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We've enjoyed hearing from you during recent months, including our readers from other parts of the globe.

For the benefit of persons unfamiliar with our country, I should explain that Minnesota is located on the Canadian border only a bit nearer our Atlantic coast than our Pacific. To our east is the beautiful state of Wisconsin, to our south the vital agricultural state of Iowa, and to our west, the states of North and South Dakota, where America's west begins.

I've lived many places both here and abroad during the past thirty-five years; but, while I was born in California, I grew up in neighboring North Dakota, only a few miles from the exact geographical center of the North American continent. I've lived and worked more than twenty years in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area now. My wife Roberta and I chose this region during the mid-1970's, after returning from several years in Asia and Europe.

Minnesota is a truly lovely part of the world, if one does not mind extremes in weather. It contains the beautiful Twin Cities region, as well as rolling farm land in the south and west, and pristine wilderness in the north. We are called the "land of 10,000 lakes," but the total is really nearer 14,000. Remarkably, some of the best fresh water fishing in the United States can be found within the boundaries of one of the world's great cities, the metropolitan Minneapolis-Saint Paul area!

Minnesota also has an international seaport, of all things, out here in the middle of the vast North American continent. Duluth is a beautiful city on the banks of scenic Lake Superior, a major inland freshwater sea, and Duluth harbor accepts ships from throughout the world via the St. Lawrence Seaway. Many visitors to our Twin Cities don't realize that they are only 140 miles from a totally different experience, and they should not miss it.

Life in Minnesota isn't entirely easy, however. The village of Tower, about 235 miles from where I write this, recorded 60 degrees below zero a few weeks ago. That's actual air temperature, not "funny wind chill degrees." which take wind velocities into account when calculating how quickly skin freezes. However, a week later, it was 50 degrees above zero in Tower. A one-hundred-ten degree difference within only a week! I should hasten to emphasize that this was an all-time record, not a typical thing, even in Minnesota.

Changes at BraveNewWorkWorld

If you've been with us from the beginning, you know that there have been some changes at our site. We have been reorganizing, and the process is not yet complete. The serious illness of one of our colleagues during the fall has been followed by a variety of events requiring the full attention of my colleague, Dr. Jerry Willenbring.

Jerry is my principal partner in The New Work Corporation, but he is also founder of Careers Online, Inc., an innovative and increasingly influential placement and consulting firm brokering high-technology expertise worldwide. The company needs Jerry's full attention for the moment, in order to maintain its momentum, grow, and play its proper role in the recovering California economy, as well as in the international hi-tech universe in which Jerry has played key roles for so many years.

Gary Johnson Communications has acquired full rights to the BraveNewWorkWorld and NewWork trademarks, as well as all BraveNewWorkWorld copyrights previously held by The New Work Corporation. We will continue to develop the BraveNewWorkWorld web site, as well as various other programs and productions in conventional print and broadcast, as well as hi-tech media.

The New Work Corporation has been put on a slower track, but will be involved in the development of multimedia training, educational, professional, and self-help programs over the next several years.

Callies joins BraveNewWorkWorld

We're delighted to announce that Teresa Callies, a long-time member of the Minnesota Public Radio news organization, has joined us at BraveNewWorkWorld. Teresa has a global perspective based, not only on her academic background, but also on her extensive international experience. In addition to a special interest in the worldwide work revolution, she has a background in international relations, with special expertise in Greek life and politics. You may have read her recent opinion piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Our NewWork News page is still only a pale shadow of what we intend for it to become during 1996. We intend that NewWork News will not only gather and organize work-related news from the vast amounts of information available from the world's press, including the academic press, but also put it in context. Teresa Callies' contributions to the full development of NewWork News will be invaluable. We believe that there's nothing else quite like BraveNewWorkWorld, and, also with Teresa's help, we will develop the site as a whole over the months ahead.

We're pleased that Mr. Jock McCardell of the University of New England in Australia has consented to write our first Guest Commentary. We expect that our Guest Commentary page will become the worldwide forum on the revolutionary new world of work. Many more commentaries will follow, written by a variety of thoughtful persons from a variety of perspectives. Nominations for guest commentary authors are welcomed, because we want dozens of quality contributions, then tens of dozens.

