TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION AND THE RIGHT TO COMMUNICATE

 

William J. McIver, Jr.

National Research Council Canada

Institute for Information Technology

 

William F. Birdsall

Halifax, Nova Scotia

 

Abstract. This paper examines the co-evolution of information and communications technologies and communication rights. The emphasis is on the right to communicate. The paper provides a historical analysis through several generations of human rights developments of the interrelationships between technical advances that enabled new communication modalities and the subsequent social and organizational interests that evolved. These communication modalities include bi-directional, interpersonal communications supported by telegraphy and telephony unidirectional, mass communications made possible the broadcast technologies of television and radio; and bi-directional, many-to-many communications supported by the broadband technologies of satellite, the Internet, and the World-Wide Web. Three generations of human rights have been recognized in this context: Civil and political rights; economic, social and cultural rights; and the emerging area of collective rights.

 

Introduction

 

As communication technologies evolved into increasingly sophisticated global networks, communication rights evolved, from specific rights expressed as negative freedoms to a comprehensive and positive human right: A right to communicate. The intersection of communication technology and communication rights is a process of expanding universalism. Thus, the Internet can be seen on the side of communication technology and a right to communicate on the side of human rights as together constituting what Armand Mattelart calls “networks of universalization” (Mattelart, 2002, p. 1).

 

Communication, communication technologies, and human rights are linked in significant ways. Communication is a fundamental social process necessary for individual expression and for all social organization. Human rights are those rights one has by the very nature of being human; they are inalienable. Taking away an individual’s ability to communicate and repressing their human rights are both dehumanizing actions. Throughout history, humans have expanded their ability to communicate through technology. Therefore, technology joins with communication in a complex interrelationship with human rights.

 

Founded on eighteenth century Enlightenment concepts of progress, universal rights, and the freedom of goods and ideas, communication technologies evolved – from the construction of national networks of roads to the information highway – into ever more complex and geographically dispersed networks concomitant with the growing universality of human rights. It is not coincidental that one of the earliest modes of a formal technical network of communication, the inauguration in 1794 of the semaphore telegraph in France, arose out of the same Enlightenment ideals of universal communication and the political turmoil of the closing decades of the eighteenth century as did the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Following the French revolution, the semaphore network was promoted as a guarantee of democratic rights in the new Republic (Mattelart, 2000, p. 4).

 

The connection between democracy, human rights, and communication technologies remains a compelling idea in policy-making. The United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report 2000 states, “Human rights and human development share a common vision and a common purpose – to secure freedom, well-being and dignity of all people everywhere” (UNDP, 2000, p. 1). Consequently, “…human development is essential for realizing human rights, and human rights are essential for full human development” (2). The report also links human development, human rights, and technology in its observation that “[t]oday’s technologies and today’s more open societies present great opportunities for networking and for building alliances” (6). In its Human Development Report 2001, the UNDP asserts “[t]he ultimate significance of the network age is that it can empower people by enabling them to use and contribute to the world’s collective knowledge. And the great challenge of the new century is to ensure that the entire human race is so empowered – not just a lucky few” (UNDP, 2001, p. 8).

 

Thus, there is a longstanding recognized link between communication technologies and rights; however, there is little understanding of the interaction between these two spheres. It is necessary to study the development of the interaction of communication technologies and human rights and its consequences to formulate effective strategies for research, public policy, and advocacy promoting electronic networks and democracy.

 

A Right to Communicate Across Generations of Rights

 

There have been successive innovations in communication technologies along with successive generations of human rights. At the most fundamental level, human rights are those rights one has by the very nature of being human (Donnelly, 1989). A United Nations glossary defines human rights as:   

 

… the rights possessed by all persons, by virtue of their common humanity, to live a life of freedom and dignity. They give all people moral claims on the behaviour of individuals and on the design of social arrangements—and are universal, inalienable and indivisible (UNDP, 2000, p. 16)

 

It is important to recognize that human rights are social constructs. As Howard observes: “Human rights are human rights because humankind has decided they are. Human beings create their own sense of a morally worthwhile life” (Howard, 1995, p. 15). Because human rights are social constructs they evolve over time. Some rights are discarded and others added. In this way, one can speak of generations of human rights.

 

Scholars and jurists of human rights identify three generations of human rights (Vasak, 1990; Marks, 1982): Civil and political rights; economic, social, and cultural rights; and collective or solidarity rights. Characterizing them as ‘generations’ of rights does not mean that one set of rights has taken precedent or replaced an earlier set of rights; they have been cumulative. Rights in each generation are also not entirely mutually exclusive; they overlap and are interdependent. Nor is each generation exclusively a negative or positive right. Over time there has evolved sets of rights that are becoming more widely accepted and that continue to be elaborated upon as conceptions of human needs have expanded. The development of global interactive communication networks in the last half of the twentieth century has in this way generated the need for a right to communicate.

