Driscoll 2017). Minitel was a modem-based videotex platform and network
service developed and implemented in the 1980s by the French postal and
telecommunications regulator PTT; Minitel remained in service until 2012,
when it was
retired. The catalyst behind the French government’s
considerable investment in Minitel – which included giving a Minitel video
device costing several hundred dollars to every household in France for free –
was a report commissioned in 1976 by French President Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing on telecommunications and computers from two leading French
experts, Simon Nora and Alain Minc. Giscard was deeply concerned about
the state of France’s telecommunications infrastructure, which lagged far
behind other industrial countries, and about the country’s ability to compete
with the United States in both the technological and the cultural spheres, as
advances in telecommunications and computers created new opportunities –
Social_Media_and_Democracy