Page 25 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information and Political Change
might the Know Your Customer protest represent a new phenomenon of
lasting consequence for American democracy – collective action increas-
ingly dissociated from traditional political resources and infrastructure?
Inadditiontotheempiricalmatters,thisbookalsoseekstoaddressaset
of deeper theoretical issues and social science questions. The premises
behind these questions are that information technology is relevant to
politics because information itself is relevant, and that the revolution
in information technology that burst on the American landscape in the
mid-1990sisfundamentallyarevolutionininformation–inwhatitcosts,
how it flows, and the nature of its distribution. Within the concept of
“information” may lie links that connect historical episodes of American
development with contemporary politics and technology.
For the purposes of exploring theoretical issues in this book, I of-
ten depart from discussing technology and instead discuss information,
which I define very broadly. There are several reasons for doing so, some
pragmatic and some conceptual. First, because of the continuous change
and integration of technologies, there is danger in constructing explana-
tions of social and political phenomena framed around period-specific
instantiations of technology. The set of technologies known throughout
most of the 1990s as “the Internet” is steadily merging with other tech-
nologies, such as broadcast television and radio, recorded music, cellular
telephony, and handheld electronic devices. As these technologies evolve,
what is actually “the Internet” will become less clear and less important.
The fundamental modes of communication that various technologies
enable will become more crucial than the machinery involved.
A second reason for conceptualizing the revolution in information
technology in terms of information itself concerns the interdependence
ofoldandnewformsofcommunication.Duringthe1990s,agooddealof
the literature on the social and political impacts of technology implicitly
or explicitly differentiated between the “on line” and “off line” worlds,
comparing Internet-based politics with traditional politics or “virtual”
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communities with “real” ones. Yet new information technologies con-
tinue to operate alongside and complement traditional media and older
14 For examples of the terminology of “cyberpolitics,”“digital democracy,” and the like,
see: Barry N. Hague and Brian D. Loader, eds., Digital Democracy: Discourse and Deci-
sion Making in the Information Age (London: Routledge, 1999); Cynthia J. Alexander
andLeslieA.Pal,DigitalDemocracy:PolicyandPoliticsintheModernWorld(NewYork:
Oxford University Press, 1998); Steven G. Jones, ed., Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated
Communication and Community (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995);
Graeme Browning, Electronic Democracy: Using the Internet to Influence American
Politics (Wilton, Conn.: Pemberton Press, 1996); Kevin A. Hill and John E. Hughes,

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