Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 119
phrasing, across the years. Without them of course, it would be difficult
to imagine other scenarios of possible world(s); they also succeed
in describing moments of social and individual cooperation, while at the
same time providing sets of standards to counteract a monolithic market
centred and militarized circular logic.
Japan is probably the first case of a society taking proactive measures
to define a future IS, the policy for achieving an IS derived from the
Ministry of Trade and Industry to ‘foster synergies between research and
development, and between the public sector and major private firms’
(Mattelart 2002: 100). A concept of the early 1970s, the plan envisaged
a completely computerized central ‘administration’, the ‘Computeropolis’.
That would be a city equipped with specially programmed systems to
manage traffic, hypermarkets, financial services, training facilities, transportation
and distance-controlled medical systems (Mattelart 2002: 100).
The vision of this IS was of gradual development towards the ultimate
liberation of human beings from need. The discourse blended with this
vision spoke of a society in which ‘intellectual creativity would supplant
the desire for material consumption’ (Mattelart 2002: 101). The prophet
of this new world was futurist Yoneji Masuda.
Because of the attention paid to education and computer technologies
by the Japanese long-term IS policy, Mattelart argues, Japan is likely to
be one of the few places in the world where educational channels have
a popular national audience. In its initial stage, the US vision of an IS
also made strong references to the aims of surpassing social inequalities
and achieving the complete amalgamation of the separate realms of
‘home’ and ‘school’, as a policy that would bring access to education
to every child who is unable to attend school. That would be accomplished
with the help of computers. US state policy discourse tried to
build on the momentum of technological awe, after the moon landing
in 1969. Through a series of decentralized initiatives for research support
and implementation, the research arm of universities together with
the military drove computer communications through a series of technological
‘breakthroughs’ that would project the supremacy of US-based
corporations and the military onto world markets. The ‘children’ of this
revolution were IBM, which at one point controlled three out of four
computers in the US market (Mattelart 2003), and the Strategic Defense
Initiative or, as they are commonly known, Star Wars (launched in 1983).
Well into the first decade of the twenty-first century, computer access
and use for educational purposes, especially within the context of primary
education, had yet to achieve the goals envisioned thirty years ago.
In particular, schools in urban centres as well as remote rural areas, with
higher rates of minority African American, Latino and Native American