Some thoughts on the media revolution in the
current political climate

For many years, I genuinely loved broadcasting. Beginning very early, I dreamed of being on the radio, then television. This dream was stimulated by listening to the great stars during radio's "golden age," such as Jack Benny, "the great Gildersleeve," Fibber McGee and Molly, and others. My mother tells about how I used to do lengthy "radio programs" of my own in our barn in North Dakota when I was about seven years old. I had fashioned a microphone out of a "farmer's" match box connected to a wooden yardstick.

When I was a child, I thought Jim Rohn was the greatest radio announcer in the world. To me, he was as big a star as anybody on the networks, even though I first heard him on KSJB, a regional station in the Dakotas where I eventually started my own career. Later, Jim was "Captain Jim" on Ch. 4, a children's program, as well as "Oompa Jim" on a Polka show, and also the weather man each night on the news strip. He was a wonderful broadcaster. Thanks, Jim.

My obsession was stimulated further by a tour of CBS Television City, just across the fence from Farmer's Market, in "Hollywood" sometime during the mid-'50's. Ours was a very leisurely tour during a more leisurely time. We walked in on a rehearsal of the Jack Benny show, and I recognized Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, among other things, sitting in the front row of the bleachers. I was allowed to wander leisurely and at will over the set of "Art Linkletter's House Party," examining in detail the pieces that were so familiar on our TV screen on the farm in North Dakota. Art was one of classic network radio and television's biggest, most durable, and most beloved stars, as well as one of Hollywood's most successful entrepreneurs during the '40s and '50's.

Down the hall, we visited a huge studio where both "Playhouse 90" and "Climax" were presented live on CBS-TV each week. A tremendous number of set pieces were mixed together with tags taped to them indicating which of the two shows and in which scenes the pieces would be used that week. The pieces had been built or modified right in the studio. Work benches and carpentry equipment lined the walls.

I could not believe it. Two different dramatic shows broadcast live on the network adjacent to each other! Two and one-half hours of continuous live television with different casts and overlapping crews and all from the same studio! I could only imagine what things must have been like in that studio while they were on the air. We now know that some of the very best work that television has ever done happened in that room during those years. Many of the writers, directors, and actors from "Playhouse 90," in particular, became legendary. It made me appreciate, with awe, the great gifts of people in the media's big time.

I was reminded again recently when, after working for a couple of hours to produce some very simple things for a radio station, I saw the wonderful new film, "Sense and Sensibility." Nearly everything about this film is nearly perfect, including the original author's work nearly two centuries ago. Cambridge University-educated star and screenwriter, Emma Thompson, clearly is a genius; but I think she would have been as remarkable, had she not attended university at all. Her talent is that large. Having just struggled a bit to produce simple things, I was alert to what it must take to put really extraordinary images on the big screen. Similarly, everyone should take piano lessons for a while, if only to appreciate what Horowitz could do.

Anyway, years later, when NBC's "The Tonight Show" was still produced in New York, I found myself standing in the doorway of a very tiny control room at Rockefeller Center one late afternoon, chatting with three technicians who kept their eyes on a lot of meters and dials in front of them. Johnny Carson was taping his show from a studio directly downstairs. The reels on a single ordinary video tape recorder of 1960's vintage turned silently, except for a slight periodic brushing sound, indicating that, like similar machines in local stations throughout the country, one reel was slightly out of round.

Here was something else I couldn't believe. The Tonight Show was being taped on a single ordinary studio recorder. Nothing special, no backup. If I had reached over and stuck my finger in one of the reels, I would have brought the famous Tonight Show with its small army of cast and crew, including one of television's greatest stars, to its knees for that day. Of course, had I done that, I'd probably still be making little rocks out of big ones someplace.

Nonetheless, it all seemed so vulnerable somehow. But the people who work at the top of the industry, like those in small local markets, come to take both the demands and the circumstances of their work for granted. To a point.

Interestingly, I remember asking if they recycled the tapes, and I was surprised to learn that they did. This was Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, for heaven's sake, one of television's brightest lights, and they're not saving the shows? Later, I would read that Carson has always resented that, for reasons of simple economy, NBC did not save most of the early programs, which are now lost forever. Years and years of wonderful creative work gone. Forever. All to save the cost of tape in an economy where a half minute of commercial time costs as much as somebody's house.

