by Stuart Overbey
Daily Lobo
Richard Schaefer, a communication associate professor, will be leaving the country on a sabbatical next semester to study his theory of Chinese replacing English when digital technology replaces current Internet technology.
Clad in tennis shorts and a T-shirt, Schaefer, who has been a faculty member in the Communication and Journalism Department since 1996, recently sat amidst boxes of belongings in his office and talked of plans and visions for his sabbatical.
This fall he has been attending a Chinese 101 class, which he said he hopes will help him understand the students he may teach in Beijing this spring.
Schaefer said that when he hears from the University of Beijing in December, he will know if his spring semester destination is China or Mexico. Either country promises a lesson in language for him, but he said that China plays a part in his vision of media and communication in the coming decades.
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The communication professor said he wants to write "a thinking piece," which proposes that when digital and broadband technologies replace analog and current Internet technology internationally, the Chinese language may replace English as the predominant language of this century.
During 1995-96, Schaefer assisted with a project at the Library of Congress, archiving imagery in anticipation of broadband technology soon being in place, which would make the library's video catalogue accessible to everyone. Under the Clinton administration, the analog TV channels were to be given back to the FCC and replaced with digital in 2006 and broadband infrastructure would have been in place nearly everywhere in the United States, but under President Bush, the plan has stalled.
Schaefer said he does not think the current administration's reluctance to further the technology rollout is due to any sort of devious suppression of individuals' abilities to disseminate information, but rather to a lack of vision. He characterized the administration as interested in "old industrial structure."
He said that a complete changeover from analog to digital would mean that everyone would have to buy a new television - at about $2000 apiece.
Potentially, these televisions would have "convergence" capabilities - that is, they would serve as computers and videophones.
"You would think the consumer electronics industry would love it," Schaefer said.
But, he added, the reluctance of the industry has to do with timing and cost, thus a television would no longer be a fixture in every living room, but a sign of affluence.
A change to broadband technology infrastructure, which can transmit at least primitive picture and voice in real time, is happening faster in Canada, Korea and other countries than in the United States.
When these changes take hold internationally, Schaefer said, the mode of communication, and therefore culture, will change from primarily written to primarily visual. That is, instead of relying on e-mail, people will talk to each other on real-time videophones.
Schaefer insists that in this context, the Chinese language may then rise to the forefront for three reasons: first, the language lends itself to oral, rather than written expression; second, about 1.5 billion people speak some form of Chinese - increasingly Mandarin is the uniform language - versus about 1.2 billion who speak English and about 800 million who speak Spanish; and third is what he called a "diaspora," or a huge wave of emigration, of Chinese all around the world.
"At one time Latin was the dominant knowledge language around the world," Schaefer said. "A vernacular language will dominate. It just depends on whose language is the one that's spoken every day by the largest number of people who are involved in the largest number of things."
He said he hopes to formalize his ideas this fall, and submit them for publication in a convention paper for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication or the Journal of Communication.
