1. Introduction

In the developed countries we observe an intensive and extensive (re)construction of the national electronic communication infrastructure. From a technological point of view, these activities can be seen as a further step towards bringing the dormant potentials of the computer to life. During the second half of this century, many industrial tasks have been automated by the connection of machines (Fleissner 1987: 101-120) and chemical processes to computers. The rapid appearance of the personal computer (PC) in our offices and private homes laid the foundations for the next stage, "Telematization", including three aspects of use: the stand-alone use of the PC, the linking of it to mechanical or chemical processes, and, more recently, the linking of PCs to each other within electronic networks (Fleissner 1996a: 13-19), locally or worldwide, called "Intranet" and "Internet" respectively. For the present, with the advent of speedy multimedia-technologies, "Mediamatic" (Latzer 1997) seems to be the most recent interim stage of electronic technology, allowing for the convergence of three traditional, formerly separate, technologies: the telephone, the mass media (like broadcasting and newspapers), and the computer (Bangemann Report 1994, Soete 1996). To connect all the participants, content providers and consumers, the contributors and the users, the writers and readers of any kind of information, the so called "Information Highway" is to be created.

While from the viewpoint of science and engineering, information and communication technologies (ICT) and their applications are successfully seen from a limited, but purposeful perspective of performance and efficiency, a philosophy of culture has to fulfill a more comprehensive task. It has to pay attention to the complexity and the many dimensions (if not the totality) of any phenomenon of human activity. Starting from this premise, we should strive for methods whose scope and scale transcend any particular discipline. Of course, all our reflections are not reality itself, they are only more or less appropriate and interest-guided or covetous approximations of the phenomena in question.

In the case of the Information Highway, one can usually find three major starting points for an analysis: the technology-based analysis (technology push, e.g. Negroponte 1994); the economic angle of sight (economy pull, e.g. Soete 1996); and the sociological/psychological (community pull, e.g. Rheingold 1994). In this article we will add a political and cultural perspective to them.

While Nicholas Negroponte, in his best-seller "Being digital" (1994), starts from the new possibilities which digitalization has opened up for the convergence of traditional media and the creation of new ones, and discusses the impact of the new media on social life, life-styles, learning and teaching, and the law. The politico-economic view locates the traditional and new actors of the emerging Information Industrial Complex (IIC) within society, and tries to forecast new markets and the losers and winners of the game. This is of particular importance for the European Union. The vision of its future was called "Information Society" (Bangemann 1994; Soete 1996), mainly under the auspices of increasing competitiveness and the creation of new content and services for the sake of higher profitability. Economists analyze the contemporary construction of the Information Highway with the goal of profit-maximization. Their remedy usually consists mainly of the four words liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and globalization. New technological options enable traditional industries and services to enter new branches of business and expand, while others, in this case the European PTTs (national post, telephone, telegraph, and telephone administration), could quickly become the main losers, mainly for two reasons. Firstly, new competitors are able to link their traditional networks to the Information Highway (like cable TV companies via a set-top-box) or may upgrade their conventional networks via fiber optics (like the suppliers of electric energy or the railway companies, public or private). Secondly, European Union Law has already put an end to the monopolies of the PTTs with respect to the lines and the provision of end user equipment; on January 1st, 1998 the monopoly on telephone services (which have so far been a profitable source of public revenue in some EU countries) will also fall.

Relatively independent of the other two, the third (sociological/psychological) type of analysis focuses on power-related problems within the electronically linked community, predominantly on the micro-level. It asks whether group decision making will be shifted toward more democracy (electronic lobbying) and equality (gender swapping, invisibility of handicaps), and if and how it will result in more participation, human empowering or more integration (Rheingold 1994).

In my opinion a philosophy of culture should strive for a more comprehensive view. It should not only take into account different perspectives according to scientific fields, but it should also mediate the different positions as well, and if possible, contribute to the discussion in a relatively original and creative way to increase the level of self-reflection. Both unification and differentiation should be included in the analysis as current trends, and their interplay should be explicated. Far from having finished such a rather demanding task, I only can try to sketch some of the most urgent questions and to present some glimpses in the appropriate directions.

