Communications technology will continue to rapidly transform the world’s economic and political landscape despite last fall’s terrorist attacks, an expert in international affairs and military history told a business audience last week.

Current rhetoric may suggest the world will never be the same after Sept. 11th, that “a page has been turned and we’re on a new chapter, if not an entirely new book,” says Gwynne Dyer.

“But I don’t believe a word of that,” he told about 200 people gathered at the Calgary Petroleum Club last Thursday, in a speech sponsored by the Calgary Council for Advanced Technology.

The prominent London-based independent journalist, who has a PhD in Military and Middle Eastern History from the University of London, offered a decidedly optimistic viewpoint of how communications technology and new media have helped trigger a global political revolution and a gradual democratization of the planet.

Gwynne Dyer

Dyer illustrated his argument by alluding to the writings of what he termed three “prophets” – author George Orwell, Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff and current best-selling writer Samuel Huntington – all of whom, he said, represent a rather pessimistic view of the impact technology has had on our economy and globalizing society.

Perhaps best known for penning the grim futuristic novel 1984, Orwell believed the onset of radio technology was dangerous, and it would enslave people rather than liberate society, said Dyer.

But while both Adolph Hitler and the Bolsheviks exploited radio as a vehicle for power and social control in the 1930s, Dyer pointed out a subsequent form of communication – the television images of the massacre in China’s Tiananmen Square – also played a pivotal role in galvanizing world public opinion and sparking the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

“What seemed magical and out of the blue, the overthrow of the communist regime – without buckets of blood in Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union itself – was actually a consequence of the change of communication technologies,” said Dyer.

As advanced communication has become more pervasive on the global stage in the last two decades, it has been paralleled by several revolutions that have advanced the cause of democracy in such diverse countries as the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, South Africa, the former Soviet Union, “all by the same non-violent tactics – and depending on a global television audience to deter the local regime from having blood all over the streets,” said Dyer.

“What we are in the presence of is a global political revolution which is overwhelmingly positive, and which I think by now has conclusively demonstrated that the desire to live in egalitarian societies and democratic societies is not a Western cultural artifact, but rather something that any human society, given the possibility, will seek,” he added.

Dyer also addressed the current “war” against terrorism by highlighting issues raised by Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard University and author of The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington’s best-selling book argues that the powerful cultural “civilization” of the West is destined to collide in post-Cold War conflict with a resurgent Islamic identity.

“You can see why he got a lot of airtime on CNN on the last three or four months,” observed Dyer dryly. “The problem is, he’s full of s---.”

Most Muslim countries which have the ability to escape from their feudal past have done so, Dyer argued. Islamic extremism, on the other hand, has been born from a frustration over the inability of Arab societies to modernize and succeed at the same pace as the West.

Instead of adopting Western ways, Dyer said, the extremists believe that a return to fundamentalist, core Islamic values is the way to rekindle God’s favour and redress the political and economic imbalance.

The idea that Islamic radicalism is a harbinger of global conflict which will plunge us back into a medieval war between civilizations “is actually a nightmare whipped up by self-interested parties – but an entirely implausible one,” said Dyer.

“But it appeals to certain people. There are a lot of people in Washington who are looking for a new enemy after the Cold War, so you can see why they love Huntington.”

Meanwhile, the veteran journalist drew on the economic theories advanced by Kondratieff, a Russian economist and one of the architects of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan who later died in one of Stalin’s Siberian prison camps.

Kondratieff believed that in addition to the regular business cycles of boom and recession, there exist longer economic cycles for emerging technologies.

The Kondratieff cycle (or long wave) theory detailed the number of years that the economy expanded and contracted during each part of the half-century long cycle, which industries suffer the most during the downwave, and how technology plays a role in leading the way out of the contraction into the next upwave.

Dyer suggested if the 50-year cycle theory is applied to current “hot” communications and computing technologies that have transformed our workplace and economy in the last two decades, “we’re nowhere near started yet.”

“I am suggesting you haven’t really yet seen the full flowering of the economic impact, or indeed the technological elaboration of the dominant technologies in this cycle.”

“ You’re still on the ground floor of this stuff.”

And while cutting-edge innovations in biotechnology and nanotechnology seem to be booming, they are instead like chimeras on the horizon, part of the next wave.

“I’m not saying you can’t make money off them now,” Dyer said. “But their actual broad application in the economy and society as a whole . . . is probably further away than the optimists among us suspect.”

Dyer concluded his look at the future by recalling the expectations for technology only a few decades ago, which included predictions of commuters flying their cars to work and a 2001 Space Odyssey vision of space exploration.

“It happens slower than the optimists think it will,” he added. “The technologies will proliferate, and the economy will change at a slower rate than we expect or hope or want.”

Meanwhile, the broader social and political environment in which this all occurs is growing increasingly hospitable.

“A democratic world is actually the right kind of world for technological change to have maximum and the most beneficial impact,” said Dyer.

“And I think that’s where we’re going.”