Technological determinism and the future of the BBC

One of the most disturbing and misleading myths current at the moment is the notion that technology must ultimately determine everything. So the commercial and anti-BBC lobby argues that the advent of multi-channel TV automatically makes an organisation like the BBC — funded by a general tax on every viewer — unjustifiable in political terms. What this view overlooks is that decisions about media are (and should be) ultimately made by politicians, not by technology. There’s interesting corroboration for this view in Paul’s Starr’s magisterial study of the history of US media, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, (Basic Books). He shows that at every stage in their evolution, US media were shaped by political choice, not by technological determinism. Or, to quote James Fallows’s excellent review,

“The decisions [Starr] describes are striking to the modern reader not so much because they turned out a certain way, but because they were made at all. They suggest a belief that societies and their governments can affect the path that technologies and markets take, rather than an acceptance of whatever the path turned out to be as inevitable. This concept seems utterly missing from current discussions of the media. Regulators and the public feel there is little they can do to steer the content or quality of the media (with the feeble exception of the F.C.C.’s punishing broadcasters for vulgarities that would barely be noticed on cable). Members of the media feel they have no choice but to give, immediately, what the market demands.”