 

Pre-Civil Rights: Writing & Early Postal Communications, circa 2,000 BC-1793

 

The word ‘telecommunication’ was suggested by the French in the 1930s as a term to encompass radio, telegraphy, and telephony during the formation of a single international body to manage all of them: The International Telecommunications Union (Codding, 1995). The term telecommunication is, therefore, usually associated with the electrical transmission of messages. The earliest form of telecommunication, however, was based on the technologies of writing and road construction, and on the organization and management of networks of couriers, animals and facilities. From a technical perspective, therefore, postal systems must be viewed as the earliest type of complex telecommunication medium. Though primitive relative to modern telecommunication, postal communication’s enabling technologies created the necessary preconditions for the earliest developments in civil and political rights themselves and the evolution of norms of communication toward expectations of universal access. Postal communications also influenced the development of other communication technologies.[1]

 

Cuneiform, hieroglyphic, and hieratic forms of writing began to develop as far back as 3,000 BCE in various sites including Egypt and Mesopotamia. Phonetic and script forms of writing began to replace these as more efficient and sophisticated tools for communication around 2,000 BCE The transport of written messages became essential tools for the management of the ever-larger empires that began to form. As Scheele pointed out, the use of runners to carry memorized messages was in practice when writing emerged (Scheele, 1970, pp. 7-10). Writing, which brought advantages of accuracy and durability, began to replace human memory and with it writing-based protocols for messaging emerged. The Egyptians had established courier services by 2,000 BCE, the Chinese some time after 1000 BCE, and the Assyrians by 700 BCE (Scheele, 1970, pp. 8, 10-12, 16). Mail, along with roads and armies, became the tool by which empires maintained control over large areas and for facilitating trade (Scheele, 1970, p. 8).

 

As Innis and others have shown, characteristics unique to different media have biased – not completely determined – how they allow people to manage space and time (1964, pp. 3-32, 33-60). It can be further argued that these biases have extended to the development of norms and expectations by users of these technologies, thereby providing significant influences on the development of communication rights. The impacts that postal communications were to have on the development of communication rights seem residual when examined across the breadth of its history. Modern civil society’s access to communications, wide-spread literacy necessary to make use of such access, and expectations and norms around universal communication can be linked in significant ways to the advent of postal services, but they were nowhere to be seen in its origins. The impacts of postal communications on rights and norms were also recursive or cyclic in nature. Knowledge of writing was limited, and in some cases restricted, to an elite class in many societies. As the core technology of postal communications, however, it enabled a more efficient and wider dispersion of knowledge than before, including knowledge of writing itself. This recursive interplay between writing, knowledge dispersion and the post, lead to greater pressures for both knowledge of writing and postal communication. Political transitions in Europe resulted in the disappearance of many state-run postal services. The advent of private courier services to fill the void arguably created space and time for these residual and recursive impacts to strengthen and take hold throughout civil society because access to them was less restrictive.

 

Access to early postal communication was limited to royalty, their officials, and wealthy civilians, usually merchants. Early state postal services were distinct from the courier services used by civilians and were more efficient since they were able to establish and maintain well-supported roads, networks of horsemen and facilities to house them. In the Roman empire, access to the cursus publicus was initially limited to official government business, as was also the case in the early Egyptian and Chinese systems. Thus, access to this type of medium of communication for civilians required the ability to hire couriers, usually slaves or paid individuals. Access to the post by civil society was further limited in that it was transitively dependent on having access to a small class of literate officials, scribes, among a vastly illiterate populace, to produce and interpret correspondence (Scheele, 1970, p. 11).

 

While access to early postal systems was limited, civilians were brought into direct contact with them. Many communities bore responsibility for the maintenance and costs of state postal systems. Official couriers in China had the authority to confiscate horses from local communities and in Rome local communities had to provide accommodations for couriers. It is possible that this type of contact helped develop norms around telecommunications in that these communities benefited from trade and the spread of literacy made possibly by the posts, and they were able to observe their operation. In the latter case, this may have encouraged the development of private courier services.

 

Both state-sponsored postal services and literacy suffered a general decline in Europe with the fall of the Roman Empire and the resulting void in coherent political leadership across large regions. By the ninth century CE, state-sponsored postal systems had practically disappeared in Europe, though courts maintained their own messenger services (Scheele, 1970, pp. 19-27). Roads left by the Empire allowed private services to evolve. Private courier services came into being in the eleventh century as universities, cathedrals and other types of institutions emerged and sought means of communicating with each other (p. 19). In China, the imperial postal system was opened for civilian access in 1402 CE. In Europe, private courier services began to evolve further in the twelfth century with the increase in commerce between city-states. Relationships between private courier organizations and governments grew. The best known of these was the Thurn and Taxis Posts.

 

During the ascendancy of the nation-state seminal developments in civil and political rights occurred. A culture of greater literacy in the eighteenth century enabled greater intellectual and economic development, and created an environment in which the work of intellectuals such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rosseau – whose work collectively weakened the hold of the church and the absolute rule of the monarchy, fostering revolutionary thought – had wider accessibility than in earlier periods. The telecommunication of these ideas played a critical role in their impacts. Correspondence between intellectuals of the time is well known. Voltaire is believed to have written over 20,000 letters to other philosophers and dignitaries across Europe (Tallentyre, 1919). The societal pressures created by the dissemination of the ideas of Voltaire and others into the third estate is recognized as a significant factor giving rise to the French Revolution.

