Speeches and Interviews

March 20, 1998

Coping with Convergence: Social and Cultural Change in the Age of Digital Technology

Lecture to the University of Western Ontario (London) — Perrin Beatty

Technology — is it all that bad?

It's little wonder so many people regard today's digital revolution with suspicion. Mankind has always maintained an uneasy relationship with technology, simultaneously regarding it with both reverence and fear, uncertain about whether our machines would ultimately prove to be our slaves or our masters.

At times, our fear of technology leads to movements to block its progress, as it did in Britain in the early nineteenth century when members of the guilds attempted to destroy the machinery threatening their livelihoods. At other times, it has led to a sense of despair about whether our technology was not already irredeemably in control. That sentiment of pessimism seemed to reach its peak in the 1950's and '60's when a succession of critics described how Mankind had been subjugated by machines.

The French scholar, Jacques Ellul, first expressed this analysis three decades ago in his book The Technological Society. According to Ellul, who used the term "technique" to refer to both technology itself and to the systems of social organization it fosters and requires, technique has become autonomous, displacing the natural order of things and imposing its own structure on Man.

Ellul's analysis is profoundly pessimistic. Although he leaves open the possibility that society can be redeemed, it is hard to see how such a transformation can take place. A series of other social critics, including White, Lewis Mumford, John Kenneth Galbraith, E. F. Schumacher, and, herein Canada, George Grant, also expressed their alarm about how technology or rigid social organization could rob human beings of their humanity.

Their arguments, which complement Ellul's fears of technological determinism, are well-known, but it is worth repeating them here.

First is the speed of change itself, which threatens to overwhelm us. Most of the scientists who ever lived are alive today and most of Mankind's accumulated knowledge has been generated during this century. Yet the pace continues to build.

Related to the concern about the speed of technological development is fear that the new technologies deprive us of the time needed to take informed decisions. The most dramatic example of this problem was the constant presence off the Atlantic coast of North America throughout the Cold War of Soviet submarines capable of launching nuclear missiles that would obliterate Washington and other eastern cities in less than 10 minutes. During that time, the American government would be expected to determine whether it was, in fact, under attack, and whether to launch a retaliatory response that could end all human life.

Another frequently expressed concern is that, in addition to serving our needs, technology also requires us to accommodate its own. Thus, the development of mechanized mills in Britain at the start of the Industrial Revolution created a need for cheap and abundant labour which was met by forcing children, often as young as 10 years-old or less, to work in brutal conditions. Similarly, the development of the automobile required society to organize itself around the car, investing billions of dollars in highways and creating suburbia. A striking example of the unintended consequences of technology, since cars were originally expected to make it possible for ordinary people to escape built-up areas and enjoy the countryside.

The principle was perhaps best expressed by the words that appeared without any evident sense of concern over the entrances of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair: "Science explores: Technology executes: Man conforms."

While some of the critics concede that perhaps technological advances were positive in the past, they say they are now qualitatively different. We now have the ability to exterminate all life on earth, and the computer has the ability to supplant human beings in many of our roles. The most clear-cut example of the threat posed by computers is that, while past technologies created more jobs than they eliminated, computerization today may be destroying millions of jobs that will never be replaced, leaving us with permanent high levels of unemployment.

There are moral concerns as well. Many critics worry that, while human beings make rapid scientific progress, our moral development lags far behind. As a result, our technology is developed and implemented in a vacuum, leaving us to live in an age when, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's words, "Things are in the Saddle/And Ride Mankind."

For 50 years, we have had the power to split the atom and we now possess the ability to tamper with the genetic substance of life itself, but no agreement on how those capacities should be used. The fear that stalks us is that massively destructive technologies will inevitably be used simply because they can.

Finally, we are haunted by the picture portrayed in 2001: A Space Odyssey that one day the computers on which we depend for our lives may decide that we are no longer necessary. It is less a fear that our machines may revolt, but instead that, as they become more capable, they will insidiously replace us by performing better than we can those functions that we used to think only human beings could perform.

Technology — is it all good?

The mirror opposite of these critics are millenianists like Marshall McLuhan, George Gilder, and Nicolas Negroponte, the Director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who hold that, far from threatening human freedom or our humanity itself, information technologies will transform society, liberating individuals and helping protect our humanity.