Nineteen-ninety-five is generally acknowledged to have been the 75th anniversary of radio in the United States, and, while television's technological roots go back to the 19th century, the commercial TV industry in the U.S. awaited the end of W. W. II and the introduction of the image orthicon tube, the heart of the modern TV camera. Thus, while it's somewhat arbitrary, I suppose we can say that commercial television in the United States is just about now completing its first 50 years, as well. I started in radio during the first half of its history, and began dabbling in television only a few years after it burst on the American scene, although, by that time, tens of millions of sets had been sold.

Anyone of my generation who has had anything to do with protecting a broadcast license, managing a broadcast facility, performing on the air, or who has sat for an FCC license exam, certainly grew up with the Communications Act of 1934. Most of us had major parts of it memorized. It defined the rules by which American broadcasting has functioned over all the years since, and it created the Federal Communications Commission.

We were admonished to operate in the "public convenience, interest, and necessity." We had to carefully watch what we said on the air, if we wanted to renew our station license. We had to provide equal time to political candidates. There were all sorts of do's and don'ts, and people at all levels of the business were quite familiar with them. In the early days, it was even illegal to use the public airways to relay personal messages. Thus, quiz show contestants on early network radio were reminded that they could not say "hello to Uncle Mortimer."

Of course, there has been much de-regulation of the broadcast industry during recent years. It has made Howard Stern, Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh, and nationally televised presidential debates possible, among other things. You may remember that it was sixteen years after the first televised presidential debates in 1960 before we had another one. That was because of the old "equal time" requirement incumbent on local television stations by virtue of their license requirements at the time. All that has changed.

De-regulation made possible an escalation of the vividness of television images needed to hold the attention of an increasingly bored, media-saturated audience, particularly images relating to sex, violence, and the use of taboo or violent language. Theatrical films are still ahead of television in what they can show, but not too far ahead, assuming that "ahead" is the right way of putting it.

I'm a parent, and I've never had the slightest desire to fill my children's bodies or minds with toxic garbage. Many people worry about the effect of the media on children, and there is a problem. However, it is a problem for which parents and others with legitimate child care obligations should be responsible, aided by information plus technological devices which almost surely can be developed for effectively filtering media content. If there can be a technological solution to children and television-the "V-chip"-surely there can be a similar solution with respect to the Internet.

When parents control what their children are exposed to, it is a part of normal, conscientious parenting, not censorship. It is censorship only when governments do it, and that is as dangerous as a blowtorch near a gas tank. Today, the so-called "dirty words." Tomorrow, opinions critical of those in power. The day after, totalitarianism.

Peter Drucker, who defies easy categorization into the "liberal" vs. "conservative" dichotomy, has written a new magazine piece in which he says that the "political correctness" stuff on some American campuses is inherently totalitarian in attitude, and I agree. The last time such an ill wind blew across the campuses, he says, was in the late '30s and early '40's, but, then, it was Stalinist.

I'm not old enough to remember that, but I do have some memory of the McCarthy period, and I clearly remember some of the less attractive aspects of campus life during the 1960's. There were the large piles of Mao's silly, pretentious, and dishonest little red book that quickly sold out in the Michigan State University bookstore. It was another period, like our own, during which the capacity for critical thinking seemed to be suspended, even at a great university.

At about the same time, I was under strong pressure to cancel my classes in order to contribute to the appearance of a spontaneous campus-wide student strike to protest the Cambodian incursion and Kent State shootings. I disliked the Cambodian invasion, and hated the Kent State shootings. Still, I felt that there were people on the campus at the time who were in danger of forgetting which country they lived in. I held classes as usual, and it did not make me popular with many persons in our department and elsewhere on the campus.

You are unlikely to see much offensive content on this site, unless you are offended by ideas, and many people are. We are not "shock jocks," and this is not intended to be "tabloid web." Nonetheless, we will not take kindly to anyone, including the government, telling us what we should or should not say here or anyplace else. Anybody who wants to try can simply, well, go straight to heck, if their ears are tender. If that's not clear enough, I'm capable of putting it in terms that are considerably more colorful.