 

As larger nation-states became ascendant, a movement back to government-run postal systems began. There were a number of reasons. As Adam Smith pointed out, governments could realize significant profits from these services (1976, BK V., CH 1, Pt. II. p. 246). Even when governments did not maintain national postal services, they usually did not entrust private couriers with state communications; they maintained their own courier services. Thus, they were inclined to control their own postal systems when it became feasible. Civil society became concerned over the ability of governments to censor and prevent the transfer of mail. Most systems were government controlled by 1867.

 

During this period, another cycle would take place, providing greater access to the posts by civil society. Government-controlled postal services initially established fee structures to make a profit, which made their use prohibitive for many. Abuses to avoid paying postal fees became widespread making reforms necessary. Abuse of the postal system and the government’s desire to continue service for the general population through reforms is evidence of the entrenchment of postal services by this time as a norm for communication, otherwise other means of communication might have been sought by its abusers. Postal reforms were enacted by Great Britain in 1840, which made access more affordable and uniform through a non-profit, flat-rate model; and less prone to abuse, through the introduction of prepaid mail using postage stamps. Usage doubled the following year and a more than four-fold increase in usage was seen by the end of that decade (Scheele, 1970, pp. 32-35). Many countries quickly adopted the British model, fostering the concept of a universal system of communications in most countries.

 

Thus, the residual and recursive social impacts of postal communication occurred along multiple trajectories. The development of a culture of greater literacy and postal reforms reforms helped this medium to become entrenched within civil society and contributed to the dispersion of knowledge to more citizens. In this way it also contributed to the development and shaping of norms around communication rights.

 

Modern Civil & Political Rights: Moderns Postal Service & Introduction of Electrical Telecommunications, 1793-1948

 

The period 1793 to 1948 saw seminal developments in civil and political rights, from the French Revolution to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The evolution of civil and political rights in individual nations occurred in the context of increasing internationalization of communications. Early international bodies formed around the deployment of postal services, telegraphy, telephony and radio to resolve international political and technical conflicts these technologies raised. It was in this context that the concepts of universal service and freedom of transit for communications began to emerge. Their introduction cannot be seen as statements on human rights as much as they were necessary requirements for the operation of international networks. The failure by individual nations to uphold such principles would cause a common area of operation to disintegrate. As with postal communications, this type of principle influenced later human rights perspectives on universal service.

 

Internationalization of Postal Communications. The Universal Postal Union (UPU) was established in 1874. By this time, postal services were entrenched forms of communication in many countries. Rates and practices for international mail had to be normalized. The reform of the British system created pressure for reform at the international level (Codding, 1964, pp. 18-20). The reforms with most relevance to communications rights have been universality in the handling and fee structure for international mail and freedom of transit of mail through third countries (pp. 73-75). These principles failed during World Wars I and II, but their presence at other times contributed to a burgeoning conception of communication rights.

 

Telegraphy, Telephony & Early Radio. Telegraphy, telephony, and radio evolved along different trajectories with respect to universality and communication rights. This was due in part to the unique characteristics of each technology and the development of two different types of regulatory models: One controlled by the private sector in the United States and government-controlled telecommunications systems in most other countries. In the case of radio and telephony, however, interconnection or interoperation barriers raised by the private sector hindered universality.

 

The first electrical telegraphy devices were demonstrated in the early 1830s. By 1866, the first trans-Atlantic telegraph transmissions were being performed. The telegraph made rapid impacts on communications, from speeding up the delivery of written correspondence, in the form of the telegram, to the instantaneous reporting of the news during the American Civil War. The International Telegraph Union was founded in 1865 to bring about harmonization among countries in Europe and several existing conventions to which they were variously parties (Codding, 1972, pp. 4-23). Codding has pointed out that as early as the 1852 convention between the Western European Telegraph Union and the Austro-German Telegraph Union that member countries recognize the right of every person, who paid the requisite fees, to use telegraph services (1972, p. 17).

 

The telephone was invented in 1876. By 1885, the ITU had begun to address its use (ITU, 2002). The goal of universality extended to telephony under the umbrella of the ITU’s constitution. Universality in this context, as with early work on international postal and telegraphy communications, may have been concerned more with practical matters, than with moral and ethical ones. In particular, one concern was the maintenance of a common international operating area. Codding pointed out that the characteristics of this technology raised new challenges to universality (1995). Language was less a barrier for processing mail and Morse code than it was for human conversation via telephony. Thus, the dispersion of telephony in Europe was slower than in the U.S. and, therefore, was less of a factor in generating norm-creating pressures toward human rights conceptions of communications than in the U.S.

