Spacebridges: Cultures Unite
Live Conversations:
The media even had the technology to bring the two cultures into direct contact, which further encouraged friendship and commonality through learning about each other. A primary example of this was the Spacebridge, a live televised event which linked audiences in two different locations via satellite.
Anne Stadler first learned about this remarkable process when it beamed Grateful Dead rock concerts. She got in touch with the producers in order to advance citizen diplomacy with this new technology.
The first KING 5 US-USSR Spacebridge operation transpired in December of 1985 with Phil Donahue and Vladimir Posner as the moderators. Stadler mentioned, “Donahue was in our studio with a Seattle audience, Posner was in Leningrad.”[9] Moreover, the diversity of this exchange was enhanced by the “different walks of life [and] different ethnicities” present.[10] This live event, therefore, initiated a greater bond between the two countries.
Now I will present a transcription of the 2017 Anne Stadler interview by Gwen Whiting, in which she questions Stadler about the Spacebridge process.
"Okay, let's talk a little about another project. Can you explain what a Spacebridge was, um and a little bit of the technology behind it?" -Gwen Whiting
"Sure, it was uh very interesting. A Spacebridge is when you have uh, television cameras televising something in a location and it’s linked by satellite to television cameras and an audience in another country or another place. Uh, ya know it can be called video conferencing, but in this case, it was called Spacebridging. This was a term that was, a television term, uh that uh and as far as I know, the history of Spacebridging uh was the um the I don't know the engineering of it I couldn’t tell you that uh exactly at all, and I know that there was like uh a one or two second delay, uh which was just part of the technology. And um, the um some function of the space that the signal had to cross, uh but um, the first Spacebridges that I know of were with the Grateful Dead, a band who did Spacebridges with rock bands or audiences in the Soviet Union. And we found, I mean I was just interested in this. I wanted us as a television station to be in direct touch with the Soviet Union. And there was another guy at KING, Steve Smith at news, who was also kind of researching this. And uh, I found out that uh Edvir Svouskey and uh Kim Spencer uh were the two people who set up the Spacebridges. So we just got in touch with them, and we said ya know was is this? how do ya do it? how does it work? how could we do it? And we got our engineers talking to them and so forth." - Anne Stadler
Teens participate:
As Stadler introduces below, the success of the Spacebridges led to the involvement of even younger participants through the Teen Bridge. The youths selected entered the KING 5 station the night before the broadcast to take part in cooperative games that turned strangers into friends and created a sense of “joie de vivre.”[11]
The next day the broadcast involved Jean Enerson in Seattle, along with Vladimir Posner in Moscow. It was even in deliberate support of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) signature.
"Let’s talk a little more about the Teen Bridge since you told me some stuff that was interesting when we spoke on the phone earlier. Um, how were the kids brought together?" - Gwen Whiting
"Uh, when we did the Teen Bridge we had them come to the station the night before, and we spent a whole evening uh with uh Bob Fulghum, who was an amazing uh facilitator and teacher. And doing different kinds of uh collaborative games and get to know you kind of things, so that we would have a group of people who weren’t strangers to each other but who were really uh, uh had connected with each other. And uh kind of had a kind of joie de vivre that they were bringing to the program. And then they came in the next day and uh to do the Spacebridge and we had, we had an amazing interpreter. A simultaneous interpreter who works for the UN and uh, in fact I got to know her quite well ‘cause she did several um programs with us. Uh and uh, so she was interpreting the uh Russian and um, the result of this program, the Teen Bridge I think it was an hour. And the result of it was that that program aired in the Soviet Union uh deliberately to support a treaty, a non-nuclear, non-proliferation treaty uh that the Soviet Union and the United States had just signed. And uh, it was a missile treaty of some kind. And uh, so they aired the program, I think in order to show the population that this is important to our TEENS. To the people who are future leaders in this country." - Anne Stadler
Here is an example of a Teen Bridge that had a live studio audience in both Seattle and Leningrad, with Jean Enerson and Sergei Skvortsov as the moderators.
Summary:
As a whole, all of the SpaceBridges fueled the determination to come into close association with one’s enemy even while not in close proximity. Spacebridge participants had pleasant experiences and they found similarities that were not expected.
As a result, they were disposed more strongly towards peace. Samantha Smith, a young American activist during the ‘80s, reflected the same kinds of sentiments as these participants as she expressed “there’s nothing wrong with them (Soviets), they’re just like us.”[12]