There is a strong sense in which media simply reflect the increasing baseness, coarseness, rudeness, and dangerousness of American social life. It has infected political discourse in recent years too, giving us "in your face" national political figures. For example, the Republican party recently certainly hasn't looked like the party of Rockefeller, Scranton, Romney, or Eisenhower, let alone Lincoln. It hasn't been the party of Bush or Nixon either, if you ignore Nixon's psychiatric and character problems for the moment, and concentrate on his policies, many of which could have been part of a Democratic administration. It hasn't even been the party of Goldwater lately, as my colleague and former Republican, Dr. Ken Taylor, has pointed out. At the very least, Goldwater is a decent and honest man.

Similarly, the Democratic party of recent years has not greatly resembled the party responsible for bringing about some of the more important reforms of this or any other century. Many recent Democrats must accept some responsibility for being too arrogantly casual about things that matter greatly to large numbers of ordinary citizens, and, in the process, courting the horrors of reaction, a hint of which we have seen recently.

Some of contemporary American politics has the familiar putrid stench of European politics in the 1930's when gangsters won control of governments while, all the time, invoking familiar, comforting symbolism, religious and otherwise. Is Pat Buchanan our Zhirinovsky, except slicker because he's worked so much on television? Since the New Hampshire primary, Zhirinovsky himself has been quoted as saying that he thinks Buchanan is pretty nifty. That might be too rough a translation from the original Russian, but it captures the general idea.

There is banality, not only in evil, but also in coarse, assaultive behavior that attempts to bludgeon its way into our consciousness. Maybe all this has gone about as far as it can go before beginning to sink under its own weight. Maybe people will tire of the monotonous drum beat of rudeness, crudity, depravity, and violence in all its forms.

Howard Stern's act and Madonna's act may be offensive, but mostly they're just stupid, confining, and boring, boring, boring, surely not liberating. They're intended to appeal mostly to persons whose development leveled off somewhere in early adolescence, or who are willing to settle for so little, despite life's grand possibilities. It's like visiting the Taj Mahal and being preoccupied with its sewer system.

All the recent changes in the media will pale in comparison to those on the horizon as a consequence of the new omnibus telecommunications bill recently signed into law by President Clinton, with or without the "V-chip," and with or without efforts to censor the Internet's content. For the first time in more than sixty years, the Communications Act of 1934 is not part of our lives.

It's a whole brave new media world too, and we will see the broad outlines of 21st century American life emerge during the years immediately ahead. As in the new work world, the unfamiliarity is unnerving. We don't know what to do, but we feel we must do something. The danger is in doing too much too early or in doing all the wrong things.

We'll see a very rapid acceleration of the grand convergence of industries and technologies that has already been going on; but most unfamiliar to most people, including politicians, is the Internet, because there has never been anything else quite like it.

Politicians around the world are nervous about the Internet, not simply because it is unfamiliar, and certainly not because people may use it to express the kinds of things that are freely expressed on television or on the telephone, but also because it threatens their own positions. Just as so many middle management jobs have become obsolete and irrelevant in the modern corporation, so are many political and bureaucratic roles made pointless when people can decide and do for themselves. Those who are dependent on privileges attached to traditional roles are greatly annoyed by these developments. One is reminded of the look on Nicolae Ceausescu's face in 1989 when he first realized that the crowd he was addressing was not responding in the familiar manner. Similar efforts to limit expression on the Internet are occurring in Germany and in China, as well as in other countries.

Social organization has always been determined in large part by who can talk to whom about what under what conditions, and persons with a vested interest in hierarchical authoritarian arrangements have always done their best to limit open communication either by threats, intimidation, or claims that such restrictions are ordained by God. Institutional structure that has seemed rock solid can suddenly dissolve when nearly everything can relate to nearly everything else.

A society's "informal organization" is more important than its "formal organization," because, in the long-run, informal organization determines what the formal organization will be. Not only have the possible patterns of informal interaction been increased exponentially by the Internet, geography has been made largely irrelevant as well, including many geographical boundaries.

Among other things, with the new technologies, direct democracy, as opposed to representative republican forms of government, may now be possible in huge societies for the first time, not just in the New England town meetings or the smaller communities of Classical Greece. This brings to mind liberating images of greater democratization, but also images of mass impulse or intemperate mob rule. Freedom always carries risks, and an enlargement of options is a way of increasing freedom. It is a condition ripe for anxiety as well as exhilaration or euphoria.