 

Radio was invented in 1895. Its first application was for radio-telegraphy in 1896. Its international regulation was first taken up in the period 1903 to 1906 with the formation of the International Radio-Telegraph Union (IRU). The characteristics of this technology caused an urgent need for regulation. Radio transmissions are not directional and can more easily interfere with other communications in the same medium than telegraphy or telephony. The Marconi Corporation raised interoperation barriers – hindering universality – by not allowing its operators to communicate with people who were using non-Marconi equipment. This issue was resolved by the IRU in 1912 (Codding, 1995).

 

Universality came about in a different way in the U.S., initially driven by private sector interests. Theodore Vail proposed universal service in 1907 in the context of a regulated monopoly in a drive to gain control of the market. Customers had to choose between competing telephone companies having disjoint coverage, presenting an interconnection barrier to universality. Vail was motivated to establish universal service as a way of reducing competition through the interconnection of competing networks (Anderson et al., 1995, p.117; Mueller, 1997). Dispersion of telephony was further aided by its lower access cost relative to telegraphy (Codding, 1995).

 

Radio regulation became more complex in 1920 when Marconi initiated sound broadcasting, which introduced instantaneous broadcast communications (ITU, 2002). Radio had several unique characteristics among information and communication technologies (ICTs) up to that time. Radio allowed information to be sent easily across large geographic areas. The audio nature of the medium eliminated literacy as a barrier to information. Finally, cost was not a major barrier to acquiring information from radio, as evidenced by its high household penetration rates. Radio, thus, became a medium for public discourse in a national network context in the U.S. and other countries during the period of the 1930s and 1940s (Savage, 1999, pp. 1-6). Savage noted that by the 1940s, over 80 percent of U.S. households had radio sets, but it was easy and customary to allow those who did not own them to listen. By the 1940s, radio had become a preferred source of news and other information. In the U.S., a struggle occurred between commercial and public regulatory models. McChesney has shown that the resolution of this struggle with the U.S. Communications Act of 1934 greatly restricted communication rights in radio in the U.S. (1994). This has been mitigated somewhat over the next 30 years with civil society and regulatory interventions. This includes the creation by the U.S. Congress in 1967 of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its subsidiary National Public Radio; and the development of the non-commercial Pacifica Radio network starting in 1949. More recently, the Federal Communication Commission authorized a new low power FM radio service in 2000, which makes possible greater access to the medium by communities for non-commercial purposes.

 

By 1934, the International Telegraph Union and the International Radio-Telegraph Union merged to form the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) (Codding, 1995). The U.S. Communications Act, passed that year, included the first provisions mandating universal service for telephony. As with postal services, both government intervention and increasing dispersion contributed to changes in the United States in norms for access to information, emergency services, and the performance of other life-critical tasks. Today, access to a telephone is considered a necessity in many countries. This norm has been strongly codified in such legislation as California’s Lifeline Bill, which stipulates that a minimum level of basic telephone service be made available to all (Moore, 1983). The passage of the 1934 Act had negative impacts on progress toward a right to communicate. It instituted a commercial broadcasting model for radio, which greatly limited community-based broadcasting. It also served as the model for television broadcasting (see McChesney, 1994).

 

The development of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights after World War II brought all of these previous technological and regulatory developments into the context of human rights. Both the UPU and the ITU became specialized agencies of the UN in 1947.

 

Economic, Social & Cultural Rights: Modern Broadcast & Electronic Telecommunications, 1948-present

 

The second generation of rights arose in the nineteenth century in response to the consequences of the industrial revolution. These are economic, social, and cultural rights including the right to an education, housing, health, employment, adequate income, and social security. Their aim was greater social equality. They are positive rights in that they require the provision of the resources necessary for individuals to exercise them.

These first and second-generation rights were enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 1948 and codified in international law in two UN treaties adopted in 1966: The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). These went into effect in 1976. They, along with the UDHR, are known as the International Bill of Human Rights (UN, 1993). The UN has adopted numerous other declarations and treaties elaborating on these rights. Over 140 countries have ratified or acceded to the International Bill of Human Rights, which indicates that there is worldwide acceptance if not implementation of a set of human rights norms.

 

The basis for a right to communicate derives from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN, 1993). The centerpiece in this context is Article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: This right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 19 is buttressed by two other articles. Article 27 section 1:

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

Scientific advancements in modern communication technologies can be seen in the context of Article 27, not as the exclusive domain of those who are able to negotiate the market place to acquire them, but as entitlements of people whose societies support their creation through government research grants or a reallocation of resources. Articles 19 and 27 imply that a society must maintain adequate literacy rates and basic infrastructure for their enforcement. Article 28 addresses this in principle:

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Articles 19 and 28 are complementary since communication is a necessary component for maintaining a social and international order in which the rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are enforced.

