Page 108 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Question of Information Abundance
This information in turn permits groups and candidate organizations
to tailor their messages and appeals to citizens on a largely unprece-
dented level. New capacities to capture large amounts of political infor-
mation inexpensively constitute an enormous departure from previous
media, especially those of broadcasting and print news. Another feature
of information-intensiveness is the capacities of new technology to pro-
vide for citizens to communicate directly with one another. Forums for
publicly displaying messages and for meeting and conversing “on line”
among people who share political concerns constitute perhaps the largest
break functionally from previous media.
Changes in the media business add additional elements to the
information-intensiveness of contemporary politics. The fact that any
news organization, including small newspapers and radio stations, can
readilydistributeinformationgloballyconstitutesanenormousaccelera-
tioninhistoricaleffortstolinknewsorganizationstogetherandtoexpand
theirreach.Thenineteenth-centurypracticeofexchangingpapersamong
news businesses is evolving in the early twenty-first century toward a sit-
uation in which any citizen can read any newspaper at any time, and
perhaps, one day, watch any television show from any nation at any time.
Already the Bangor Daily News is available in Boise and Birmingham, to
those who would read it. The practice of some citizens (and government
officials) following events during the U.S. war in Afghanistan by tuning
into Qatar’s Al Jazeera television station through the Internet is one of
the most dramatic examples of the media losing their spatial boundaries.
Afinalfeatureofcontemporarydevelopmentsininformationisamore
subtle one. It involves the archiving of news and other information. In
previousinformationregimes,therecordingandpreservationofpolitical
information was rudimentary and fragmented at best, symbolized well
by the term “news.” For the most part, information in news was available
tothepublicatlargeonlycontemporaneously;aweek-oldnewspaperwas
not readily accessible and a week-old television broadcast gone forever.
The archiving of news, political broadcasting, campaign information,
interest group records, and even citizen discussions in network-based
“bulletin boards” reorganizes political information in a way that makes
the past more accessible to the present.
The evolution of the Internet and associated technologies are popu-
larly labeled an “information revolution,” especially for their effects on
business and commerce. And, indeed, these five features of the new infor-
mation environment for politics since the 1990s fit the historical pattern
of information revolutions in American democracy. They constitute a

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