MR MARTTI AHTISAARI, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF FINLAND

ON THE OCCASION OF THE 25th ANNUAL CONFERENCE

OF THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF COMMUNICATIONS

IN TAMPERE, ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1994

First of all, I want to thank you, and congratulate you, for your choice of Finland, and Tampere, as the venue of your 1994 annual conference. I think you have made an excellent choice. With some luck, you can even have nice weather. Tampere, of course, is the home of a university internationally known for its communications research, of Finland's second national television channel with strong local roots and of an important newspaper publishing house. In addition, I think that Finland, at this juncture, is particularly interesting place to visit and to come back to, twelve years after the IIC first came to Finland for its annual conference.

Those of you who participated in the IIC meeting in Finlandia Hall in 1982 will find that the country has changed a lot. We are now looking ahead - and beyond - the referendum determining our membership in the European Union from the beginning of next year. Our economy has been through a full cycle of boom to bust, and is only now getting back to shape after the worst peacetime recession we have experienced. And talking about the area of your immediate interest, big changes have taken place in Finnish media and communications, as part of the ongoing worldwide information and communications revolution.

One might think that global trends would come late to a country on the periphery of Europe, with small population and strange language. In fact, for better or worse, Finland has for decades been among the first European countries to feel global trends. Finland has kept its doors open for information and communication innovations, so much so that it sometimes has been called the Wild West of the new media. Our legislation on press freedom is based on tradition dating back to the mid of the 18th century when a Finnish clergyman Chydenius was among the first to push for those liberal values.

In some cases, new media have made their entry and their initial conquests even before the appropriate legislation and regulations were in place. A case in point is cable TV, which started here in a legislative vacuum. As a result, at the time when many other European countries still were struggling with the basics, Finland already had considerable experience in cable and satellite-to-cable operations. From the outset of television era, Finland has had both public and commercial television, developing its own model of mutually beneficial and mostly peaceful coexistence between the two. Today, there are three nationwide channels, two public and one commercial; cable covers 40 per cent of households and brings in scores of satellite channels. Private local radio stations appeared in 1985, and there are some 50 of them today, in addition to the well established public services in Finnish, Swedish and Sami.

During the Cold War era, Finnish neutrality was reflected in the fact that our national broadcaster, the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE), was a full of member of both the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the Organisation Internationale de Radiodiffusion etTelevision (OIRT). It used its unique position to build a bridge between the two, shaky as it might have been, often with help from mass communications researchers of the Tampere University. When the Cold War was over, YLE put its experience to good use in helping the EBU to embrace the former OIRT members.

Finland has been one of the European pioneers in deregulating and liberalizing its telecommunications. The last monopolies are now being dismantled. From the beginning of this year, there has been a full competition between domestic long distance carriers. From the beginning of July, international telephone traffic market was opened as well. Soon, competition will be a fact of life at the local level as well. For the general public, these changes have meant an array of new access codes and incompatible telephone cards, but also better service and cheaper rates.

You cannot have failed to notice that most everybody here seems to be walking around with a portable phone. In fact, Finland has more mobile telephones per capita than any other country. Mobile telephones are one of the flagships of Finnish high-tech exports; their manufacturer Nokia is number 2 in the world, right after Motorola, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, will be the market leader in Europe this year.

Finland was the first country where the multimedia-ready telecommunications network was taken to experimental use. It was last year. We are not just waiting for the information superhighways to reach us, we want to be a part of the vanguards surveying their course through an uncharted terrain.

It is difficult to think of another forum as exciting and as up-to-date as yours, bringing together policy makers, business leaders, broadcasters and media managers, academic experts and consultants from a wide but converging spectrum of communications that span everything from telecommunications to computing to radio and television and to press journalism. You cover exactly those areas that experience the fastest growth and invite to imagine the boldest scenarios for the future. In a few words, they are where the action is now.

In these areas, you are not only experts. You are also some of the prime movers and actors. Your institute must have foreseen the emerging convergence and integration tendencies earlier than others did. Since the International Broadcast Institute already years ago changed its name to the broader-focused International Institute of Communications, somebody must have seen light early on.

I hope that the IIC still has its crystal ball, because it is now needed, more than ever, to chart the course of the information superhighways, which are being built, unlike roads or railways in their time, without a clear idea of where they might lead. We know how perilous it is to try to predict the fate of emerging technologies. Telephone, radio, television, videocassette players and home computers did not die because of lack of practical use, as some of the early sceptics predicted. On the other hand, they did not kill each other or older forms of communication, as some others thought would happen.

Trying to find out what the national and global information infrastructures of the future might look like, we would probably - like blind men touching different parts of an elephant - come to very different conclusions depending on who we talk to. Are we going to have 500 TV channels with an unlimited supply of movies at any time, thousands of global discussion clubs complete with video, audio and virtual reality, contact with all data bases and libraries of the world or the convenience of electronic shopping?

Probably all the above, and much more. And we can be sure that put together, these things will have a huge impact on all aspects of our lives.

I did not want to interfere with your work and pretend to be setting your agenda, but I would like to share with you some of my concerns and hopes that relate to new information and telecommunication technologies, especially their social and political implications. On many issues, there is a variety of views and opinions; new technologies inspire both hopes and fears. Let me say that I am rather on the side of hope. Still, some questions have to be asked and answered so that doubts can be put to rest.

There is a fundamental question whether the new information society will promote greater equality among its members, or whether it will make the chasm between those who are sometimes called A- and B-class citizens deeper. Consider education: if all schools, urban, suburban and rural alike, have access to data banks, multimedia encyclopedias and video conferences with the best teachers, this will certainly go a long way in leveling the field. On the other hand, as long as this access is enjoyed only by a small number of elite schools, the gap between them and others will only grow.