 

Mass Media: Radio & Television. At the birth of the UN, significant developments in creating broadcast models for radio and television had already taken place. Government-controlled models dominated in many countries and dispersion was moving apace. Household penetration rates for television became greater in many countries than that of the telephone. Telephone penetration of U.S. households was 94.1 percent by 1998 (NTIA, 1999, p. 2), while an estimated 98 percent of U.S. households had at least one television set that same year (TVB, 2000). Radio and television share several characteristics that have made them especially important in a communication rights context:

·        Use is not dependent on literacy;

·        They enable the broadcasting of information over large areas;

·        Barriers to participation in content formation are high due to transmission equipment costs;

·        Infrastructure costs are lower relative to telephony and telegraphy; and

·        Access costs to radio or television sets are low relative to telephony.

Developing nations and non-governmental organizations became sensitive to these characteristics. They objected to what they saw as undemocratic uses of mass media by colonizing nations, which was aided by their uni-directional nature. This ultimately contributed to the conception of a right to communicate. The concept of one-way data flow was developed in the 1950s as a characterization of the dominant news flows from the industrialized nations to developing and underdeveloped nations at the time (UNESCO, 1980a, p. 36). Freedom of information was seen as a one-way process of transmitting information from those in power to ordinary individuals. In the wording of Article 19, certain types of information were being imparted in one direction and usually without people explicitly seeking it. Hamelink (1994) points out that colonizing nations began broadcasting to their colonies in the 1920s. Independence movements within colonies and the independent states they would become had to contend with the social and political impacts of colonial media on their pre-revolutionary nationalists movements, the internal inter-ethnic conflicts they usually entailed, and on changes to their national cultures. The Bandung Conference in 1955 at the advent of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in 1964 were forums in which issues of post-colonial communication and North-South communication imbalances were raised (Hamelink, 1994). The advent of satellite communications raised these issues to a new level.

 

Satellite Communications. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the implications of satellites for both cultural development and communications were quickly perceived. Satellites enabled the transmission and networking of information spanning great distances and remote regions. The implications were so profound that Marshall McLuhan’s characterization of the “global village” became the emblematic phrase of the era. The United States and Canada quickly followed the Soviet Union with their own satellite programs. Direct broadcasting over wide areas of the planet by satellite increased concerns among many countries about the challenge of maintaining cultural diversity and identity. Direct satellite broadcasting (DBS) opened up the possibility of transmitting signals anywhere without any government control. The issue of Canadian cultural sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States was one impetus for Canada’s rapid entry into satellites. There was the realization that direct satellite broadcasting could undermine national government communication strategies. As Comor observes, “…because of the ‘intimate’ quality of the human voice and image entering one’s home, DBS provides an effective means through which both a literate and non-literate population can be reached.” Because of this intimacy, “an effective and immediate expression (and manipulation) of human emotion is a well-recognized political and commercial advantage relative to other forms of mass media” (Comor, 1994, pp. 87-88). As a result of these concerns, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed a resolution in 1961 that “Communication by means of satellite should be available to the nations of the world as soon as practicable on a global and non-discriminatory basis” (quoted in Hamelink, 1994, p. 67).

 

The linking of the implications of direct satellite broadcasting to human rights was first articulated by Jean d’Arcy, Director of Radio and Visual Services in the UN Office of Public Information, in an article published in 1969 on “Direct Broadcast Satellites and the Right to Communicate” (d’Arcy, 1969).

 

The influences on d’Arcy reflect the interrelationships, discussed above, between culture and technology. He was familiar with issues of cultural diversity and media dominance working in the UN’s media program and as someone who had worked in the French media industry. As a Frenchman, he was from a country that was not only the source of one of the great Western human rights traditions, but was a country sensitive to the issue of protecting its cultural and lingual identity.

 

France had been especially concerned about the ‘Americanization’ of its culture and language since the nineteenth century. In the post-World War II period there was particular concern about media dominance as expressed, for example, in the 1967 bestseller, Le Défi Américain (The American Challenge) by the French journalist, Jean Jacque Servan-Schreiber.

 

Jean d’Arcy grasped that a right to communicate “protects cultural diversity in a world which is increasingly subject to the homogenizing influences of technology” (Anawalt, 1985, p. 200). As countries expressed concerns about “cultural aggression and cultural imperialism,” the rhetoric would shift from the traditional right of freedom of expression to d’Arcy’s idea of a right to communicate (Van Dyke, 1980). However, as important as the cultural component of a right to communicate would be, it is a second interrelated aspect that d’Arcy stressed: The importance that a right would give to the individual citizen and groups to participate in the communication process.

 

While recent developments in direct broadcast satellite communication was the immediate context in which d’Arcy conceived of a right to communicate, he drew for inspiration on Bertolt Brecht’s response to the development of the medium of radio. In reading Brecht’s essay, “Theory of Radio,” published in 1932, d’Arcy was especially struck by Brecht’s comment on the radio as a potential technology for interactive communication. Brecht wrote:

Radio must be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication. Radio would be the most wonderful means of communication imaginable in public life, a huge linked system – that is to say, it would be such, if it were capable not only of receiving but of transmitting, of allowing the listener not only to hear but to speak, and did not isolate him but brought him into contact (quoted in Richstad, 2003).