In Negroponte's book Being Digital, he acknowledges that every technology has its dark side and that digital technologies will create significant social disruptions, but that concession fills only a fraction of a book celebrating a transformation Negroponte believes is already well underway. His description of where we are headed leaves little doubt about his enthusiasm.

A similarly enthusiastic account of the effects of digital technology on our society can be found in the work of Canadian Don Tapscott. In his latest book, Growing up Digital, he argues that our kids the 'Net Generation' are being transformed by computers and the Internet — and in ways that can only redound to the benefit of personal development, social arrangements and the economy 'N-Geners', Tapscott explains, have a different set of assumptions about work than their parents have. They thrive on collaboration, and many find the notion of a boss somewhat bizarre. Their first point of reference is the net. They are driven to innovate and have a mindset of immediacy requiring fast results.

Technology is value-laden, but neither good nor bad in itself

So are the new technologies taking us to a world of mechanical despotism or to a new age of individual freedom and development? I believe that to suggest that technology, by itself, will do either is simplistic and misleading. It either fosters false fears or confuses hype with fact.

The great revolutions of the past, including the Industrial Revolution, have required a combination of factors — scientific, economic, political and cultural. There is a synergy among these elements that causes events to follow a particular course. Technological developments do not take place in a social and historical vacuum; they occur at a specific time in human development.

Human beings are at once technology's creators and its creatures. A specific technology exists only because it meets a human need or want. The steam engine was not lying dormant in a vein of ore waiting to be discovered. Nor was the first silicon chip contained in a grain of sand which simply needed to be cracked open. All of mankind's inventions from the plow to the automobile to the computer were the result of human creativity being applied to science. Although the debate continues about whether technology is simply the product of an independent truth or is a form of art that reflects particular values, it appears reasonable to conclude that it is, indeed, value-laden. Whether the values are a desire for efficiency and order or the longing for self-preservation or power over others or a host of other human wants, we develop our technologies to help us achieve specific human goals.

The contract we make with technology to receive its benefits involves concessions on our part as part of the exchange. Sometimes that bargain appears to be Faustian, as in the discovery of how to split the atom or in the development of machinery that allowed the creation of assembly lines in which individual human beings were simply an inefficient and expendable part of the process. To get the specific benefits we seek, we develop technologies that tear a hole in the ozone layer, that strip away human dignity, or that can lead to the deaths of millions.

The fact that Man's inventions can be used both for good and for bad, sometimes at the same time, does not make them value-neutral. What it does, instead, is to disprove the arguments of those who believe that technology has replaced political debate with debates over technical issues. As a defence minister, I represented Canada in NATO Nuclear Planning Group meetings where we discussed the circumstances when nuclear weapons could be used. The experience convinced me of the urgency of the larger moral and political debate about how to ensure that they never will be used again. Such is also the case with scientific advances in genetic engineering. We are now faced with the need for a debate about whether we should be tampering with the basic building blocks of life.

In other cases, it is not the political process, but the marketplace that stands in the way of a particular technology or gives it an unexpected boost. Most of us have heard of Betamax, the picture phone, the SST, Telidon and a host of other, often brilliant, technologies that were developed to meet a market that didn't exist. Frequently, the best place to look for examples is in those technologies, like High Definition Television, that government wants to promote.

Where government appears to be more successful is in commissioning technologies for its own purposes such as defence or space; in many instances, these technologies take on a life of their own in the same way as the Internet, where the U.S. government's primary interest was to develop a communications system that could survive a nuclear conflict.

Focus on new information technologies

So technology is not autonomous, but neither is it wholly in our control. We shape it, and we are shaped by it. Those characteristics are particularly valid in the case of the new information technologies which are developing at a pace and with a potential impact without precedent in our history. These new technologies pervade every aspect of our society from food production to government to health care to culture, and they have the potential to reshape how we perform in each of these sectors.

I want to narrow the focus to new information technologies because of their high visibility in current social and political analysis, their pervasive and turbulent influence in the media industries, and my own role in charting a course for Canada's national public broadcaster through the information revolution which itself has important implications for the Canadian body politic.

It is hard to read a newspaper, to watch a newscast, or to listen to a politician's speech today without hearing poetry about the net. But, behind all of the hype, and largely obscured by it, something profound is taking place.

