The NY Times has a debate forum on the recent inane decree of the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel that proscribes mention of the words Facebook and Twitter from French broadcast media (and which I posted on en français two days ago). The TV news has already executed the order, now referring to the two euphemistically as les réseaux sociaux (the social networks). C’est vraiment con, à mon avis. The contributions to the NYT forum are uneven (Pierre Haski’s is the best) and the suggestion made by some that the CSA was motivated by anti-Americanism—as Facebook and Twitter are American—is a procès d’intention. I don’t buy it. I think the CSA was just being its bureaucratic self and implementing the letter of the (stupid) law—or the CSA’s interpretation of the law, which may in fact be faulty—that bans “clandestine advertising” in the media.
Not to chercher la petite bête or anything like that but I wish to take issue as well with Matthew Fraser’s commentary on the Minitel
The Minitel proved to be a financial boondoggle for the French state, as usage was taxed by the state-owned phone monopoly France Telecom. The online porn services proved to be particularly profitable. Minitel’s techno-glory was short-lived, however. In the 1990s, the explosion of the Web made the clunky French videotext service virtually obsolete. It was another blow to French industrial pride — and once again, the Americans were the victors.
First, I think Fraser meant to say “bonanza” and not boondoggle. More generally, the decline of the Minitel was hardly perceived as a blow to French pride or symbolizing some kind of American victory. When the Minitel was introduced it was superior to anything that existed in the US at the time—in terms of the services it offered—and had a good run of almost twenty years. But it was a closed system and obviously couldn’t compete with the Internet and the WWW once those came in. Maybe a few nationalists in the state bourgeoisie perceived this as a French defeat but it certainly wasn’t the general public sentiment or relayed by the media. The popularity of the Minitel was, in fact, one of the three reasons why Internet use—and use of computers more generally—lagged in France in the ’90s compared to other Western countries.
As for the other two, as long as I’m on the subject: 1. The general French unfamiliarity with keyboards; as college term papers, job cover letters, and the like were always handwritten in France—where penmanship is/was taken seriously—, the only people who learned how to touch type were secretaries. College-bound French high school students—unlike their American counterparts—never looked at typewriters. 2. The early domination of the computer market by Apple, making it so that computers in France were considerably more expensive than in the US (with all the cheap IBM clones and compatibles of the ’80s and ’90s). But that’s all in the past. France caught up. She always does. And sometimes stupid decrees like the CSA’s are abrogated as well.
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