At the time, Brecht wrote this, the commercial and regulatory structures of radio were reaching the configuration that would prevail through much of the rest of the century. Previously, there were many amateur broadcasters using radio as wireless telephony and distributing content to their communities and among themselves. This distributed local broadcasting flourished until it was marginalized by the commercialization and concentration of radio broadcasting and the accompanying regulatory structure that emerged in the 1930s (Stevenson, 1996). Similarly, at the time d’Arcy was thinking about a right to communicate, cable television, whose implementation was initially perceived as having the potential for democratic participation, was undergoing greater commercial concentration and regulation (Surman, 1996). Brecht’s comments, written as radio was moving rapidly into its commercial/regulatory phase, reflected an alternative vision for radio. D’Arcy was writing at a not dissimilar time, as cable was moving into its more commercial and concentrated structure. For d’Arcy, direct broadcast satellites opened the possibility of interactive participative communication as envisioned by Brecht. By doing so, it also changed the social and technological context of traditional rights with communication, in particular, if there was to be any hope of developing a truly democratic mode of communication free from the dominance of large public and private organizations and regulatory structures.

 

The importance of communication is acknowledged in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, its statements of rights and freedoms were conceived in the context of the print media and one-way, top down distribution through mass communication systems. They arose out of a print and broadcasting environment where the concern was about the free flow of information rather than the process of communication. Jean d’Arcy described this situation as the “mass media mentality”: “For almost a century, people in this age of mass societies have become conditioned by their ‘mass media mentality’ to accept as normal and ineluctable a unilateral, vertical flow of non-diversified information” (d’Arcy, 1983). As d’Arcy asserted, this conceptualization of communication is inadequate in an era of global interactive telecommunications where the individual can participate in horizontal interactive communication.

 

Article 19 was too narrow in a world of global interactive communications (d’Arcy, 1969). It was formulated in the aftermath of World War II when the primary concern was the free flow of information through the mass media, in particular, radio. Article 19, for example, does not directly address issues of participation in public communication and privacy. Broadcasting, computing, and satellite telecommunications were going to become increasingly inter-related, opening up multiple channels of communication among individuals and groups. Global two-way or interactive communication to other individuals or groups of individuals could be placed in the hands of everyone. As more people gained access to the means of participating in the emerging communication processes, communication would no longer be dominated by economic and political elites. Consequently, d’Arcy concluded:

The time will come when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will have to encompass a more extensive right than man’s right to information, first laid down twenty-one years ago in Article in 19. This is the right to communicate (d’Arcy, 1969).

Ahead of his time in anticipating the potential of convergence of ICTs, d’Arcy envisioned the emergence of new technological and social structures that would replace the outmoded models of the past that reside in each sector of mass communications. In 1983, he observed “The present convergence of all sectors around electronics has made us aware of the social and cultural importance of communication as distinct from information.” The old structures of separate sectors of mass distribution would be destabilized and driven towards one unified system. The new structure will allow for horizontal, multi-channel, and interactive communication between individuals and groups. The older communication structures were concerned about the distribution of content. Consequently, the rights associated with them were focused on content as well. The new, interactive, unified system is about the process of communication, hence, the need for a new right that does not exclude considerations of content, but whose starting point is the process of communication. It is because of this new structure that “A new right for man is due to emerge from it” (1983, p. xxiv).

 

As d’Arcy explains, the development of earlier communication technologies into separate sectors gave rise to separate concepts of freedoms including freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press. However, it useful here to note the differentiation between freedoms and rights as does Fisher in his consideration of a right to communicate. An individual can choose to exercise a freedom or not. Whether one exercises a freedom does not diminish an individual as a human. As well, the state and others are only restrained from hindering the exercise of a freedom but are under no obligation to promote its exercise. In contrast, a human right is inherent to the individual, it is possessed whether one exercises it or not and to repress such a right is dehumanizing. Furthermore, the state is under an obligation to insure through the provision of legal and material resources that the individual can exercise the right (Fisher, 1982, p. 19). Thus, it is helpful to see that earlier communication rights were predominately negative freedoms, that is, freedoms from state repression. What d’Arcy called for was not the replacement of the traditional communication freedoms but their encompassing by a broader human right, a right to communicate. This represents a shift from rights expressed as negative freedoms associated with separate spheres of communication – assembly, speech, press – to a positive comprehensive human right encompassing all these freedoms and more. A right to communicate would serve as the crown of what d’Arcy called an “ascending progression” of rights and freedoms (d’Arcy, 1983). Thus, the right to communicate and its social and technological environment differs from the previous era in the distinctions made between:

·        The role of the individual as a passive receiver of information and the role of an active participant in interactive global communication;

·        Information and communication;

·        Content and process; and

·        Freedoms and rights.

 

The Third Generation: Collective Rights & Solidarity Rights, 1955-Present

 

The third generation of rights emerged in the closing decades of the twentieth century. They are still widely debated and, are still largely absent in international law. These rights differ

from the earlier rights in a number of ways:

·        They arise out of planetary or global concerns,

·        They embody both individual and collective rights,

·        They are even stronger positive rights in that they require state intervention often at both the national and international levels in coordination with other states,

·        They often involve a redefinition or extension of earlier rights.

