the development of "information-capital".

Equal entitlement.

This principle implies that "all people matter" and that no person should be excluded. The cyberspace project of a Global Information Superhighway could exclude vast numbers of people. The norm of equal entitlement to cyberspace resources is deeply threatened by the current disparities in access to the uses of ICT. This gap is for example illustrated by the fact that 77% of the world population has only 5% of the world’s telephone lines. The communication gap in the world is not decreasing. On the contrary, it is widening. There are no indications that the international donor community or national governments make a serious effort to change this. Rather the opposite occurs. The UNDP support to telecommunications in the developing countries, for example, went down from US $ 27 million in 1990 to US $ 2.2 million in 1995.

Without major public efforts in this field, the global super information highway is not likely to include the two billion people who live on less than $300 a year, or the more than 1 billion people who are illiterate and some 500 million children for whom there are no schools.

When he launched the Global Information Infrastructure project in a 1994 speech at the conference of the International Telecommunication Union in Buenos Aires, US Vice President Al Gore spoke very movingly about the creation of this mother of all networks.

"The development of the GII...must be a democratic effort.... In a sense, the GII will be a metaphor for democracy itself.... I see a new Athenian Age of democracy forged in the fora the GII will create. .... The Global Information Infrastructure .... will circle the globe with information superhighways on which all people can travel. These highways -or, more accurately, networks of distributed intelligence- will allow us to share information, to connect, and to communicate as a global community". Vice President Al Gore referred to a New Age of Athenian democracy. He may well be right since Athens had a highly discriminating political arrangement. Athenian democracy excluded slaves and women. Women are likely to be excluded from the global electronic democracy unless current female disadvantages in computer access, use and skills are drastically changed. If the tradition of women’s use of new technologies continues, women will have little chance to define their role in cyberfuture. "The users of the Net are predominantly male, white, young and university-educated". (Smith, 1995: 22).

A form of governance for cyberspace that takes equal entitlement to its resources seriously requires far reaching changes of the current political practices in such areas as development assistance, transfer of technology, intellectual property protection, and space cooperation. These practices all reinforce the inegalitarian character of the present global order. Changes would include a drastic increase in overseas development assistance in the field of communication and under conditions more favourable to recipient parties, the adoption of the UNCTAD Code of Transfer of Technology on the terms proposed by the developing countries, a revision of provisions on the protection of intellectual property in the GATT/TWO multilateral trade accord so as to take the interests of less powerful countries and small producers into account, and the adoption of a multilateral accord on space cooperation and equal benefits.

Security.

The moral standard of human security tends to receive a limited interpretation in the individualistic legal and biological sense. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ("Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person") has to be read in the context of Articles 5 and 9 which protect people’s moral and physical integrity against interference from state and non-state actors. This implies protection against torture, cruel inhuman and degrading treatment and against arbitrary treatment in the form of arrest, detention or exile on grounds not established by law.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides for a similar protection of personal security in Article 9. In the International Covenant on Social and Economic Rights (Article 9) security is broadened to social security, inclusive of social security.

However important this is, it reflects the common one-sided view in which human rights are almost exclusively understood to mean civil and political rights.

Processes of economic growth that immiserate ever larger groups of people are usually not perceived as a gross violation of human rights by most Western governments, donor institutions, or as a matter of fact, by many human rights organizations. If in the normal course of free market operations, World Trade Organization rules, or IMF conditionalities, millions of people are uprooted, impoverished, or unemployed, this is usually not seen as human rights violations. Human rights advocates usually attack murder and torture, but not poverty. The exclusive perception of human rights as civil and political rights, is dangerously shortsighted. It creates explosive contradictions between political conditionalities that press for good governance, democracy and respect for human rights and economic conditionalities that impose such austere measures that the resulting inequalities can only be controlled by highly undemocratic policies!

The policies of the IMF have -across the Third World- undermined the economic conditions for democracy, such as education, social equality, and reduction of poverty. The structural adjustment programmes of the IMF have in fact in many countries weakened the capacity of governments to meet international human rights obligations. The neglect of basic social and economic rights undermines such civil and political rights as freedom of expression and freedom of association.

