Page 142 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Consumer Protection and Privacy
capital in the United States as a dispute over the classification of asso-
ciations. Robert Putnam’s observation of the decline in traditional civic
organizations,suchasthePTAandtheBoyScouts,islargelyanassessment
of the state of bureaucratic civic associations. 29 Critics of this argument
who claim that social capital is now borne instead by informal parents
groups, “soccer mom” networks, singles groups, fitness clubs, and the
like invoke organizations with many postbureaucratic features. 30 The
so-called on-line communities of the Internet may be the best example
ofpostbureaucraticcivicassociation.Itwilltakemoretimetoseewhether
and how contemporary associations such as these build social capital or
in other ways produce meaningful consequences. In any event, I do not
pursue matters of purely civic association here.
The case studies are organized below by group and policy area, not
technology. In the study of information technology and politics, consid-
erable attention is typically paid to web sites as a unit of analysis, in large
part because they are one of the most readily observable of all political
phenomena. Though web sites themselves are indeed important and can
serve as a useful focus of analysis, it should be clear that in this study, my
focusandunitofanalysisismuchbroaderthanthewebsiteasaparticular
form of technology. In the case studies, I sought to examine how collec-
tive action occurs in an information-rich environment where a variety
of technologies contribute toward information abundance of one kind
or another. The case narratives below give a description of each group,
and their strategies and the structure of advocacy resulting from use of
information technology. Following the narratives is a summary that an-
alyzes the cases together for what they illustrate about postbureaucratic
political organization.

CONSUMER PROTECTION AND PRIVACY
The short story of the Libertarians and the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation (FDIC) at the beginning of Chapter 1 is in several ways an
archetypal case of information infrastructure substituting for traditional

29
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
30 Nicholas Lemann, “Kicking in Groups,” The Atlantic Monthly 277, no. 4 (April
1996), http://xroads.virginia.edu/∼HYPER/DETOC/assoc/kicking.html; Michael
Schudson, “What If Civic Life Didn’t Die?” The American Prospect 25 (March–
April 1996), http://www.prospect.org/archives/25/25-cnt1.html; Theda Skocpol,
“UnravellingfromAbove,”TheAmericanProspect25(March–April1996),http://www.
prospect.org/archives/ 25/25-cnt2.html.

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