Page 113 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Fourth Information Revolution
economic activity, geophysical circumstance, or historical contingency.
Whatever their particular sources in a given place and time, character-
istics of information and communication contribute powerfully to the
creation and definition of culture, identity, and social structure. In this
view, the Weberian bureaucracy represents the congealing of a character-
istic pattern of communication under conditions of information scarcity.
Social theorist Pierre Levy’s term for this relationship between infor-
mational and structural or cultural features of society is “communica-
tions ecology.” 10 An “ecology” is comprised of the dominant modes of
information flow and the forms of organization and social structure that
adapt themselves accordingly. For Levy, like Castells, features of com-
munication take on characteristic patterns in particular eras of history
as a function of various factors such as technology. These characteris-
tic patterns in turn exert influences on the nature of public and private
institutions, economic practices, social arrangements, and cultures.
In the ecology that prevailed in the United States throughout most
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the salient characteristics of
information and communication were the high cost and asymmetric dis-
tribution that resulted from resource requirements and scarcity. The in-
formation and communication necessary for group formation, business
transactions, and the maintenance of social ties were expensive, lending
themselves to particular kinds of organizational arrangements that were
typically variants on the hierarchical, Weberian administrative form.
In this way, costly information led to decision-making arrangements and
organizations of all kinds that employed bureaucracy for their internal
structures, and that also constructed rigid and impermeable boundaries
to separate them from other organizations with which they communi-
cated, cooperated, or competed. Such arrangements characterized cor-
porations, private citizens’ associations, universities, and even armies. As
characteristics of information change as a result of technological devel-
opments, so should these structures.
Economic theories of the firm provide the most well-developed char-
acterization of that process. These theories, which originated prior to the
Second World War, held that costs of information and communication
are typically higher in market-like transactions between organizations
than within single hierarchical organizations of the sort that Weber de-
scribed. Transaction costs drive producers toward hierarchy and vertical

10
Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace
(Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1997).
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