 

These are considered collective or solidarity rights such as a right to collective economic, social, and cultural development; and to communicate. Collective rights arose in the last half of the twentieth century out of the anti-colonial era, but also reflect other global concerns such as the environment. It is because they are global in nature that they require the state to be interventionist, not only nationally but also internationally in insuring citizens can exercise these rights individually and as a collective.

 

From Bandung to Montreux & Beyond. Communication rights entered the domain of collective rights at the Bandung Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1955 and the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference at Montreux in 1965. Bandung began to address the social and cultural impacts of broadcast ICTs in developing countries. Montreux began to deal with the economic, social and political impacts of ICTs (Markle Foundation, 1972, pp. 3-6). In particular, developing nations began to link communication with development. Recommendations were made in the Plenipoteniary that the ITU support technical assistance, establish a regional presence, and that member states establish a fund for use by developing countries for this assistance (Codding, 1995). This initiated a movement that has continued to the present, with mixed results. By 1982, the ITU included in its mission the “[maintenance] and [extension] of international cooperation … for the improvement and rational use of telecommunications” (quoted from Codding, 1995). This conception of development has been extended to include not only technical assistance for member states, but also for communities therein. Among many other issues, many now maintain that assistance must extend from the technical level to that which would allow communities to both make use of information transmitted over ICTs and to participate in its formation (see Rockefeller Foundation, 1999; and WSIS-CSCG, 2002).

 

Futher Development of Communication Rights Theory. As envisioned by d’Arcy, a right to communicate would display all the characteristics of third generation rights. It is planetary in that it was conceived at the time when the global implications of satellite communication, combined with computing networking, were becoming apparent. It is a right belonging not only to individuals but groups, thus, it is a collective or solidarity right. It would be a strong positive right in that the state would have the responsibility to insure that its citizens have the resources to exercise it. Finally, it is an extension or redefinition of earlier rights and freedoms, in particular freedom of opinion and expression. However, like other third generation rights the debate of what constitutes a right to communicate is yet to be resolved.

 

Jean d’Arcy himself never provided a concise definition of a right to communicate. Nor was his idea immediately taken up within the United Nations community. The 1970s was a period of intense debate within the United Nations about cultural diversity, media dominance, and the ‘free flow of information.’ During this time, the Non-Aligned nations advanced the proposal for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) (UNESCO, 1980b). Cold War politics also established further fault lines. Nonetheless, efforts began within UNESCO in the 1970s to formulate a right to communicate. In 1974, the UNESCO General Conference adopted a resolution authorizing the Director General to consult experts for defining a right to communicate. The General Conference reaffirmed this initiative in 1978. A number of meetings of experts were held under UNESCO auspices and within the International Broadcast Institute. However, the debate over a right to communicate fell victim to international North-South and East-West ideological and power politics in the 1980s. The United States and Great Britain withdrew from UNESCO, the idea of a NWICO collapsed, and UNESCO abandoned it efforts to formulate a right to communicate. In the 1980s and ‘90s UNESCO would revert to focusing on freedoms in specific communication sectors such as its “Promoting the Free Flow of Information and the Development of Communication.”

 

However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, combined with the emergence of the Internet, there is renewed interest in communication rights. Thus, while it is not possible to give a definitive formulation of a right to communicate it is possible to draw on earlier work to illustrate the potential of the concept as a strategic framework for promoting democratic communication.

 

Michael Freeden makes the point that “The meaning of a concept is shaped by the range of further concepts that are attached to it and support it.” Thus, the concept of a right will be linked to such other concepts as liberty and equality with the result that “The resulting configuration will enable the content and role of the ‘right’ to be interpreted.” Consequently, a right can be seen abstractly as a cluster of related concepts whose inter-relationships are partly responsible for giving the right its meaning (Freeden, 1991, p. 2). A right to communicate would be just such a cluster of concepts. It can be conceived as a human right that is the apex of a cluster and hierarchy of rights, freedoms, entitlements, and responsibilities. A right to communicate would include at a minimum “the right to inform and be informed, the right to active participation in the communication process, the right of equitable access to information resources and information, and the right of cultural and individual privacy from communication” (Richstad & Anderson, 1981, pp. 26-27). A right to communicate encompasses interconnected freedoms such as the freedom of opinion, expression, and information. These freedoms in turn can potentially be exercised through such entitlements as freedom of the press, the lack of censorship, the rights of journalists, and the right to access to information. It is important here to point out the distinction between this abstract perspective and those factors that make it possible for these rights to actually be exercised. Clearly, it is the case that the another part of the meaning of any right derives from the institutional and social contexts, whatever they may be, that define if and how citizens can exercise it.