My story of the Information Highway does not start from the diffusion of electronic technology. Higher emphasis has to be given to societal efforts to produce an electronic high-speed infrastructure as an act of construction of a new type of a capitalistic society by means of self-fulfilling prophecy. This act is by no means one of pure chance. A complex and multi-faceted field of preconditions has to be in place before the new society can emerge.

We see the following preconditions as necessary:

1. An appropriate general vision of the future which will satisfy long-term cultural desires using special metaphors ("Leitbilder"). Its purpose is to create a higher degree of acceptance of applications of new technology.

2. The politico-economic context of contemporary capitalism under the heading of globalization of markets and internationalization of production, which may be described by conventional methods of politico-economic analysis (Fleissner et al 1996b: 161-178).

3. The technological basis and the stages of technological development, as briefly described above, by automation, telematics, and mediamatics.

If my assumption is true that the politco-economic context and the technology trends are common to all the developed countries, it may suffice to show the main lines of development of the Information Highway in the most advanced (in this respect) country of the world, the United States of America, followed by the status quo in the European Union. On the national level, the making of the Information Highway will show some peculiarities. Therefore, case studies for the making of the Information Highway in Hungary will be presented in appendix two.

In the next chapter, the stages of development of a new vision for a future society based on new ICTs will be mirrored.

2. The Development of a Vision

As early as in the 1960s, a few social scientists began to feel a deeply rooted change in society and experienced some inkling of the end of the aging paradigm of industrial society. It is not quite clear who was first. Was it the Japanese Tadao Umesao (he called information society "joho shakai") in 1963 (Ito 1991:3-12) or Alain Touraine (1969), who published a vision of a new kind of society, the "information society"? Touraine, and later on Daniel Bell (1973), avoided the term "information society", but called the society "postindustrial". Nevertheless, Daniel Bell indicated the main changes: a trend away from primary and secondary sector towards the service sector, increased importance of scientific work, research and development, a transformation of work from manual workers towards brain workers etc. Information and knowledge as factors of production became as important as capital, labor, and land. Nevertheless, classical automation continued to offer the most important method of increasing the efficiency of production, leading to a shrinking material production sector (agriculture and manufacturing).

A formalized concept of information, invented by Shannon and Weaver at Bell Labs in the second half of the forties, started its triumphal march through the exact and social sciences. No longer did the concepts of knowledge and information stay connected to human beings. Reified, objectivated, context-free information was seen as an important source of prosperity and competitiveness. Starting with the moment where information was defined in a formal, mathematical, statistical way, it could be found everywhere: in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, history, and economics. Technical systems were erroneously viewed as if they handled the same kind of information as human beings or societies do. Although this is not true in real life, this perception smoothed the way for the increased acceptance of the notion "information society". In fact, reified information became one important means of fulfilling the task of profit maximization for traditional private enterprises. By using the information processing machinery and the software and hardware linked to it, and with automation techniques to minimize the possible inputs into the production process (labor, land, capital, intermediary goods), the rate of profit could be increased compared with a competitor's, at least temporarily. This relation has become one of the most effective driving forces for the implementation of labor/capital-saving technological change.

However, the importance of reified information has decreased for the developed world. More and more competitors from the Third World have joined the so-called threshold countries, modernizing their production units much as the developed countries had done before. Now, automation and increased productivity of labor no longer remain the monopoly of the rich part of the world. For the developed world, a new strategy seemed to be more effective: no longer should a reduction of inputs and rationalization be the implicit goal , but rather the invention and creation of new products, services, and markets. With such a strategy it should not be necessary to increase the already high rates of unemployment by making further gains in productivity. Creativity and innovation, possible on the basis of highly qualified staff, and usually seen in connection with the widespread adoption of information/communication technologies, promised a new means of globalization, hopefully without the negative side effects of growth in unemployment.

