Page 14 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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September 13, 2002

Acknowledgments 13:21

The origins of this volume lie in the interplay between research and
teaching that constitutes the central theory of the modern university.
Several years ago, a student in my course on technology and politics
prepared an exceptionally good term paper about a new subject, the
Internet and political equality. When I had designed the course earlier
that year, 1995, the Internet had struck me as no more than one of several
potentially important sociotechnical phenomena relevant to politics and
social issues, along with genetic engineering, industrial competitiveness,
and defense conversion following the end of the Cold War. Although the
student’s paper did not venture far from material that I had covered in the
course, it prompted me to think further about the subject and eventually
to launch my own inquiry into theoretical aspects of technology and
information in American democracy. This book is one result. I have
since lost track of the student who wrote that paper, but I acknowledge
here her contribution to the direction of my research.
Students of business history will recall that 1995 was the year when
Netscape Communications Corporation announced it would become a
publiclyheldfirm.Thatstockofferingremainsperhapsthemostpowerful
symbol of the evolution of the Internet from a limited, government-
sponsored, academically oriented enterprise into an economic and social
phenomenon of vast scale. I managed to turn a tiny investment into a
somewhat larger one on the first day of the Netscape public offering, but
I do not write as a technology booster. My orientation toward technology
as a force for social and political change, as well as for the production of
wealth, rests on only a skeptical optimism. I grew up in what came during
my youth to be called “Silicon Valley” and I picked up the local trade by
earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering after high school.
Having learned to design semiconductor circuits in the early 1980s is

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