The Future Role of Telecommunications in the Pacific

The Pacific Telecommunications Council is a forum and provides an opportunity for a variety of views and perspectives to be heard and to help us in educating each other. The formation of this new and small organization is an important historical process. The significance of the PTC is, in the first place, a recognition of the emergence of a specific region. Fifteen years ago no one in the U.S.A. would have thought it sensible to form such an organization. The notion that all the countries around the Pacific had important interests in common would have seemed a bit odd. That's certainly not so today. There was, in the past, no reference in school books in America to a Pacific region. There was reference to a number of regions in the Pacific hemisphere. There was reference to the North American region with its Anglo-Saxon, European culture. There was reference to Spanish America with its Hispanic culture, and to Oceania with its Polynesian and Micronesian, Melanesian traditions. There was reference to East Asia as a region with regard to the Buddhist traditions that have permeated a number of countries of this area. These diverse culture areas, however, are increasingly coming to share certain common regional experiences and certain common problems. Their relations are increasingly frequent and close. The formation of the PTC is thus significant because it shows a recognition of this fact. The PTC is significant for a second reason. The creation of such a Council expresses an awareness of the fact that in an era of rapid technological and social change, public policy must be made on the basis of study and research, the very things the PTC has been set up to do. Experience in the world of action, though it is very vital in the making of policy, is not enough to assure that authorities will make good policy. When change is rapid, the existing practices of institutions may often turn out to be a poor guide to what practice should be. For example, military institutions where armies in this day of high technology still march up and down parade grounds and salute and wear uniforms that were appropriate to an archaic technology have very little today to do