COLUMN ONE : TV, VCRs Fan Fire of Revolution : Technology served the cause of liberation in East Europe. The power of information is clear, but is it democratizing?

1989 was the year George Orwell was proved wrong.

Television, it has turned out, is not the ultimate tool of repression.

In the year that Eastern Europe surged toward democracy, communications technology served the cause of liberation. The stories trickle in from country after country--of Solidarity videotapes secretly screened in Polish church basements, of Cable News Network broadcasts picked up by satellite dishes in Hungary.

Now, as Europe reshapes itself, the question is whether the opposite is true:

Is technology actually democratizing? As the Eastern Bloc moves further toward economic modernization, does democracy become inevitable?

The ultimate answer may be long in coming. The information revolution has barely begun in Eastern Europe.

More than that, some believe Orwell’s only mistake in his novel “1984” was thinking that television exercises control by inflicting pain. Maybe, as Aldous Huxley suggested, TV controls by inflicting pleasure--a notion that might produce the advertising expert as political kingmaker and the pitchman as politician.

But what is clear, and still largely unappreciated, is that the fall of the Iron Curtain was at least in part a revolution of technology.

It was the need to modernize in the technological age that forged Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms in the first place. The act of modernizing then granted people access to the outside world that fueled their discontent--and later helped their underground movements escape detection.

In a sense, Gorbachev’s challenge now is largely technological: How can he maintain political control while embracing technology that will decentralize information and undermine central authority?

In Poland, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa asked the question differently: “Is it possible for a new Stalin to appear today who could murder people?” In an era of computers and satellite TV, he concluded, “It’s impossible.”

Certainly technology is not the single cause of change in Eastern Europe. Events of such sweep require a confluence of factors, from the talents of Mikhail Gorbachev to the aging of the postwar generation that embraced communism, from mounting ethnic strife to--perhaps most critically--the growing economic gap with the West.

But today economic opportunity goes hand in hand with technology. “These reforms are a result of civilization--of computers, satellite TV (and other innovations) that present alternative solutions,” Walesa told a recent luncheon gathering of journalists from the Washington Post and Newsweek. Gorbachev and he, Walesa said, “just happen to be people in the right time in the right situation.”

He is right that throughout the last decade, technology seemed the servant of revolution, not of repression.

One of the first cases actually was in Iran. The Islamic revolutionary underground used audio cassettes to circulate the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s speeches throughout Iran, where one in four citizens was either working for or informing to the shah’s secret police.

In the 1980s, the use of technology for revolution spread to the very medium Orwell had seen as the ultimate tool of suppression--television.

Orwell feared the medium because it was centrally controlled, perfect for an authoritarian regime he called Big Brother. But in the 1980s the nature of the medium changed, at least in degrees, with the spread of satellite technology and videocassettes.

Irresistible Machines

Videocassette recorders gave people some choice over what they could watch and allowed them to interact, even record their own images. So irresistible did the machines become to Eastern Europeans that they were allowed even in the most closed societies, such as Romania. In 1988, the Soviet daily newspaper Izvestia talked about “the currently fashionable passion for videotapes.”

The effect was distinctly political, even if people were mainly watching Western films on videotape. “Blue jeans and rock music and the message of possibility . . . the underlying message of being an individual,” these were the subliminal political cues of the VCR, said Jessica Lipnack, whose consulting firm, the Networking Institute, studies the impact of technology on organizations.

In Poland, where the opposition was better organized, the VCR became a way of sustaining an underground, not merely fueling dissent. Solidarity kept itself alive from 1981 to 1988, among other means, by making video documentaries--everything from biographies of Solidarity leaders to documentaries about demonstrations the official media tried to dismiss--and screening them in secret in church basements and community centers.

Another force undermining government control of television was satellite technology. Those who had satellite dishes--some of them homemade--could receive programming from anywhere.

Popular Channel

One of the most watched channels was the U.S. Cable News Network, which CNN executive vice president Ed Turner said was received in government offices in several East Bloc countries.

“Even second-level and third-level managers and clerks can see another way of life,” Turner said.

And when CNN correspondents arrived in such capitals as Bucharest, Sofia and Budapest, they were viewed as celebrities.