We can also question equality in an international context. Will new technologies be mainly used to broaden and pave the infamous "one-way street" of international information flows, or can they be used to redeem the situation? There are examples of both. Cooperation among third world broadcasters has led to encouraging results, creating intra-regional television news exchanges and at least a trickle of a counter-current, from South to North. To be competitive in the news marketplace, third world broadcasters need credibility, tools and training. If they themselves supply the first, their colleagues from North should be able to give them the rest.

There are some who fear that our electronic future will be an implementation of Orwell`s "1984", just a few years late. Others emphasize the great potential for democracy and civil society of uncontrolled horizontal links that make it possible to bypass established forms of political organization. There are already examples of pressure groups that have been mobilized solely through Internet, of people who are so few and so scattered that they would never have had a chance. And as we have seen, totalitarian regimes of the recent past were brought down, to a large extent, by radio and television, fax machines and E-mail.

Diplomacy and international relations will face new challenges, when television news gathering technologies and 24-hour news services replace traditional "diplomatic channels", as leaders get more and more of their up-to-the- minute information from news services and as live television images from current crises make their impact on public opinion. Leaders may even have to negotiate by live satellite, with hundreds of millions watching.

This applies, in my opinion, in the context of domestic politics, where media influence can be heavily felt, and is likely to grow with the help of new technologies. Access to data banks and advanced new gathering techniques are potent tools for skillful journalists. They can have an edge over politicians and bureaucrats who do not have facts and figures equally well organized at their fingertips. Again, the solution is not to get mad, but to get even.

At the same time, new technologies pose formidable challenges to journalists themselves, and to the media as a whole. Free from many earlier physical and technical limitations, seemingly easier news coverage encounters more difficult problems of criteria, relevance and selection. To quote a prominent American TV-journalist: "Focusing a camera on a live event is a miraculous technological achievement, but it is not journalism. Journalism lies on the evaluation of the event, it lies in analysis and editing. (...) To a certain degree, we all, in this day and age, are prisoners of the electronic tail wagging of the editorial dog."

Finally, the most troubling question of all, made more pressing for your conference because you are meeting at the same time as the United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. Let us assume that the building of national and global information infrastructures in Europe, North America and in the highly developed countries of Asia will proceed at brisk pace, and that they, like railways in an earlier era, will usher us in a new period of growth and prosperity. Let us assume that the new networks give everyone in these parts of the world just what they want, whether it is 500 or 1 000 TV channels or a global cyberspace with all human interest catered for and with all human knowledge on line, ready to be downloaded. We shall have electronic shopping malls, interactive dramas and of course several 24 hour news services. But what if they still are bringing us live coverage of new Somalias and Rwandas, chaos and famine, ethnic strife and catastrophes that seem to be engulfing more and more areas on our planet?

In other words: what is in there for them - for Somalia and Rwanda, for other countries of the South still ironically called "developing", and for the 2,5 billion newcomers on this planet by 2025, most of whom will be born in the less affluent part of the world?

In his book "Preparing for the 21st century", Paul Kennedy reminds us that the pessimistic predictions by Malthus were proven wrong because industrial and agricultural revolutions brought the curve of economic growth again ahead of that of population increase. Now, as we are confronted with even more serious population explosion, Kennedy points out that - unlike in Europe 200 years ago - the "power of population" and the "power of technology" might not as easily match and cancel each other, because they are now based in different geographic areas, and because today`s fastest growing technologies might not be of much direct help to the poor South. He is afraid that instead of creating masses of discriminating consumers of design suitcases, the coming of a telecommunications revolution to developing countries could well cause billions of "have-nots" to feel ever more angry at the "haves".

Others are more optimistic. In the latest "State of the World" report of the Worldwatch Institute, computer technology and communications networks are seen to bring potentially enormous resources into the fight against the two interconnected problems of Third World development - poverty and environmental degradation. The report points out, however, that without careful attention to the public policies that govern their evolution and application, they are unlikely to be a force for reducing the environmental impacts of industrial civilization, ending poverty and strengthening participatory democracy. And further: it would be a mistake to use these technologies as simply a new, more effective way to dominate the world. "They can also help us learn to live with nature. Rather than our machines controlling us, we can begin to control them - and ourselves", the report concludes.

One more quote, from Sir Arthur Clark who probably has been quoted many times before at your meetings. The father of the geostationary satellite greeted the realization of his idea by saying that now the engineering problems of bringing education, literacy, improved hygiene and agricultural techniques to everyone on the earth have been solved. "But", he said, "of course the technical problem is the easy one. Do we have the imagination and statesmanship to use this new tool for the benefit of mankind?"

Let me elaborate. Statesmanship now calls for global concern on what might be called "cultural ecology". Our common future depends on not only the physical environment but on the cultural and informational environment as well. Indeed, mankind does not only live in a biosphere but also in a mediasphere.

I find an ecological approach to communications problems particularly useful as it helps us to get beyond the narrow national or special interest perspectives. As a matter of fact, the original idea of the United Nations 50 years ago already inspired to look at media issues in terms of universal human rights and in terms of global conditions for world peace. Today the challenge is even more vital and essentially the same for both communications and the UN as such: how to serve at the same time the increasing needs of a delicate civil society and of the ecologically fragile global community.

I wish you a pleasant stay and a successful conference. And welcome back to Finland again - this time, I hope, even sooner than in twelve years time!