October 9, 1988

JET LAG CITY — Since I’ve just returned from Paris, today’s column could easily be headlined “France is Better Than America Because ….,” but that would be too easy. It doesn’t take a genius, however, to see that the way the French approach high technology is far superior to the U.S. approach. If our leaders ever wise up (I know it’s asking a lot), we will be taking lessons from them.

Look closely at “la vie Francais” and you can see how the French have assimilated what here would be “whizzy” technology into their ordinary lives.

Most public telephones don’t take coins anymore; they are used with smart cards, which automatically deduct the amount of your call. And as I mentioned last week, one company is even test-driving a smart card-based parking meter system.

That stuff is small potatoes compared to Minitel, France’s national videotext system. Run by the French PTT (Post, Telephone and Telegraph), it’s provided virtually free of charge and provides a physical link by phone line to every French citizen with a terminal. Most terminals are provided free.

In addition to electronic mail, Minitel boasts the biggest online database in the world, the French phone book, with more than six million numbers. The user interface is extremely easy to use and hardly requires a keyboard.

Some 3.5 million — million! — people use the Minitel, for everything from making restaurant reservations to buying Metro tickets, to banking, to online classrooms for student athletes on the road. Certain phone numbers link people to free services, but thousands of third parties are making fortunes by providing pay services linked to Minitel.

Then there’s La Cite des Sciences et de l’Industrie, a huge museum in northeastern Paris that’s devoted entirely to technology. Many of its displays are hands-on learning, but many also show how technology is used in industry. One exhibit showed new high-tech manufacturing techniques being used by Renault, the large French carmaker. A U.S. visitor remarked that the museum put the Smithsonian to shame.

Whether or not that’s true, the point is that the French government visibly influences and finances educating people about practical applications for industrial and personal technology.

In the United States, the government seems only to have a real investment in continuous deregulation — which is another way of saying, “It’s not my job.”

Well then, whose job is it? The French government obviously feels an enormous obligation to bring its citizens into the 21st century without forcing them to buy a $3000 home computer in the process.

In the States, we turn up our noses at French “socialism,” but don’t dare look at how progressive attitudes have turned France into a country of technological sophisticates, at least compared to us. The French may be intellectual elitists, but if I had to choose between intellectual and economic elitism, I’d pick brain over coin any day.

We all have good reason to be afraid of communism, and it’s an easy leap for today’s political demagogues to connect communism and socialism. They trade on fear, because it gives them power. They don’t want to name the enemy because once named, we will face it and their power will be diminished. And our biggest enemy today is not communism or socialism, but our own splendid ignorance.

France isn’t perfect, but it certainly isn’t ignorant.

Why is illiteracy becoming a national epidemic in the United States? And why don’t we have a national E-mail system like Minitel? Why are we losing our industrial prowess and global competitiveness?

If we cared as much about our citizens as the French seem to care about theirs, enough to get us reading and writing again, enough to make a concerted effort to teach us how things work and why we should use them, maybe we’d see a reprise of the resourcefulness and energy that once brought the United States to the top.

There is a more specialized form of U.S. ignorance, peculiar to industry, that doesn’t consider the future — the real future, not just the end of fiscal 1988.

Our leaders today are not visionaries. They don’t challenge industry to use the tools it has — computers, TV and telephone, to name the obvious — to inspire us to try something new, to take the chance, to maybe (dare I say it) lose a little money today on the chance of making it big tomorrow.