The penetration of modern information technologies into every sector of society has been dramatic and is growing at a pace that is hard to comprehend. For example, while there were only about 150,000 computers in the world in 1972, last year about as many computers as televisions were purchased in the United States. Similarly, the intelligence built into a five dollar pocket calculator is considerably greater than that of the first electronic computer, ENIAC, which was completed in 1946. It weighed thirty tons, covered over 1,500 feet of floor space, and used 18,000 vacuum tubes.

The full effects of computerization will not be felt until electronic intelligence becomes both ubiquitous and ordinary in each of our lives. That stage, which is still a considerable distance off, won't be reached until we insist that personal computers become a good deal more accessible and more reliable than they are today.

So far, we have not insisted that that standard be met. In part, that is because the personal computer is still like a talking dog to us more remarkable for the fact that it talks than for what it has to say.

Those of us who use computers extensively are so mesmerized by them that we overlook the fact that they are enormously undependable and hard to use. We tolerate a degree of unreliability in them that we would never accept in our cars, our televisions, or our refrigerators. We would never permit the sort of incompatibility between our CD player and the stereo system or between our televisions and our VCRs that we meekly accept between computers and peripherals. Our personal computers are such marvels to us that we are prepared to accommodate their needs instead of expecting them to adapt to ours. For a large segment of the population, however, computers are still mystifying and inaccessible.

The breakthrough will come when the computer's designers use its enormous flexibility to make it conform to the user, instead of forcing users to conform to it. Similarly, consumers must start to demand greater interoperability and dependability from manufacturers. When those breakthroughs are achieved and when falling prices put computers within the financial range of any family that can afford a colour television — a price point that it is rapidly reaching — the stage will be set for enormous changes in how we live and work.

Simply put, my thesis is this: that this is a transforming technology which is affecting each of us far more rapidly than we realize, and that it involves a dramatic shift of power away from governments and other large institutions and to the individual. This does not mean that large institutions have not been empowered to do things they could not before — clearly governments and big businesses also benefit from the new technologies — but it is the individual and the smaller organization that have gained disproportionately, thereby closing some of the gap in resources that used to exist.

While most of these new technologies' effects upon the individual are positive, some may be extremely damaging. For example, the data trail each of us leaves as we use our credit cards or cellular telephones, or as we add to innumerable medical, educational, governmental, police, and commercial databases allows unprecedented access to even the most intimate details of our lives. Additionally, as society relies ever more heavily on complex technologies, the potential danger if something goes wrong can be enormous. Anything from a computer virus to an electronic switch that crashes to a severed telecommunications trunk can cost society hundreds of millions of dollars, and inconvenience or even kill countless individuals.

The Future: tough to predict, hard to avoid

Yogi Berra said making predictions is a tough business, especially when they're about the future. Like so many others, political scientists and broadcasters are in the business of trying to understand what people will do next. The trouble is that even our best guesses can get us into trouble.

Predicting where technology is going is a tricky game, as a glance at the covers of Popular Mechanics over the last few decades will confirm. Most of us are not yet commuting to work in personal helicopters or being swept along city streets by moving sidewalks. Nor will we ever.

It is not just the popular press that gets carried away with its enthusiasm over new technologies that somehow never take off.

We heard recently that Microsoft, which has invested millions of dollars in trying to put channels of television on the web, has abandoned that effort. If Bill Gates, with all his technical brilliance and with all the resources of Microsoft available to him, can't predict even the short-term future, why would you or I pretend that we could? There are billions of dollars to be made or lost by people like Gates betting that they can get it right, but they are playing in a league that is too expensive for most of us to belong to.

Yet, most of us also cannot afford to ignore the big trends and where they are taking us. Technology trends have an impact on power relationships in society, as well as on how people receive and use information from the media. We need to do our best to understand them, whether as political scientists or public broadcasters.

If we can't predict the future in detail, let alone control it, we can certainly get a sense of the general direction of changes in technology. We can also do something else that's very important for our sense of direction: understanding where it is we want to go as an institution or a society, as well as having the flexibility and skills to prepare us for adapting to change when it does come.

