Opening remarks
This century took on the formidable task of educating its majorities; a task that the unprecedented levels of world population rendered all the more formidable and yet all the more essential. As the world faces this deeply felt need and faces up to this still far from completed task, it recognizes at the same time the extraordinary developments that have taken place in the arts, and the technology, of broadcast communications. The title of this meeting draws attention to one quite remarkable step forward in technology: the geostationary satellite; a satellite in an orbit of just that radius (40000 km) which makes its period the length of the day so that it can remain always over one point of the rotating Earth. Modern technologies have expanded the answer to the age-old question ‘who is my neighbour?’ and the geostationary satellite has extended the natural concept of neighbourhood as bounded by the horizon of line-of-sight vision and increased by more than two orders of magnitude the distance of effective line-of-sight communication. For many years now able people all over the world have been considering the impact that this technological development, and all the other developments in the technologies and the arts of broadcast communication, can have on the world’s need to educate its majorities. The problems are different in different parts of the world, and different countries will come to different conclusions on the educational pros and cons and the technological pros and cons of different approaches to the solutions of the problems.