While in the sixties and seventies the term "information society" was familiar only to small groups of specialized social scientists, in the late eighties the situation changed tremendously. As in many other cases before, the United States was the first country which managed to create a new vision for itself and for the world. The "information society" was no longer a crystal-ball forecast offered by scientists, but became a normative guideline for the most important groups of society, the state and private enterprise. The first impetus came from a consortium of 13 computer firms which discussed their ideas within the "Computer Systems Policy Project" (CSPP) with US politicians (Bernhardt/Ruhmann 1995: 8). The background of this enterprise was the shortage of Pentagon money for the computer industry after the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the socialist bloc. A new focus for capital investment was needed. In December 1990 CSPP was asked by the government to evaluate their High Performance Computing and Communication Program (HPCC). One year later the result became Public Law (102-196): The High-Performance Computing Act passed through Congress. It created high expectations, in particular for the scientific community. Electronic communication between scientists was to be supported and improved by a new electronic network, the NREN (National Research and Education Network), and the research and development of high-speed hardware and software was to be publicly sponsored by government funds. However, it was still a limited and sectoral concept.

At almost the same time, CSPP had produced a new and far-reaching recommendation for Senator Al Gore and Congressman George Brown. CSPP wanted them to prepare a bill for the conversion and extension of the electronic infrastructure. In 1993 CSPP published a new summary paper of its vision under the header "Perspectives on the National Information Infrastructure: CSPP's Vision and Recommendations for Action" (CSPP 1993). Immediately afterwards the Clinton administration produced a paper along these lines entitled "Technology for America's Economic Growth: A New Direction to Build Economic Strength" (CPSR 1995: 15). This vision was more precisely formulated in September 1993 in a brochure of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) "The National Information Infrastructure (NII): Agenda for Action". There one could find, for the first time, Al Gore's catchy name "Information Superhighway". A working group for the construction of the Superhighway was founded (IITF - Information Infrastructure Task Force), and a "U.S. Advisory Council on the NII" (25 representatives of private and public institutions) was formed. They were to promote private capital investment in the information and communication sectors, and applications within the educational and health-care system, as well as in the public administration. The US government supported the construction of the Information Highway with public financial assistance, regulatory measures, and standardization, but the ownership of the Highway and its construction was to remain private.

The declared main goal of the US National Information Infrastructure (NII) is to remain competitive, to gain ground within the global economy, to create good jobs for the American people and to foster economic growth for the nation. But not only economic goals were formulated. The NII intends to change the life of every American by reducing the limitations of location, economic status, and disability, and offering everybody a fair chance to apply his/her talents, gifts and ambitions (CSPP 1995: 15). By announcing the "National Information Infrastructure" the United States has developed a formula by which the Democratic Clinton administration, as well as important representatives of the Republicans (e.g. Newt Gingrich), expect to be able to protect US society from economic decline, and, more ambitiously, to lead them to new heights of economic and political "excellence".

Only for a short period was Al Gore's idea confined to the United States of America. At the Brussels G7 summit in February 1995, Gore personally expanded his idea to the global scale (Bernhardt/Ruhmann 1995: 8), after the 1994 meeting of the G7 in Naples had demanded a "Global Information Infrastructure" (GII) and a list of 11 projects (digital libraries and their electronic linking; modern information infrastructure in health care; telelearning of foreign languages; environmental care; early warning systems for catastrophes etc.) (Kretzen/Plehwe 1995: 32). Common standards for technical compatibility of the international networks, for the opening of markets for new products and services, for data security, for privacy, for appropriate copyrights, and for accompanying measures to increase demand for the new opportunities, were proposed (Dippoldsmann/Genrich 1995: 51).

Many enterprises adopted the policy of the governments. In the US, a huge market developed. GII was to become not only a means for communication, but the main trading center of the world. The Internet, first created by the US military as a means of surviving a nuclear war, was later made available to scientists and research agencies, and is now used as a test bed; it is experiencing a new phase of commercialization, in which millions of customers can be connected.

