Page 103 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
throughcableandsatellitetelevision,andalsoincludesthemultiplication
of special-interest magazines and the flourishing market in recorded
video. 150 The 1980s are traditionally considered the transition period
between these two phases. By the early 1990s, a majority of households
subscribed to cable television, and by the mid-1990s, over half of those
with cable subscribed to more than fifty channels. 151 By 1999, cable ser-
vice was available to 97 percent of households, virtually every household
with a television set. The key feature of this phase of mass media is the
fragmentation of the audience and the divergence in the content of po-
litical communication and news.
The politics of these two phases are in some ways in opposition to one
another. The rise of the mass audience after midcentury and the increas-
ingly central role played by broadcast television constituted an important
breakfromthesecondinformationregime.Themassdynamicsofscarce-
channel television after 1960 exerted countereffects to the specialization
and fragmentation of that earlier regime, namely, a tendency to homog-
enize communication and elevate the importance of mass opinion in
politics. Channel abundance in the 1990s, on the other hand, eroded
the mass audience for the traditional networks and re-created opportu-
nities for more specialized, individualized, fragmented communication
reminiscent of a century before.
The broadcast information regime that emerged from the 1970s there-
fore did not last long. It never displaced the second regime but comple-
mented it, and by the 1990s it was in tension with the effects of chan-
nel multiplication as well. The mass audience was to remain alive and

150 Several periodization schemes for communication are available, none of which are
particularly suitable for understanding the coevolution of political communication
andpoliticalstructureintheUnitedStatesfromalong-termperspective.Forinstance,
Mark Poster divides the modern period into two media “ages”: the era of film, radio,
and television constitutes the first media age, while that of the Internet and post-
broadcast technologies constitutes the second. Jay Blumler and Dennis Kavanaugh
divideroughlythesameperiodintothree“ages”:thefirstrunninguntilthemid-1960s
and characterized by high levels of consensus organized by institutional structures,
especially parties; the second associated with limited-channel broadcast from the
mid-1960s to the end of the century; and the third emergent now as a function
of media abundance. The importance of the shift from channel scarcity to channel
abundance is one of the central points of agreement among various periodization
schemes such as these. See Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge, Mass.:
Polity Press, 1995); and Jay G. Blumler and Dennis Kavanaugh, “The Third Age
of Political Communication: Influences and Features,” Political Communication 16
(1999): 209–230.
151
W. Russell Neuman, The Future of the Mass Audience (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1990); Owen, The Internet Challenge to Television.
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