Page 209 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Political Organizations
by information technology. What that means varies a great deal by or-
ganization, but the general trend is toward increased opportunities for
organizations to respond rapidly to unfolding events around them. That
capacity means more than simply greater efficiency at pursuing goals. As
rapid responsiveness becomes more viable alongside long-term strate-
gic planning, it appears to consume a greater fraction of organizations’
attention. As the organizations in this study enhanced their capacity to
make tactical decisions and follow up with political action on a daily and
even hourly basis, the orientation of some showed an increased emphasis
on short-range planning and event-based political action.
An important part of this phenomenon is the splitting of traditional
memberships and citizen groups into submemberships on the basis of
better information about interests and location. Especially in the case of
ED and the electoral campaigns, organizations have come to understand
the public in terms of vastly more specific information than in the past.
As a result, these organizations are more inclined toward highly specific
efforts at mobilization rather than blanket calls for participation by en-
tire lists of memberships or supporters. This contributes to a kind of
shape-changing phenomenon in which organizations draw on what are
effectivelydifferent“memberships”fromissuetoissueandeventtoevent.
As information grows more abundant, the boundaries and membership
of a political organization are increasingly a function of the particular
eventinwhichitisinvolved.

These are some of the possibilities and implications of postbureaucratic
political organization suggested by the case studies. They endorse the
theory from Chapter 3 that information abundance leads to a decay in
traditionally bureaucratic forms of political organization and collective
action, but they also illustrate quite clearly constraints on the post-
bureaucratic shift. The organizations in all the cases confronted in one
way or another the limited capacity of new information technology to
attract or direct the public’s attention as effectively as broadcast and
print media. 220 Literally every organization operated on the assumption
that in an environment of information abundance, efforts to commu-
nicate political messages using new technology would mainly reach
those citizens already interested in an issue or cause. None made the
mistake of attempting to replicate the influence of television advertising

220
I am especially indebted to Russ Neuman for helpful conversations and advice on the
nature of political attention in the interaction between “new media” and “old.”
192