3. European Information Society

Somewhat delayed, but in a similar way, the member states of the European Union have little by little paid more and more attention to the opportunities of electronic communication. At first, the EU tried to reduce the gap between the other two large competitors, the USA and Japan. The former was and is still leading in hardware technologies, like memory chips, integrated circuits, mainframe computers and the PC, as well as in the market for standard software (in particular Microsoft MS-DOS, WINDOWS, and WINDOWS95). The EU started promoting research and development programs in the eighties. In 1984 ESPRIT (European Strategic Program for Research and Development in Information Technologies, planned a for minimum of 10 years) was set up, followed in 1986 by JESSI (Joint European Submicron Silicon), DRIVE (Traffic Management Systems), DELTA (Telelearning), and AIM (Telemedicine); in 1988 IMPACT (Information Market Policy Actions) took off. Although not all of them were successful, in principle the policy of promoting EU-wide research and development programs continued during the nineties with e.g. RACE (Research and Technology Development in Advanced Communications Technologies in Europe). Since 1992, developments have continued in the form of ACTS (Advanced Communication Technologies and Services), TELEMATICS (Applications in Telematics), and IMPACT 2. Between 1994 and 1998 the EU is subsidizing TELEMATICS by 902 mill. ECU, ACTS by 674 mill. ECU, and ESPRIT by 2044 mill. ECU.

In December 1993 the European Council asked a group of top managers and politicians (e.g. the EU commissioner Martin Bangemann, Siemens' Heinrich von Pierer, Carlo de Benedetti) to prepare a working paper for its Corfu meeting (June 24th to 25th, 1994). The so-called Bangemann Report, with an agenda for action, gave the basic ideas for a European pathway into the information society. The political and economic leaders of the EU understand the transformation process as a "market-driven revolution", performed by the private sector. The technological-economic basis is to consist of four strata:

1. Networks and their connections (mobile communication, satellites, EURO-ISDN; access via plugs for PCs and laptops, wireless access via mobile telephones, PDAs)

2. Basic services (e-mail, video conferencing, file transfer, data-bank queries, interactive multimedia)

3. Applications (telelearning, telework, university networks, health-care information systems, public administration networks etc.)

4. Information content (on-line services, data/picture banks, audio-visual programs like movies, computer animation, TV shows etc.).

It is expected that from an economic point of view the information society will grow out of the convergence of three markets:

* the market for professional applications (between large-scale enterprises, public administrations and SMSE within the European domestic market)

* the market for private applications

* the market for audio-visual applications (Informationsgesellschaft - Perspektive für Europa? 1996: 49-65).

The Bangemann report shows a lot of similarities to the brochure of the CSPP: the title, the content, the structure, and the function are nearly the same, with one evident exception: the US report argues against the competitors Japan and the EU, the EU report argues against the US and Japan. Bangemann's report offers high expectations of reducing the chronically high unemployment in the EU: more than 10 million new jobs are to be created. However, this figure was corrected by A. D. Little (Neue Märkte und Multimedia 1994), who believes that no new jobs will be created, but 10 million jobs will be affected (Bernhardt/Ruhmann 1995: 8). Furthermore, experts predict that in the public administrations of the EU, about 30 percent of employees could be made redundant by new information/communication technologies. The Austrian and German banking and insurance sectors, airlines, and telecommunications industries could lose thirty to sixty percent of their jobs if they are brought up to the same levels of labor productivity as the top US firms (Martin 1996: 148-151).

It seems that the EU's main problem of high unemployment cannot be solved by the perspective of a European Information Society. Consequently the most recent papers by the EU represent a shift of focus toward the inclusion of social, political, and cultural goals into the formerly more or less purely economic perspectives; quality of life, health care, cultural diversity, democracy, the danger of the loss of privacy etc. are the topics dealt with by an interim report of a group of top experts related to GD V/B/5 of the European Commission (Eine europäische Informationsgesellschaft für alle 1996), although this group is still subsumed under the heading "adjustment to industrial change".

4. "Leitbilder": Complex Strategies for Acceptance

The politico-economic construction of a new society in Europe is no easy task. It is not possible without the active participation of the majority of people, or at least their neutrality. Therefore it is no surprise that the EU authorities are trying to formulate the perspectives of information society in such a way that every social group will gain from it. The aims are as follows:

1. Everybody should win through more equality and increased possibilities for self-realization

2. For consumers, a higher quality of life through the development of services and entertainment (infotainment)

3. For employees, new and more creative jobs in the service industries

4. For the citizens, more efficient, transparent, customer-oriented, cheap public services, along with closer interaction with communal or regional authorities, and more democracy

5. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMSEs) increased competitiveness through access to educational, consulting and on-line information services

6. For all private enterprises, a large and expanding market with an estimated volume of more than 1,500 billion German Marks in the year 2000

7. For special groups like scientists and researchers, students, librarians, medical staff, teachers, designers, social workers, artists etc. there is to be greater assistance for their professional activities

8. For public administrators and politicians, a way to approach their "clients" and voters more directly, and thus to become a more legitimized institution.