It's a little like piloting a sailboat. Only a fool would attempt to change the direction of the wind or the currents, and if you set sail without either having the necessary skills or without knowing where you want to end up, you will simply be blown about or capsize. But if you are properly prepared, and if you respect the wind and use it effectively, you can end up wherever you want.

Technology Futures: faster, smaller, cheaper, more of everything

While digital technology has become awesomely complex, all the major trends point in the same, compellingly simple direction — ever greater power and flexibility, with the ability to send, process and store vast amounts of information, in leaps we can hardly imagine from one year to the next. Of course, the social effects of these changes are anything but simple.

A major part of the story is the ubiquity of intelligence thanks to advances in the microchip, as we've seen. But it's not the whole story. Several parallel developments in technology are combining to create unheard-of possibilities:

1. Bandwidth increases: e.g. Canada's backbone network, CA*netII, is already the world's first second generation Internet with a capacity of 310 Mbps and CA*netIII, just recently announced, will be the world's first optical Internet at 1 terabit capacity.

2. Storage density and costs: squeezing more and more data onto hard drives to accommodate material like motion video.

3. Cheap PCs and other access devices: the under $1,000 PC took off in popularity in 1997, and will be joined by other low-cost devices like WebTV.

Though intelligence and bandwidth are the main drivers of change, these other factors have an important supporting role to play — especially in making digital technology affordable and accessible to large numbers of people. You've probably noticed that hard drives on computers keep getting bigger, going from a standard of less than 200 Megabytes to over two Gigabytes in half a dozen years. You may not have noticed that as chips kept getting cheaper, so has storage: dropping from $5.23 per MB about six years ago, to a mere $0.10 per MB today!

Here's another perspective. IBM recently announced that it can now pack 11.6 gigabits into each square inch of a hard disk's surface. That means that each square inch can hold the equivalent of three-quarters of a million double-spaced pages of text!

Social impact of distributed intelligence

What are the impacts of these developments?

First, and most important, is the dramatic increase in power and decrease in cost of the microchip. The microchip is the building block of the computer revolution. It is the successor to the transistor, which was developed by three scientists at Bell Laboratories in 1948, just two years after ENIAC was unveiled. The transistor was important because it provided a fast, lower power, tiny, reliable, and less expensive alternative to the vacuum tube.

Because they were so large and costly, with thousands of components being individually and painstakingly put into place, computers thirty years ago were tools available only to large institutions like the government, big business, and universities. Even for these institutions, the cost was so great that their computers had to be used for very large jobs before they were cost-effective. Computer power was centralized within the organization so it could be kept working continuously on processing these large batches of data. Since then, the improvements in microchip technology have been so dramatic that a personal computer today typically contains 7.5 million transistors at a cost of less than the case containing them.

According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, chip density will more than double over the next five years, to some 18 million transistors, while high-end desktop clock speeds will more than quadruple, from 350 MHz to 1,500 MHz. Every time we think we've hit the end of the road, because of physical limits in the chip, we hit a new break-through instead. Recently, scientists have discovered how to reduce chip pathways from a relatively wide 0.25 microns, down to 0.08 microns, all without a wholesale change in how new chips will have to be manufactured.

As interesting as these technical developments may be, I don't think they're anywhere near as interesting as their social consequences.

The steady trend in computer technology over the last 40 years has been towards moving computer power out of the large institutions where computers had to be housed in the early days and into the hands of smaller institutions and individuals. Geographically, it is spreading out of the large urban centres where big businesses and governments are housed and into the more rural and remote areas where it is now affordable.

Even within large organizations, there has been a dramatic shift. While the nature of computers even 20 years ago required that their processing power be centralized, it is now distributed much more widely. Some government departments, for example, plan to have a personal computer for virtually each of their employees.

One of the most surprising aspects of this story is that the history of technology has witnessed exactly the same social effects before.

Information technologies have followed the same pattern of being initially available only to a few, but continually spreading out from the centre and changing power relationships as they did so. Before Gutenberg learned how to use movable type to print books, they had to be individually printed by hand. While they could be wonderful works of art, the small numbers produced and the enormous cost involved meant that people had to come to the books to read them and that only the fraction of the population that was literate could consult them directly. Everyone else would have to rely upon the priesthood who controlled the books to share their contents with them. As literacy spread and as mass production brought costs down, common people no longer had to rely upon intermediaries to get access to printed materials.

