Communication Technologies’ Three-Pronged Attack on War Itself
(Original)

Michael Collins
(Age 23, USA <Living in Japan>)
Harvard University

The rate of occurrence of wars between nations, wars within nations, and international terrorism will most definitely decline in step with the improvement and expansion of communications technology. The ways in which media and information and communication technology abets world peace are classifiable into three broad categories, arising at different points chronologically yet ultimately interrelated. Those ways are the fostering of mutual dependence, the multiplication of “choice,” and the realization of common ground.

By forging ties of interdependence, communication technologies make their first salvo against the senselessness of warfare. These ties are on two distinct levels, with both lessening the likelihood of war between the two parties, economic and personal. Economic binds, increasingly more forceful in accordance with the size of the communicating parties, are more effective prevention in the short-term; it is a clear lesson of history and, indeed, driver of military strategy that war is unlikely to break out between polities highly dependent on commerce with each other. Within states, communication technology is pivotal for development, and the spreading of wealth is instrumental for curbing the terrorism that, as a rule, emanates from underdeveloped societies in assailment of rich ones. To describe just one episode, in the recent economic strides of India, peasants have been able to use the Internet to compare the varying prices offered for their crops, thereby to guarantee that they make the most possible money through their transaction, whereas before the Internet such high-tech haggling could not have occurred. Less significant than the economic factor in the short-run but of equal or greater importance in the long is the interpersonal element. For communications technologies enable cross-borders relationships that would be impossible otherwise, and, although such civilian-level, personal bonds are insufficient to avert a war between two states, over the course of time those friendships should proliferate and reify into a society-wide sentiment of amity between the populations in question. And while the economic paths to peace conjure thoughts of “selling,” the interpersonal ones are all about “sharing,” best exemplified by person-to-person exchange but overlapping with the economic and between-nations spheres through openness, abroad, on the techniques necessary for making certain technologies.

“Choice”—from among a number of candidates, brands, lifestyles, et cetera—is another ingredient for peace, and communications technologies assist, substantially, in its advance. Once initial contacts have been made, once interdependence has seized a foothold—via the penetration of markets and the broadening of personal horizons—, people, wherever they might be, can exercise more freedom in thinking a certain way, acting a certain way. That is to say, they are no longer forced to patronize the media, consume the products, and harbor the ambitions assigned to them by local authorities, authorities very often interested in utilizing their “subjects” as tools of war so as to preserve their own privileged positions or, possibly, augment them all the more. The multiplicity of options before people with diversified worldviews, made diverse by means of communications technologies, will minimize the chance that they engage in war—always a kind of “last resort”—or feel serious animosity toward those outside their own borders. The entrenchment of choice, on the back of communications technology, can be conducive to intra-societal conflict in the short-term, as the establishment in a given locality strives to maintain its monopoly on the distribution of goods and the presentation of information to the public, but it certainly adds to a global—and permanent—climate of peace.

The third major contributor to world peace associated with communication technology is the last to take hold, however the hardest to efface: thorough understanding of the essential sameness of all the peoples of the world. Alongside the expansion of communication technologies and, in part, thanks to them, the popularization of English as a world tongue will make clear the similarities in mentality, so overweening in comparison to the differences thereof, of all mankind, self-evidently eroding the abilities of any potential belligerent to dehumanize his enemy—so common a tactic in motivating one man to fight another to the death. The same ascendancy of English, underscored by the need for efficient worldwide communication, will only facilitate the presentation as well as the protection of individual cultures, rather than “killing” them off, as some claim, since their characteristic languages can be maintained for more local interaction.

Thus, trepidations (and bellicosity) over “cultural imperialism,” of certain cultures and ideologies exterminating others—without the firing of a single shot—are without firm foundation, in my view; if, in the face of the expansion of communications technologies, certain modes of governance and ways of life are truly viable, then they will be enriched rather than hobbled, and their connections with (and perceived usefulness to) other cultures will only increase. War, meanwhile, in all its odiousness, will only decrease, as there is further creation of across-the-human-race commonality.