In view of the increasing vulnerability of contemporary societies to a broad range of social risks, including the possibility of total human extinction, the human rights regime needs to incorporate a broader concept of global human security. (Beck, 1992; Leslie, 1996).

Human security is to-day jeopardized by fundamental risks induced by the process of modernization and its global spread. There are risks related to economic maldistribution -the growing income disparities in the world and the globalisation of poverty entail lethal risks for increasingly large numbers of people in the world.

There are risks related to ecological catastrophes (the desertification, the depletion of the Ozone layer, the deforestation, the Greenhouse effect).

There are industrial risks such as a multiplication of the Bhopal catastrophe.

There are risks related to the proliferation of nuclear arms and conventional arms (eg biological and chemical warfare). There are risks related to bio-technological experimentation and genetic engineering.

There are also social risks related to cyberspace-technology. These include nuclear warfare triggered off by compter malfunctioning, large-scale financial frauds, technological addiction, and aviation diasters. Intentional harm is easily inflicted in cyberspace. Computer networks enable people to communicate in anonymity. Anonymity brings out the worst in people. Under the cloak of anonymity people engage in harmful acts against others through abuse and deceit. Apparently, anonymity creates a ‘moral distance’ to the victim which makes it easier to commit harmful acts. It is the classical case of the bomber pilot who pushes the button and never knows who was hit. The Information Superhighway creates enormously attractive opportunities for ‘digital crooks’ and ‘cybersnoopers’. Such crimes and misdemeanours which range from copyright infringements to electronic surveillance pose serious threats to people’s moral and physical integrity.

Cyberspace-related social risks to human security are also induced by the increasing dependence upon vulnerable and error-prone digital systems. A risk factor is also the cybernisation of daily life which reinforces current trends towards high-speed, robot-centric societies.

Horizontal effect

Human rights should have horizontal effect. They should not only apply to state-citizen, but also to citizen-citizen relationships In the case of information provision there should be protection against information oligopolies organized by fellow-citizens. This so called "Drittwirkung" or third party effect of human rights means, for example, that information rights of people should be free from interference by public as well as by private parties. Already in the discussions leading to the human rights Covenants it was proposed that interference by private parties should be barred. The proposal did not acquire the status of legal provision. "An individual has the right to freedom of opinion without interference by private parties as well, and the state is obliged to ensure that freedom....It is doubtful, however, whether the complex problem of protecting a person’s opinion against interferences by other individuals can be solved in this global and absolute manner" (Partsch. 1981: 218).

In spite of these reservations, the defense of freedom of expression should go beyond state interference and incorporate the reality of situations in which private parties exercise power equivalent if not exceeding that of the state.

The right to freedom of expression goes beyond this negative freedom from interference, however, and includes the recognition of positive free speech rights.

If the freedom of expression is interpreted in more than the classical negative sense, the positive interpretation makes it necessary to define this right not merely as a liberty but as a claim-right. A positive freedom to communicate implies the claim-right to express opinions and the related entitlement to facilities for the exercise of this right. The recognition of freedom of expression as positive claim-right is particularly important in situations where the voices of some people are systematically excluded. In such situations the mere freedom from interference does not enable people to participate in public communication (Barendt, 1985: 86).

It is becoming increasingly clear that cyberspace needs defense against attempts to impose censorship. This defense should not only be directed against governmental actors. Informational self-determination (encompassing free speech, freedom to receive and seek information, the right to control person-related information, the right to confidentiality of communication, and the right to refuse information) is threatened by the fashionable Information Superhighway project. This happens for example as a result of the potential and highly likely censorship exercised by mega gatekeepers. At the gateway to the Information Superhighway stands a shadowy figure looking oddly like Rupert Murdoch. (Winsbury, 1995: 8). As the Information Superhighway project is to be privately funded and commercially driven by the market there needs to be a system that defines what services the consumer will get, that charges consumers for what they get and shuts out those who cannot pay. If major companies invest billions of dollars in the Information Superhighway they will want control of access to consumers so they can recoup these investments.

The freedom principle should offer protection against the control of information and media by a limited group of citizens. Beyond the freedom to be protected from state interference, the right should also address the restrictions that fellow-citizens can pose upon access to information.

Institutional consideration.

