Page 26 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information and Political Change
modes of communication. Electoral campaigns use web sites and tele-
vision commercials, e-mail and the postal service, wireless devices and
fax machines. A campaign might use broadcast news coverage to steer
citizens to a web site for making donations, which are then used to pur-
chase campaign advertising on television. Often it makes more sense to
speak of a single “world” with on-line and off-line features than attempt-
ing to maintain a distinction between an on-line world and an off-line
world, categories that are largely artifacts of historical transition. The
revolution in information technology means that democracy is growing
increasingly information-rich and communication-intensive, not sim-
ply that democracy is now characterized by the use of one particular
technology or another.
Just what constitutes “information” for the purposes of this analy-
sis? Information has lovely literary and scientific histories that on rare
occasions intersect. 15 It is beyond the scope of this book to trace those
histories, but I hope it is sufficient to observe that in English literature
and philosophy, the word “information” makes occasional appearances
as far back as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, prior even to the printing
of the Gutenberg Bible. 16 Shakespeare animated the word memorably
in Coriolanus, when Menenius asks forgiveness for the bearer of bad
news: “But reason with the fellow, before you punish him, where he
heard this, lest you shall chance to whip your information and beat the
17
messenger who bids beware of what is to be dreaded.” Among philoso-
phers, John Locke’s invocation of information in An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding is striking because of its foreshadowing of Claude
Shannon’s later creation of the modern scientific theory of information:
“From whence commonly proceeds noise, and wrangling, without im-
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provement or information.” Differentiating information and noise in a

Cyberpolitics: Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet (New York: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1998).
15
For a thorough analysis of the modern meaning of information from a humanistic
perspective, see Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at
the Turn of the Millennium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
16
Geoffrey Chaucer, “Tale of Melibeus,” in The Canterbury Tales, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), p. 933, line 1486.
17
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Lee Bliss (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2000), p. 234.
18
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 3, Ch. 10, Section 22.
VI. Public domain version 1995 [1690], available at http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/
Projects/digitexts/locke/understanding/chapter0310.html. In 1948, Claude Shannon
published a mathematical model of the communication of information that re-
mains the foundation of information theory in engineering. See C. E. Shannon,

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