While the printing press obviously also increased access to books for the privileged, that access was no longer reserved exclusively to them.

The first lesson to be learned from the development cycle of these technologies is that growing production and declining costs empower the individual citizen, replace rigidity with flexibility, and reshape how we organize society.

Social impact of expanding bandwidth, decentralized communications networks

The second dramatic trend in information technologies involves bandwidth in communications: the rate at which data can be transmitted — as well as the decentralization of communications networks. The invention of the telegraph allowed individuals separated by long distances to make rapid contact with one another. For its day, it was a remarkable achievement for people in different cities to send messages to one another at a great speed. However, the telegraph was also an instrument that was highly centralized. Telegraphs were not located in people's homes, but in central offices, and the communication was between those offices. From there, it was usually necessary for the messages to be delivered by hand.

The development of the telephone, which was treated with scorn by Western Union, changed electronic communications qualitatively. While the intelligence in a telephone network is still located at phone company switching offices, and while the copper wires that carry telephone communications into our home are limited in the amount of information that can be carried, the telephone empowers individuals in a society by allowing them to communicate, unmediated, among themselves. The telephone's arrival meant that, for the first time, not only words, but also voices could be used to send messages over long distances. Additionally, the telephone was interactive; it permitted individuals to receive immediate feedback to the points they raised. Finally, although the telephone was at first restricted to the wealthy, it was by nature democratic, soon becoming affordable for ordinary families and being usable by people who did not know how to read or write. The effect was to make geography less important in our dealings with one another.

Broadcast technologies, which developed in parallel with the telephone, followed much the same pattern. Radio and, later, television were at first available to people, usually in urban areas, who could afford them. However, they soon became affordable to virtually everyone in society. Today, whether or not a family has a telephone or a television is virtually always a question of choice and not of economics.

Television and radio created the mass audience on a scale that had been impossible in the past. In the process, they became invaluable tools both for authoritarian governments trying to control how their publics thought and for large corporations needing a mass market for their products. While the need to create a mass market that can be sold to advertisers means broadcasters have to be responsive to the audience's likes and dislikes, the model of broadcasting that existed until recently was highly centralized. Because spectrum was considered a limited resource, governments restricted the number of licenses they gave out. In the case of television in particular, the public was restricted to choosing between a handful of choices. Finally, unlike the telephone, broadcasting is one-way, transmitting information chosen by the broadcaster to an essentially passive audience.

Improvements in communications technology over the last three decades have broken the monopoly on power once held by governments and large corporations and given ever-increasing authority to individuals. When citizens can decide for themselves what they see and hear and talk directly to one another whenever they choose, they possess a power that cannot belong permitted in authoritarian societies.

Lucent Technologies presents a powerful example of how bandwidth has exploded. They recently announced that they have increased the number of simultaneous, full-speed data streams that can be carried on one optical fiber five times, from 16, to 80! When equipment using this technology ships towards the end of this year, a single fiber will carry 400 gigabits per second! What does that mean in plain English? That a single system, which handles eight of these fibers, will be able to carry 3.2 terabits/second of data, or 90,000 encyclopedia volumes, each second.

Social impact of digitization

Digital radio demonstrates the third strong trend: the ability to completely redefine how products and services are designed. For most of us, digitization has meant simply greater clarity in the same way as compact discs offers greater clarity than vinyl records or cassettes. Many of us also recognize its greater efficiency, letting us pack more information into smaller spaces. Both those characteristics are important, but more important by far is that digitization allows us to package, transmit, and manipulate information in totally new ways. In fact, I believe the term "digital radio" is a misnomer: it could more correctly be referred to as wireless multimedia because of the ability to build a range of services around the near compact disc quality signal.

As the cost of microprocessors drops while their power increases, the intelligence in products becomes one of the cheapest elements in the manufacturing process, which in turn allows us to use these products in ways that would have been inconceivable only a short time before.

When motion picture cameras were first developed, they were largely used to film stage plays. It took years before producers comprehended that they were dealing with a totally new medium. The same phenomenon affects how we use today's new technologies. To date, we mostly use intelligent products to perform an old function somewhat better. Only once the design of a product or service is fundamentally rethought can digitization's full potential be achieved. That shift in thinking, is what Nicolas Negroponte refers to as the shift from dealing with atoms to dealing with bits.