This notion has two dimensions. It proposes to include all people into decision-making that affects their lives and to extend such participation beyond the political realm. Maximum participation and extended equality call for the participation of people in decision making in former elitist fields such as technology and culture.

Especially in the light of the increasing privatization of the production of technical knowledge and cultural expressions, also these social spheres should be subject to democratic control. This requires that affected citizens have a right to participate in decisions about its development and utilization of technology and culture..

This is undoubtedly a complex order, since technology and culture are related to special requirements of expertise, skills, and creativity. It will therefore be necessary to explore introducing forms of democratic control that do not constrain the essential input of individual expertise, and creativity. The individual scientists, engineers, and artists may resist the notion of technological and cultural democracy, but it would be fallacious to believe that they are fully autonomous to-day. They may stand more to gain than to lose, if their creativity is subject to common good considerations rather than to corporate profit motives.

Cyberspace and public accountability.

The implementation of human rights, as Hossain rightly observes (1997: 20) requires "good governance". "Governments as well as powerful corporations must adhere to respect human rights and be accountable for their conduct measured by human rights standards". The serious obstacle here is that increasingly governments are (often voluntarily) losing the regulatory instruments to control the powerful corporations and global governance is increasingly the arena of private business actors. The trade mark of these actors is the refusal of public accountability for their conduct.

This principle makes the key players in world communication accountable for their decision-making on behalf of others. Decisions that affect people’s daily lives are taken in such matters as the quality of information, the diversity of cultural products, or the security of communications. The decision makers are increasingly private parties which are neither elected nor held accountable. As a matter of fact the worldwide drive towards deregulation of social domains tends to delegate important areas of social life to private rather than to public control and accountability. Increasingly large volumes of social activity are withdrawn from public accountability, from democratic control, and from the participation of citizens in decision making.

The global corporations that control ever more facets of people’s daily lives, have become less accountable to public authorities everywhere in the world. ‘Most corporate leaders, while proudly exercising their constitutionally protected right to influence elections and legislation, deny that they are making public policy merely by doing business. They do not accept responsibility for the social consequences of what they make or how they make it’. (Barnet and Cavanagh, 1994: 422). The key issue is therefore the establishment of public accountability of the most powerful private players.

It would seem however that the adoption of strict rules of public accountability of private players is highly unlikely in the first place and that their enforcement would probably be beyond the power of public authorities. The only effective pressure could come from the main constituencies of these players, the customers on their markets. Ultimately they are dependent upon the people who buy their goods and services and for whom they decide such matters as the quality of their food, clothing, entertainment, work, environment or health care.

The establishment of accountability therefore demands a massive mobilisation and politicisation of consumer movements around the world.

Implementation.

International human rights law remains a weak and largely non-enforceable arrangement. It should not be ignored that this is a conscious political choice. Most nation-states have shown little interest in interference with their human rights record. The state-centric arrangement of world politics in which states are unwilling to yield power over their citizens is still dominant and stands squarely in the way of universal respect for human rights. In current world politics states still maintain a considerable measure of sovereignty in the treatment of their citizens. Yet, the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights of 1993 has reaffirmed that "the promotion and protection of all human rights is a legitimate concern of the international community".

The real significance of these standards will depend upon the degree of their enforcement. Present remedial procedures are mainly based upon the Optional Protocol (OP) to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966) and Resolution 1503 adopted by the Economic and Social Council of the UN (ECOSOC) in 1970.

The Protocol authorizes the UN Human Rights Committee to receive and consider communications from individuals subject to its jurisdiction who claim to be victims of a violation by that State Party of any of the rights set forth in the Covenant. Individual complaints can only come nationals of states that are party to the OP (presently 75 states). The OP provides for communications, analysis, and reporting, but not for sanctions. Resolution 1503 recognizes the possibility of individual complaints about human rights violations. It authorizes the UN Human Rights Commission to examine,"communications, together with replies of governments, if any, which appear to reveal a consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights". The 1503 procedure is slow, confidential, and provides individuals with no redress.

In addition to the UN Human Rights Commission, and the Human Rights Committee to monitor the ICCPR, institutional mechanisms for implementation are the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the Committee against Torture, and the Committee on the Rights of the Child.