The political impact of satellites was most profound in Hungary and Poland, where the manufacture and purchase of satellite dishes were legal.

The effect, even if only the elite class had the dishes, was to force Polish and Hungarian official television to either become more open or become irrelevant.

When Poland instituted martial law in 1981, media-savvy Poles were already disgusted enough with official media that they moved their TV sets to face out of their windows as a silent protest.

By 1985, the Polish media had changed so much that the government signed a contract to air a nightly half-hour newscast from CNN. Among other things, that program forced Polish television to dump its longtime anchor for someone more telegenic.

Then there was what experts have taken to calling “spillover” viewing.

People in East Berlin could watch West German TV. They watched Austrian TV in Hungary, Finnish TV in Soviet Estonia and the liberalized Polish TV all over, in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and parts of the Soviet Union.

The spillover viewing forced the “democratization of official Soviet TV,” said Adrian Karatnycky, research director for the AFL-CIO, which was instrumental in supplying technology and funding to Solidarity.

In Timisoara, Romania, ethnic Hungarians saw the liberalized Hungarian television and could watch news each night about the changes elsewhere in Eastern Europe. That was one reason, some think, that the Romanian revolution started in Timisoara.

And so the media became the force behind the domino, as the Poles inspired the Hungarians, the Hungarians inspired the East Germans and the East Germans inspired the Czechoslovaks.

“What happened in Poland could not be kept silent. Everybody saw it,” said Gordon Schultz of the Walker Center, an ecumenical group working to support democratic change in China and Eastern Europe.

Adding to the power of the video and satellite underground was that, unlike Western radio broadcasts such as Radio Free Europe and the British Broadcasting Corp., it offered visual proof that made its message undeniable.

And it was indigenous. It did not bear the stigma of originating with the American government.

Less important in Eastern Europe were fax machines. But they played a major role in China.

The Walker Center estimates that during the democracy movement last spring, there were 30,000 fax machines in China, many of them in private businesses, and 3 to 4 million phone lines in Beijing alone. Schultz said the fax machines provided a crucial way for reformers to communicate with the outside world.

“If you don’t think people in the rest of world know or care that you are giving up your life,” Schultz said, “you are much less likely to give it up.”

And in some countries there were even computers.

John Micgiel, assistant director of the Institute on East Central Europe at Columbia University, estimates there are now 1.5 million personal computers in Poland, probably the highest number in Eastern Europe.

On occasion, Solidarity even tried to transmit lists of technical needs to the West on computers in secret code, according to Karatnycky of AFL-CIO.

Taken together, technology aided the surge toward democracy by offering people “knowledge that there was a better life beyond their borders,” said Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense who is now at the American Enterprise Institute.

Technology offered people hope by letting them know they had support in the West. It gave them the power to communicate, without detection by the authorities.

Catch-22’ Seen

And on a deeper level, technology also proved to be a fundamental cause of the democratic movement. Laurien Alexandre, director of global studies at the Immaculate Heart College Center in Los Angeles, sees a “Catch-22” in the Eastern European Communist regimes’ need for technology to compete economically with the West.

“As soon as you integrate these technologies into your economy and make them available to a larger range of people, you develop an information middle class who are not part of your leadership,” Alexandre said. “And this stuff you can’t control. You can’t close down the fax machines because your economy will stop.”

S. Frederick Starr, the Soviet scholar who is president of Oberlin College, calls the result “technocratic glasnost .”

“Privatized information stimulates the formation of public opinion” and “induces individuation,” Starr has written in an essay still unpublished. Subjects became citizens. Their world became more international.

Technology, in other words, bred pluralism.

And once the technology became decentralized, controlling it would have exacted a high price, economically and politically. As Wilson Dizard of the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it, “You don’t pull out the phone system.” Thus, Dizard said, “whether Gorbachev lasts or not, it will last.”

But if technology is not inherently suppressive, it is also not perfectly democratizing.

If it were, logically television and computers would have improved democracy in America. Instead, they seem to have brought on an era of media consultants, negative campaigning and the science of sound bites.

Even apart from the American experience, not all technology is inherently democratizing. The fax machine, for instance, is actually no more secure from being monitored than any phone line, said Kenneth Flamm of the Brookings Institution.