This broad distribution of possible winners creates a strange alliance between the actors of the state, the top management of the multinationals, the universities, research staff of large companies, and the grass-rooters of the Internet culture. The trade mark "global village", first created by Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan/Powers 1989), is the corresponding metaphor to offer a platform for joint activities and public discussions.

Nevertheless the citizens remain reluctant: 48 percent of Germans expressed the feeling that they were "steamrollered by these new tendencies" and that private enterprise "does not want to know if the citizens really need all these new gadgets" (Informationsgesellschaft - Perspektive für Europa? 1996: 7).

The terms "Global Village", "Information Superhighway" and "Telework" are only a few examples of the (postmodern) strategy (conscious or not) of the leading social groups for influencing the public discourse and controlling its outcome. Politics is no longer the monopolized business of political parties, or of the so-called "social partners". It looks like the creation/emergence of contemporary myths for the sake of the interpretation and creation of future society. In particular, the mass media are adopting the new terminology. In this way, a climate of acceptance and consensus are to be produced.

But let us look a little closer at these new catchwords. What do they signal to the people? It is striking that all the new phrases link modern technology and its related activities to traditional, at the first glance well-known and familiar institutions. The reason for this phenomenon is that for the majority of people, modern technology is becoming difficult to understand. The catchwords function as bridges from the past to the future to familiarize the masses on an emotional level with new electronic equipment and new modes of behavior. It looks like a strategy of emotional appropriation. While "Information Society" remains very abstract and bloodless, "Global Village", "Telework", and "Information Highway" sound very real. But this is true at the first glance only. What could be more evident than a village, work, or a highway? But the promise of evidence is deceptive. Neither will the global village rest upon direct and bodily exchange or interaction, nor will telework have the directly controlled and physical character of a self-employed artisan or of handicraft, nor will the data highway be related to cars and physical movements in real life.

Let us demonstrate the kind of deceit with the example of the Information Highway. Although there are many differences between the Information Highway and the highway for cars, the metaphor "Information Highway" has become very popular and it is accompanied by a strong suggestive power (although inapt, because there are no road casualties, no accidents, and no ecological disasters yet). Maybe it is not by chance that Al Gore's father was heavily engaged in the construction of the US highway system. Not only the USA, but all the other developed countries have copied the Nazi-German highway system as one constituent of modern transport infrastructure. Hitler's Germany took the basic idea from the Upper Italian autostrada of the 1920s, but these early autostradas were not free of crossings and had only one lane. Autobahnen represent one of the most important and successful elements of transport infrastructure of the first half of this century. The Germans invented the two-lane highway and got rid of crossings. From 1933, when the Nazis seized power, up to 1939, more than 7,000 km of highway were constructed. From the very beginning, the motivation behind was not the increased volume of traffic or public demand, but military expansion and propaganda for the "Führer". They were interpreted as the "battle against unemployment". In fact the effect on the labor market was very small: in 1936, when the construction activities were at their peak, 125,000 persons were employed, while the number of unemployed was at that time about one million (Canzler - Helmers - Hoffmann 1995a, b). As we have already stated ,Bangemann expects about 10 million new jobs, while in the EU in June 1996 17.9 million were unemployed.

In spite of all the evident differences (of course there are neither preparations for a world war, nor any concentration camps) there remains some analogy between the "Highway" and the "Information Highway" in Europe. Firstly, as in the Third Reich, the Information Highway enjoys high governmental priority, although its future economic effects are not well known. Secondly, the high volume of capital investment, now coming only partly from governmental sources, is once again motivated by a hoped-for future increase in jobs. I am afraid it will be a mistake again.

