Instructional/Communication Technology has come to mean, in a narrowsense, media hardware or a set of tools enabling human beings toovercome their physical limitations. Etymologically, it means one or moretechniques, both concrete and abstract, that help human beings solveproblems. By extension, instructional technology (IT) means all tools atour disposal for facilitating learning. Tickton (1971) defines the purporeof IT as making "education more productive and more individual, to giveinstruction a more scientific base, and to make instruction more powerful,learning more immediate, and access more equal." While the technologyitself might be neutral as a medium and as a means of instructional communication,it is the natw of its use, in terms of timely and appropriatemessages, that is the key to understanding its consequences. It is this finalfactor upon which society needs to focus.The tecent combination of computer, video, fiber optics, satellite television,and other state-of-the-art technologies has enabled a small groupto control the lives of billions. Instructional technology has also Meritedits own share of this instantaneous global power. As a result traditionalboundaries between IT and mass media communication have blurred somuch that IT sounds like a misnomer.It has now become a platitude to say that the nation that controlledthe sealanes in the nineteenth century, or that controlled the airways inthe twentieth century, controlled the whole world. In the twenty-first century,it appears that whoever controls the airwaves will control the worldand whatever is beyond it. Thus the most explosive confluence of ...