 

A right to communicate would also embody the right of individuals and groups not to communicate, a right relevant to cultural rights and national and group identity. In contrast to traditional statements of freedom of information in mass communications, a right to communicate is participatory, interactive, and applies to groups as well as individuals. A right to communicate also embodies the concept of citizen participation and responsibility for the formulation of communication policy and rights (Fisher, 1982; Harms, 2002). It provides a framework for addressing rights, freedoms and entitlements related to access including literacy, language, intellectual freedom, cultural diversity, language right, and intellectual property rights. Pioneers promoting a right to communicate have provided a basic framework of modes of communication, as delineated by Jim Richstad (forthcoming), as a way of identifying the full spectrum of possible types of information exchange that such a right must address given current technology. The framework is as follows:

·        Participatory communication,

·        Interactive communication,

·        Horizontal communication, and

·        Multiway communication.

 

The Information Society: Computer Networks & Advanced ICTs. The networking of computers began in the middle 1960s, evolving into the U.S. ARPANET and eventually into a global network of networks, the Internet (see McIver & Elmagarmid, 2002). The Internet serves as a nexus for many of the earlier phenomena in the development of ICTs and the co-evolution of the concept of a right to communicate. Like postal services, the Internet developed out of government sponsored efforts. The culture of communication and developments within it in the West evolved into one decidedly anarchic and civil, in which civil and political rights were at the very least assumed by many of its users. As with earlier communication technologies, tensions evolved between governments, civil society and the private sector over the use of and legal protections within this medium (see UN, 2001).

 

Unlike earlier ICTs, however, its technical characteristics enabled unique dispersion possibilities and it supports almost all earlier forms of communications. Packet switching in the Internet allows a distributed infrastructure, which amortizes set-up, access, and infrastructure costs across different organizations. Packet switching is also independent of the physical transmission medium. Its store-and-forward means of operation allows it to support multiple modes of transmission – continuous, discontinuous, synchronous and asynchronous. These characteristics have made its dispersion potential high. In fact, dispersion has taken place over many types of infrastructure. At the application layer, packet switching has provided a nexus for different forms of communication. The Internet is, therefore, able to support all components of Richstad’s framework: Interactive, participatory, horizontal and multi-way communications. The implications of this for the application layer is that it has provided a means for the integration of all elementary forms of communication – text, audio, images and video – and most earlier higher forms of communication – postal services, telephony, radio, film and television, and collaborative applications. In fact, the Internet is now serving as a bridging technology between new and older forms of communication (e.g., broadcast radio to Internet). Thus, from a communication rights perspective, the Internet has raised all of the earlier issues of civil, political, economic, cultural and social rights; potentials for dominance; and potentials for participatory and democratic use.

 

Conclusions

 

Human rights frameworks can and must be used as part of the solution to addressing communication imbalances, independent of specific communication modalities. Such an approach would bring with it the advantage of providing policy makers with a universally available set of standards for addressing human needs and a common lexicon with which to debate, identify and implement solutions.

 

This paper has shown how communication, communication technologies, and human rights are linked in significant ways. As communication technologies evolved into increasingly sophisticated global networks, communication rights evolved, from specific rights expressed as negative freedoms to a comprehensive and positive human right: A right to communicate. A number of complex inter-relationships between technical characteristics of specific communication modalities, culture, and public policy were shown as forces that shaped the norms that have informed evolving conceptions of a right to communicate.

 

Further research into the relationships between technological evolution and human rights – a right to communicate in particular – should focus on at least two areas. First, additional and more detailed research from the historical, policy and phenomenological perspectives taken here is warranted. Research issues would include: Comparative, case-based studies of communications rights across different nations and across time; and an in-depth examination of the diversity of cultures of communication in the world and how they each interpret a right to communicate. The second area of research would be the application of empirical research methods and frameworks to the study of communication technology evolution as a driver of communication rights development. Empirical approaches to the broad study of human rights have been in development within social science. A notable example – that will inform the authors’ future research – is the work of the Comparative Sociology Workshop (CSW) at Stanford University (Ramirez, 2002). This type of research would attempt to analyze at least three dimensions: 1) analysis of time lines or sequences of transformations involving global communications and human rights development; 2) analysis of these types of developments at the national levels in various countries; and 3) analysis of the linkages between global and national developments in these areas (Ramirez, 2002, p. 5). The authors would add to CSW model empirical studies of the role of ICTs and human rights in major political events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Metrics or indicators for analysis would include both the technical and policy dimensions. Independent variables for technology might include dispersion rates and areas for individual communication technologies, effective coverage areas, household penetration rates of access devices (e.g., radios, telephones, or computers), and relative capacity and performance characteristics of individual communication technologies. Social and policy-related variables might include literacy rates over time, levels of policy activity as indicated by the quantity of member states, NGOs or private sector entities that were engaged, and the level of legislative activity over time at both national and global levels. The authors expect that these future directions will greatly reinforce the work presented here and improve communications policy-making.

Acknowledgments:

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Euricom Colloquium: Electronic Networks and Democracy, Nijmegen, 9-12 October 2002.

   

Endnote