Besides that, our criticism of the catchwords is not only that they camouflage the politico-economic motives of those who will profit by the diffusion of the new technology, but rather that they promise that technology alone can satisfy urgent societal needs and master global challenges, thus taking people's minds off the fact that technology is only a necessary, not a sufficient, means of solving societal problems (see Fleissner, Hofkirchner 1997).

5. Long-term trends

I think the fact that mass media are so dominated by these "Leitbilder", and that the public is so fascinated by them, can nevertheless not be explained completely by the above-mentioned economico-political and metaphorical factors alone, because evidence exists that the European Information Infrastructure will not solve deeply rooted problems, such as high unemployment.

The quest for an explanation led me to search for a long-term driving force or, more precisely, a reservoir of unsatisfied desires beneath the surface of evident or sometimes less conscious interests. Though there is a very rational and scientific discourse about the technical aspects of the new media, I think behind it, and behind the immediate value for the users of the electronic devices, there is a link to the beliefs of the Judaic-Christian religions. These beliefs culminate in the particular characteristic features of God and the eschatological drama.

I interpret this Judaic-Christian Pantheon as a projection of the abilities and shared wishes and desires of traditional society. Examples are: God the Almighty, God the Ubiquitous, God the Omniscient, God the Righteous, who functions as the Supreme Judge, and on Judgment Day allocates the good and the bad to Heaven or Hell.

In periods of ordinary dynamics of a historical phase (the period of Enlightenment, early Soviet socialism, the period of reconstruction after the Second World War) these subtle projections do not come to the surface, because they may be implicit in competitive driving ideologies which occupy the minds of the people (the promise of well-being and a high standard of living in the reconstruction period, the expectation of a world free of exploitation and poverty in early socialism). In periods of crisis, transformation, and uncertainty the deeper strata of shared projections come to the fore, occupy fantasies, and link them to special artifacts. And this, in my opinion, is precisely the case now.

After the three great historical insults to the human race (no longer being the center of the world - Copernicus; no longer being creation's crowning glory - Darwin; no longer being master in one's own house - Freud), two others are impending: the former basic internal integrity of one's body, and the former basic uniqueness of the human mind, are both challenged by modern technology. The human body can be transformed by solving the riddle of the genes (the Genome project is already working along these lines), and the human mind can be (as yet only partly) replaced by the creations of artificial intelligence.

On the other hand, when global threats are lurking on the horizon, it seems that in the contemporary age, the self-release of human beings is reaching a new level of freedom, of new and previously unseen possibilities for reshaping and restructuring. New means of technology and organization could be used to respond to the challenges, new levers could be moved, new buttons could be pushed.

Facing such new questions, it does not seem surprising that the fantasies and desires which could not have been satisfied in earlier periods, but remained hidden, now rise to the surface and are articulated by and in the media. If this hypothesis is true, the development of capitalism and technological processes could be interpreted on a deeper level than the political and economic one; during history, projections of the Judaic-Christian religion could have been realized on Earth. This did not happen in the originally intended form of the religions, but in certain modified ways. Judgment Day in this interpretation was the heavenly predecessor of the market where the good are still rewarded and the bad are punished, not as in ancient times by emotional currency, but by profits and losses. The emergence of money would be one real counterpart of the Almighty God (who was interpreted by Feuerbach as in reality symbolizing the essence of man, and by Marx representing the societal nature of men). The Word was made flesh. Money, God the Almighty, now is living among us. Anybody can carry with him/her some fragments of its divinity in her/his purse, commanding labor for money, and thus activating all the possible powers and forces human society is able to exert. Although Almightiness, by the relocation from Heaven to Earth, has been transformed into paper or gold, still its power does not come from natural or physical objects. It stems from the imagination of the human brain, of its ability to link meaning to inanimate things.

The Information Highway and the Internet would, in this sense, bring down to earth further projections of divine abilities, namely omniscience and omnipresence, not forgetting immortality. By this process, the prophecy uttered by the snake in the first Book of Moses, Genesis III, 5: "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil", will be approximated, mutatis mutandis, one further step. Unfortunately, so far some other, very important divine properties have not come yet down to us; still righteousness and wisdom are missing.

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