However important the work of these bodies is, their powers to enforce human rights standards are very limited. The UN Human Rights Commission is a permanent body of the ECOSOC. Its members are state representatives. Findings of the Commission have a certain significance but are not binding.

The Human Rights Committee consists of eighteen experts supervising the implementation of the ICCPR. The work of the Committee covers only parties that ratified the covenant (presently 129 states) and provides international monitoring on the basis of reports provided by states. The Committee’s monitoring does not imply any sanctions, but it can generate some negative publicity on a country’s human rights performance. For the implementation of the Race convention the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has been established. The Committee can receive complaints among states, but only fourteen states authorize the Committee to receive communications from individuals.

The implementation body for the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women is the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. The Committee is not authorized to receive individual communications.

Whatever may be the case, it is clear that the worldwide lack of implementation of human rights standards, poses the most serious challenge to the human rights regime.

It is also obvious that the world would be a different and far more humane place for many people if human rights standards were respected.

The most important issue for the significance and validity of the regime then is the implementation of the standards it proposes. There is abundant evidence that these standards are around the world almost incessantly violated and by actors with very different political and ideological viewpoints. Usually, in wars of liberation, for example, one finds gross violations both by the hands of the oppressors as well by those of the liberators. And if one studies the depressing reports from such bodies as Amnesty International, there appear to be no countries where human rights are not violated.

For moral philosophers this is actually not a terribly surprising problem. It concerns the classical gap between the moral knowledge human beings possess and their intention to act morally.

The People’s Communication Charter.

The recognition of individual rights under international law was thus linked with the notion that individuals also have duties under international law. This was eloquently expressed in 1947 by Mahatma Gandhi in a letter to the director of UNESCO about the issue of human rights. Gandhi wrote, "I learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done".

The People’s Communication Charter articulates essential rights and responsibilities that ordinary people have in relation to their cultural environment. It represents an attempt to redress some of the weaknesses inherent in the conventional human rights regime. It aspires to a democratic and sustainable organisation of the world’s communication structures and information flows. It is abundantly clear that these great ideas cannot be simply implemented by drafting and revising a text. The text constitutes merely a point of reference for a much needed civil activism that targets what arguably is a very central social domain.

The People’s Communication Charter is an initiative of the Third World Network (Penang, Malaysia), the Centre for Communication & Human Rights (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), the Cultural Environment Movement (USA), the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC), and the World Association for Christian Communication.

The Charter provides the common framework for all those who share the belief that people should be active and critical participants in their social reality and capable of governing themselves. The People’s Communication Charter could be a first step in the development of a permanent movement concerned with the quality of our cultural environment.

The movement should not be seen by those who work in the mass media as a populist intervention with their professional independence. It should rather be welcomed as a creative alliance between media producers and consumers against those commercial forces that are more intent on generating profits than on informing people properly.

If we want to apply human rights standards to relations in cyberspace this requires the active responsibility on behalf of those who are concerned.

>From the beginning it was clear that the Charter should not be seen as an end in itself. It intends to provide the basis for a permanent critical reflection on those worldwide trends that determine the quality of our lives in the third millennium. The Charter has now been adopted by a growing number of organizations and individuals around the world and several activities inspired by the Charter are planned for the coming years. Among them an international tribunal on violations of the Charter’s rights. In August 1997, for example, the Charter was displayed at the famous Dokumenta exhibition at Kassel, Germany. The text was discussed and signed by many visitors. To-day the Web site of the Charter is the place where such events and the progress in widening support for the PCC is made public.

The core themes of the movement concern:

1. Communication and human rights

Communication and information services should be guided by respect for fundamental human rights.

2. The public domain.

Communication resources (such as airwaves and outerspace) belong to the "commons"; they are public domain and should not be appropriated by private parties.

3. Ownership.

Communication and information services should not be monopolized by governments or business firms.

4. Empowerment.

People are entitled to the protection of their cultural identity and to the development of their communicative capacities.

5. Public accountability.

Providers of communication and information services should accept public accountability for the quality of their performance.

The cultural environment is ultimately not only shaped by governments and media moguls, but in important ways by the clients of the system.

We need a critical debate on the use of the international human rights regime as instrument of moral guidance. Ultimately, all depends upon the commitment of people themselves to shaping a humane governance for our future in cyberspace.

 

 

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