The implications both for society as a whole and for government in particular are enormous.

Social impact of convergence

The merging of computers and telecommunications, which started in earnest in the 1960's, is the other key trend. It means that the enormous computing power that is becoming dispersed ever more widely in all parts of the world can be joined together in ways decided upon by the people and institutions who control it. This process contrasts sharply with the old structure of a powerful mainframe computer which controls "dumb" terminals spread throughout an organization. Here, the intelligence is widely spread and the people who control the individual computers connected to the network can determine what they want to add to or take from the system as a whole. Once they draw down information, they have the capacity to manipulate it and to distribute it again once they have repackaged it.

Unlike the highly centralized way computers and communications have been organized until now, the model that is rapidly evolving is decentralized and democratic. Indeed, it is the extremely egalitarian and decentralized nature of the Internet that is, at once, its charm and its frustration. The formal rules are few, dealing more with technical protocols than with conduct; instead, a culture of its own has evolved from among the users themselves.

The Internet gives us access to the resources of a thousand libraries, but it does little to help us in sorting out what information is useful and valid, and what is not. False information is spread on the Internet as quickly as truth. Hate messages have the same status as our personal mail. Predators and con artists enjoy the same access as world leaders or scientists.

Both the rationale for government intervention and the government's power to intervene began to shrink as technology expanded the number of choices open to individuals. Spectrum is no longer a scarce resource to be carefully conserved when a channel of television can be broadcast throughout a continent for about 20,000 dollars a month. Similarly, content quotas lose their force when the viewer, and not the broadcasters or the government, determines what he is going to watch. It is a problem that will become even more acute when it becomes possible to call up a database in New York and have this week's edition of Mad About You squirted into a microprocessor in a matter of seconds.

We can lament these changes, but we cannot prevent them. However, whatever problems are caused by the new technologies, most of us would, on balance approve of the direction in which they are taking us.

Challenges to Canadian society

I began this talk with a brief look at the critics of technological change. While some of their concerns are universally shared, it can be argued that we have special reasons to worry about the effects of convergence here in Canada.

Let's review some of the social and cultural effects of new technologies we've just been discussing:

• The power to communicate is shifting more and more to individual citizens.

• Access to information and communications technologies is becoming more affordable and widespread.

• National borders are dissolving.

• Protectionist government policies are becoming less effective.

• Competitive businesses rather than regulated monopolies are now the norm.

• Broadcasting and telecommunications services offer meaningful choices to consumers.

• Technical constraints on the amounts and kinds of information we can process, transmit and store are falling by the wayside.

• We are being liberated from many of the constraints of time and space.

I personally see most of these changes as having a democratizing and empowering effect on individual citizens, not only in Canada but in other countries as well, especially those that have lived under authoritarian rule. Other commentators, however, see the glass as half-empty. They reason that technology has put Canada at risk on the grounds that:

• We can no longer protect our cultural sovereignty.

• We are losing our sense of shared experience.

• Consumers are overwhelmed by choice, not empowered by it.

• Our regions and communities are losing their sense of identity.

• Technology is undermining the role of our cultural institutions, especially public-sector ones like the CBC.

• New technologies that empower individuals can also isolate them. While the generalist television delivered to mass audiences meant that viewers were constantly exposed to new experiences, the "Me TV" phenomenon of an exploding range of ever narrower programming formats allows us to ignore what is new and challenging and simply immerse ourselves in what is already familiar.

There is no denying that Canadians are in the throes of unsettling changes. We have only to look at recent political developments, both domestic and international: the federal government wrestling with privacy legislation; the CRTC gearing up for a major public hearing later this year on Canadian content; our difficult negotiations before world trade bodies over issues like intellectual property, to name but a few.

Challenges to the public broadcaster

As the national public broadcaster, the CBC finds itself right in the eye of the stormy debates surrounding new technologies like the Internet. We are deeply affected by all the changes I've been describing because:

• We are Canada's largest cultural agency, with a sweeping mandate to protect and promote our values and heritage.

• We depend heavily on many of the communications technologies we've been discussing — for making programs, sending them out over the air, preserving our music and other assets, reaching the audience in their homes through radio and TV and new media.