Our society is not the only one professing a basic commitment to free expression. However, each democracy has its own delicate equilibrium. In our own case, the 1st Amendment to our Constitution is the prop supporting the rest of the structure. Because of the inherent relationship between thought and expression, what controls expression eventually controls thought, which, in turn, controls patterns of behavior throughout the system. Free and open communication has always been the enemy of despotism everywhere.

I have little enthusiasm for the corrosive, dehumanizing stuff that many people refer to as "pornographic" (there is no official definition of pornography, and much is in the eye of the beholder), but I'm as near to an absolutist on the 1st Amendment as anyone should be able to imagine. It has been the foundation of all of our freedoms for two centuries, and I'm willing to accept disgusting expressions as the price we must pay in order to enjoy the benefits of a democracy. The alternatives are unthinkable, but this has been a century in which the unthinkable has become thinkable repeatedly. As unpleasant as the noise, rudeness, and raucousness can be, these are also the sweet music of a free society.

In recent years, within an increasingly ugly and polarized political climate, the 1st Amendment has been under increasing pressure from both the political left and the right in the United States. Nonetheless, any effort to limit or weaken it immediately puts us on a slippery slope. As hair-raising as human social arrangements can be, we'll be all right, so long as we hold the 1st Amendment firmly in place. There is no greater priority as we determine the supporting conditions of American life during the 21st century.

My long and quite weird career so far might seem, on the surface, to include a number of activities having little relationship to one another, except possibly contradictory. I've spent more than forty years doing broadcasts of various kinds, helping to run radio stations, building a broadcast news department, performing, lecturing, writing, teaching, consulting.

What ties most of these things together across commercial, professional, and academic contexts, is almost continuous involvement with the 1st Amendment in some way or another. My work in all these contexts has been absolutely dependent on it.

I've been aware of this all along, but this awareness was reinforced by living and working in a variety of other countries over much of the globe for several years, including some in which one could not take freedom of expression for granted, to put it in the mildest possible manner.

I lived in Spain while Franco was still alive and in power, as well as in Taiwan while Chiang still essentially called the shots, despite his great age. Tito was still firmly in power while we were in what used to be called Yugoslavia. There was always a chill in the air in these places, as well as quiet tension. In totalitarian societies, people are required to pretend they are far more alike than they really are, which is to say that they are prevented from fulfilling the essential uniqueness that defines a human personality.

Will our next Administration not only censor the Internet, but also burn the books and arrest the scholars if it can? Mr. Buchanan already has railed against "the academics" who are trying to poison the minds of our children and steal the soul of our country. When the intellectual leadership of American conservatives seemed to pass from the brilliant and informed William Buckley and the brilliant and informed George Will to Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, we should have suspected that we were in trouble. But this is something else altogether. Pat Buchanan is not a genuine conservative, and he is not a genuine Republican either.

While he's dominating the front pages in the U.S. as this is written, Buchanan's prominence is a product of the current ugly and dangerous political climate in the United States. He's not the only one who would standardize American life according to a simple recipe. He's simply more extreme than some of the others and a more skillful propagandist. There are many people in the American Congress who regard a commitment to tolerance, open-mindedness, or critical thinking themselves as "too liberal." Have we learned nothing whatever from history, even from the most recent past?

Like many who are unnerved by change and the unfamiliar, Mr. Buchanan says that he wants a return to the "clarity and absolutes" of his childhood as he remembers it. Well, Mr. Buchanan, if you want to see only clarity and absolutes in social life, you will have to invent them, or mindlessly accept ones invented by others, because, in most cases, they cannot be discovered. Humanity will have to muddle through as it has always done, even during the mythical "good old days." Moreover, if the rest of us say that we see your absolutes with such clarity, as in the case of your intellectual predecessors, it will only be because you have the power to force us to pretend, and, as a consequence, kill all creativity.

He also says that he wants a country that is guided only by the laws of God. If we are to take him at his word, this can only mean that he will never, in good conscience, be able to take an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution of the United States.

Gary G. Johnson
February 24, 1996

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