ericsson review - ericssonhistory.com

40
seen to move. So they were forced to go
along to one of the oldest Strowger exchanges
they could find. Even then,
they had to persuade the exchange's
entire staff to dial each other for minutes
on end, in order to set enough of
the switches moving and clattering!
Another possible problem was the current
fashion in television for "allowing
the pictures to tell the story", rather
than gathering experts in a studio or on
location to discuss it. "Talking heads"
(as such expert discussions are called
in the trade) are all but banned by the
editors of some TV programmes. This
attitude militates strongly against the
coverage of complex industrial subjects,
and in favour of riots, natural disasters
and the like.
Even where such fashions carry little
weight, there are other problems. A different
TV station took the ambitious
step of making a general-interest programme
about the impact of microprocessors
on a wide range of industry.
The staff immediately faced the problem
of filming something as small and static
as a tiny chip of silicon without incurring
the high cost of microscopic pictures
and of effectively covering at the
same time the changes in strategy being
forced in industry by the new technology.
For some viewers, the pictures
appearing on the screen of microcircuit
manufacture and computer assembly
were irrelevant to the accompanying
discussion of the industrial strategy
issues; the pictures were described by
some of the staff themselves as "wallpaper"
against which to set the words
of commentary. The industrial issues, in
turn, were difficult to explain without a
mass of charts and "talking heads".
These two television programmes were
unusual in that they tried to make a serious
examination of the issues surrounding
generally unfamiliar technologies.
The second was far more successful
than the first, even though
microprocessors are more difficult to
handle than telecommunications in visual
terms. There were a few distortions
of detailed fact but at least the electronics
engineers could be thankful that
they were minor.
One only needs to consider nuclear
power to get a very different storymore
than any other form of high technology,
it is always "news" for the TV
and newspapers. No nuclear physicist
can claim that his work is ignored by the
media. Instead, he will complain about
distortion and about "environment correspondents"
whose business seems
often to consist solely of spreading
gloom and doom.
Telecommunications can hardly be presented
as physically dangerous, so it
should always be spared such an extreme
type of bad press. All the same
considerable ingenuity will be required
from the industry itself, as well as the
media, if the issues are to be presented
accurately, but in a way the public can
understand.
There is, I think, a case for both telecommunications
administrations and
manufacturers to devote close attention
to the education and information of the
media. Telecommunications will never
be well understood by the public unless
the media understand it first.