• We have a special relationship with this audience, and a special responsibility to serve their needs, rather than the needs of advertisers.

We are an institution now in its seventh decade, that has to face not only technological change like the shift to digital media, but also the changing expectations of the country — and a multi-year budget cutting exercise amounting to over $400 million, which, I am very pleased to announce, we will finally be able to put behind us at the end of this month.

Despite all these challenges, I believe the CBC is uniquely positioned to ride the wave of new technologies — to the benefit of all Canadians. This is a bold claim. How can the CBC cope successfully with convergence and the whirlwind of accompanying social changes?

I talked a few minutes ago about the analogy of sailing a boat. It's important that we study the wind and the currents — not to change them of course, but to bring them under some control. Even more important, however, is what we understand and decide about ourselves, who we are, what we want, where we're headed. It's as simple as a sense of direction. And you can't make technology work for you without a sense of purpose, any more than you can sail a boat without a sense of direction.

CBC'S approach to new media and their effects

Let me give you a couple of examples of why I think new technology will actually confer some advantages on the CBC:

New digital technologies are interactive and invite a high degree of participation and personalization on the part of the audience. They make a passive media experience a much more active and involving one. It turns out these are exactly the attributes we have always cultivated in our own audiences. Yes, we're in the TV advertising game — but under our new blueprint, implemented in 1996, we make our programming decisions on the basis of audience need, not simply on the needs of advertisers, even though that means less revenue than we could otherwise earn. As cheap access devices like WebTV become more plentiful, new media will gradually help us strengthen and enrich our relationship with our audiences.

As a country of regions, Canada has always struggled with the problem of communicating over great distances, and providing a voice to a wide range of communities, including those determined by geography. This issue has been particularly challenging to the CBC, in trying to match dwindling resources to the needs of these communities. Now, the emergence of public networks like the World Wide Web offers us as broadcasters a whole new set of tools to reach these communities, as well as opportunities for those in smaller localities or operating in a minority language to communicate with like-minded people, wherever their place of residence.

These technologies are vital to us for the new capabilities they give us, but our real leverage in the world of new technology will come from having a clear understanding of who and what we are. So who are we? I think the answer is so simple that we often miss it. We are our programs. Fowler understood that fact 40 years ago when he said that we exist for our programs and that everything else is merely housekeeping. Our primary mission is to show Canada and the world to Canadians through Canadian eyes, and we do it through our programs. We have other roles, but telling Canadian stories — in our drama, in our journalism, and in our music — is the most important of them.

I can also tell you who we aren't. We aren't our buildings or our cameras or our studios or our transmitters or our trucks or our organisational structure. All those things are the shell we carry around on our back, and it's a shell that often distracts us or slows us down instead of protecting us.

Content versus technology: winning in an open marketplace

Part of the debate about technology, especially for media companies like the CBC, centres on whether technology is taking pride of place over content. We're clear about that because:

• We understand we have to use new technologies to follow our audience, wherever multiple pathways into the home and multiple access appliances may take them.

• We work to keep the focus on content, using technology as a tool only.

• We have a highly recognized and admired brand, and it is our corporate brand, and individual program brands, that will allow us to break through the content clutter. Program content is the standard-bearer of the CBC brand. As an example of what the brand means in terms of content, CBC has now completed the Canadianization of prime time on English television, moving from 90% to 98% Canadian content. Our audience knows they will never get that value proposition from a commercial broadcaster!

There's another compelling reason to focus on where you offer viewers the greatest value, and especially on unique program content. That goes to the issue we considered earlier about the winding down of protection for Canadian broadcasters and program producers, and the opening up of greater competition in the multi-channel marketplace. It also involves the related issue of international trade agreements. In the future, it is going to be progressively more difficult for governments to discriminate against businesses on the basis of nationality. That limitation takes away some of the most important tools our government has used to promote Canadian culture in the past, but it leaves it with the power to spend and the power to use agencies like the CBC. We are not only the most important tool the government has to promote Canadian culture, but we are also one of the few that are sustainable under international trade law.

The lesson I think is clear for everyone: in a world of technological open borders, and technological fragmentation of the audience, you succeed on the merits of your content, or you don't succeed at all.