Monitoring fax machines requires technology to record and then decode the fax transmissions. And in China, where technology is scarce, that was difficult. Still, about two weeks after massacring protesters in Tian An Men Square, the Chinese government managed to quash the fax underground by stationing a guard near most of the fax machines in Beijing.

More complex is television. While it was made more democratic and interactive by satellites and videocassettes and small cameras, it is still largely a centrally controlled medium. In most countries in the world, indeed, television is government-run.

So some analysts say one factor that will determine the new face of Eastern Europe is which factions control the television stations, and whether they will allow open and pluralistic programming.

“That fight is going on now,” said Dizard, who has written extensively about the information revolution.

And the outcome, he said, will be determined by internal politics more than by technology. The strong tradition of a healthy underground press in Poland, for instance, was one of the reasons that Solidarity was able to survive in secret, experts said. The same traditions are not nearly so strong in Czechoslovakia.

If any technology possesses intrinsically liberating qualities, those who study politics and communications believe it is the computer.

Computers empower the individual, granting access to vast resources of information. “You can crunch a hundred pages onto a floppy disc, reproduce it cheaply and disseminate it to thousands,” said Flamm of Brookings. “Compare that even to a Xerox machine.”

To date, however, there are not enough computers in Eastern Europe even to help modernize those countries’ economies, let alone to dictate democratic social organization, those familiar with technology there report.

And the other forms of communications technology are also in short supply. A month ago, Karatnycky of the AFL-CIO tried to fax some information to the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry, only to find that “there are no fax machines in the Foreign Ministry in Czechoslovakia.”

“There is a long way to go,” conceded Eric Chenoweth, who is studying the information revolution in the Eastern Bloc for the American Federation of Teachers and who believes that democracy is inevitable if technology advances quickly enough.

Nor does technology eliminate the other sources of authority.

Even if communism can no longer demand total conformity, said Walter Raymond, assistant director of the U.S. Information Agency, “that doesn’t mean you don’t have a state power structure that keeps the troops in line.”

And not everyone is convinced of the microchip’s democratizing qualities in the first place. Karatnycky of the AFL-CIO believes technology may have abetted reform in the 1980s simply because “these guys are much more clever and technology-oriented than the ossified elites they were confronting.”

Technology can still be used to maintain central control, he said. “Computers can be used to keep track of dissidents.”

Orwell’s only mistake may have been in predicting the means by which television controlled the population, argued Neil Postman, author of “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a scathing critique of the social impact of televison in America.

Trivial Culture

“In Orwell’s book,” Postman said, “people are controlled by inflicting pain.” The truth, he said, may be closer to Aldous Huxley’s vision, in which people are controlled by inflicting pleasure. “Huxley argues that you can control people by making their culture essentially trivial,” Postman said.

The experience of the United States supports Postman’s argument. As the power of the centralized political parties has waned, individual politicians have learned to use the media to practice a more subtle form of influence and manipulation.

Thus “spin control” could replace the old Communist technique of airbrushing people out of photographs--a technique rendered obsolete by satellites and VCRs. Conducting sophisticated studies of survey research to better manipulate public opinion could replace the old-fashioned technique of registering typewriters.

Certainly, that is the path Gorbachev seems to be following, scholars such as Dizard and Starr argue. Gorbachev’s great insight, said Postman, is that “he understood at some level that it was no longer possible to have a closed society,” thanks to forces in place long before he arrived.

That is one explanation of why he founded two major institutes, complete with 25 regional centers, to study public opinion.

They even measure Gorbachev’s popularity rating now.

But the tools of modern pluralistic politics do not guarantee success. Poland’s leaders founded an institute to study public opinion in 1983--two years before Gorbachev came to power. Czechoslovakia and Hungary started public opinion institutes in 1988. Yet the governments of all three countries fell in 1989.

Gorbachev’s “calculated gamble,” said Dizard, is that Soviet leadership can move toward a pluralistic society “and still keep essential control.”

Dizard, for one, does not like the Soviet leaders’ odds: “The long-term answer is they are not going to be able to.”

Times researcher Pat Welch contributed to this story.