By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 8 1997 (IPS)

If technology-driven change over decades used to move at, say, the speed of a car, today society is being forcibly changed at the speed of light — matching the pace of modern communications.

Rene Dreifuss, a political scientist specialising in transnationals and global change uses this metaphor to describe the pace of change inflicted on world society by the new trinity of telecoms, computers and information management.

Such speed is frightening, he concedes. Its reach extends into all corners of communication, management, teaching and global manufacturing.

“It is changing society as a whole. It is transforming people’s minds, and will fatally modify the political system, triggering a discussion on what is public and private,” says Dreifuss, a professor the Fluminense Federal University in Niteroi, near Rio de Janeiro.

The explosive growth of new telephones lines is one clear indication of the pace. According to U.N. International Telecommunications Union (ITU) figures, fixed telephone lines worldwide increased from 519 million in 1990 to 745 million in 1996.

But the biggest leap has taken place in cellular telephones, which soared from 11 million users in 1990 to 135 million last year. The ITU predicts that next year the telecoms services and equipment market will amount to one trillion dollars, up from 788 billion in 1995.

Time spent on international telephone calls, which in 1990 totalled 33 trillion minutes, climbed to 68 trillion in 1996, expanding at an average annual rate of 15 percent. Equipment exports, meanwhile, doubled between 1990 and 1995 up to 58 billion dollars.

China boasts the fastest growth in installation of fixed telephone lines, an average annual increase of 41.5 percent since 1990. But Brazilians lead the world in usage of cellular phones, with an average of 110 minutes a month, compared to 90 in the United States.

And by the year 2003, the number of cellular phones is expected to have risen threefold — a key point of interest for private firms keen on getting a share of Brazil’s telecoms sector, currently undergoing privatisation. For the concession for Sao Paulo’s cellular phone service, an international consortium paid 4.4 times the minimum price set by the government, some 2.45 billion dollars.

“Usage time will increase in the future, with the improvement of services and the increase in the number of users,” predicts Roberto Peon of Bell South, the U.S. company which heads the consortium that made the exaggerated offer to ensure it clinched the deal.

Worldwide spending in telecoms grows by 12 percent a year. In 1995, the average spent per user was 905 dollars, 100 dollars more than the previous year.

Telecoms and informatics, which recorded a global turnover of 1.37 trillion dollars in 1995 according to ITU statistics, are at the head of the shift towards the information society.

This is the “era of dilemmas” says Dreifuss, quoting the title of his new book in which he discusses the challenges of globalisation in a world centred no longer on objects but ideas.

“Production at a distance,” with the parts of a product manufactured in various countries and assembled in another, leads to the creation of networks of corporations that seek to fulfill the enormous demands for technology, human capital and operative capacity through multiple associations between companies, he says.

The new production system demands an enormous amount of information and communications which thanks to today’s technologies are rapidly being upgraded and perfected, and offered at increasingly lower costs.

But it also gives rise to a “deepening of the democratic process, with demands for participation in government decisions in real time,” he adds.

In consequence, the system of political representation undergoes major modifications. The changes “even interfere in the way music is listened to or films are watched,” he said to illustrate the increasingly accelerated social — and psychological — effects.

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