Although many in our industry refuse to accept the inevitable, the battle will be won or lost in the marketplace, not in a hearing room in Hull. These technologies are powerful enough to challenge the very sovereignty of countries. The most we can ask of regulators is that they give us a somewhat orderly transition to a much less structured marketplace.

In the United States, Fox has predicted that a combination of old and new technologies will deliver viewers a choice of a thousand channels by 2010. Whether that figure is accurate or misses the mark by a few hundred is not important: our starting point as broadcasters must be that we will never know less competition than we do today.

Strategic use of technology still complex

I don't want to leave the impression that at CBC we have the new technologies all figured out. The devil, as they say, is in the details, and our work is cut out for us in executing the details of the approach I've been describing to you. For example, one of the paradoxes we all face is that we must become masters of many technologies, even though we somehow have to make them subservient and invisible as we concentrate on the more important issues of creating and distributing content.

Over-the-air, cable, specialty services, discs, websites and other delivery platforms like cable modems and ADSL all offer pathways into the homes of our audiences. We must look at them as all offering the same benefit — connecting with our audience — even though they have very different operating and budgeting demands. This cross-media approach is challenging for a conventional broadcaster like CBC, because our major assets and reputation are so closely tied to our main networks. Part of the legacy of old technology we have to live down is our commitment to the hardware and tools that help us make and distribute the programs. CBC, like all public broadcasters, have to realize we're not in the bricks-and-mortar business, however much we tended to cling to that idea in the past.

In the future, the implications of digital production and transmission could result in a radio or television station being found in a back-pack or a briefcase. No running back with news stories, no race against time. The program comes directly to you from a street corner or the middle of a war or an ice storm, complete with editing and voiceover. It will mean that we can be a hundred times more responsive to give Canadians a more immediate sense of what is happening in Canada and around the world.

For the CBC it is important that we must stay in the forefront of technological innovation but be careful of the risks associated with being early innovators in areas like high-definition TV. We led innovation in digital radio, and we are steadily replacing analogue links in the television production chain with digital equipment. I believe it is just a matter of time before the final link between our transmitters and the viewer also becomes digital. But in high-definition TV, which consumes vast quantities of bandwidth and dollars, we should slipstream the Americans, given the huge marketing, programming and technical risks involved. But we will be close behind, watching attentively — and ready to move quickly.

However technology-neutral we might try to be, digital technology does change how we relate to the world and often upsets well-established thinking in a traditional organization like ours. A good example is our web site. Today our web offerings often reflect our organisational structure more than they reflect any interest in what our audience is looking for. If someone is looking for a report on a news event, he wants to know that it meets the CBC's journalistic standards. He couldn't care less whether it was a radio or television reporter who put it there. We can use the story to direct people to our services or our programs, but only if we give them something they were looking for in the first place.

Lessons learned…

So what have we done so far?

Although we know that further improvements are necessary, we have built one of the most successful web sites in Canada, paving the way for our successful transition into new media. In contrast, none of our private competitors yet has a significant presence on the net.

We are increasingly looking for synergies that cut cross-traditional media lines and are starting to undertake projects that are from their inception, designed to be delivered by a variety of media.

We have applied for six new specialty channels, either by ourselves or with private sector partners.

We have led the industry in preparing for the transition to digital radio and television.

What lies ahead

As information sources multiply, and the choices offered to viewers, listeners, and browsers either separately or together increases exponentially. I see a time where the mandate and the role the CBC plays will be altogether more important. The CBC, in whatever form, will play the role of aggregator, providing to Canadians through its values and mandate, an effective way to source content that allows them to find meaning in their world.

I hope you've seen by now that, while I'm far from a technological determinist, and don't see technology as a panacea for the CBC or the country as a whole, I do see it as an integral and positive force in preparing Canada for the 21st century — providing we are clear about our own goals and remain master of the wonderful tools that technology has put at our disposal.

In Genesis, the Bible records that Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden because they had disobeyed God's instruction not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They were made mortal and forced to provide for themselves, prevented by a flaming sword from ever returning to Eden.

Whether we interpret Genesis literally or not, it describes the reality of our existence: that innocence, once lost, cannot be regained; that knowledge, once acquired, is never unlearned. Despite our efforts over the centuries, we cannot renounce that taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and return to Eden. We must make our own way in the larger world.

How we do so remains very much in our own hands.