Page 262 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Dahl’s Equality Proposition
Postbureaucratic political organization and new structures for plural-
ism threaten the public sphere in a different way. Aside from colonization
of the public sphere by media giants, which is a phenomenon of the third
information regime, the fourth information revolution threatens to pro-
duce fragmentation and the loss of the common among what remains
public.Astraditionallywell-institutionalizedorganizationsyieldsomeof
their dominance over political gatekeeping and agenda-setting to a larger
number of less well-institutionalized groups and postbureaucratic orga-
nizations, the stability and predictability of the national political agenda
can decay. To the extent that the fourth information revolution succeeds
at undermining centralized, organization-based flows of information,
it will tend to feed self-selection, polarization, and fragmentation. The
capacity for increasingly individuated information environments pro-
motes the autonomous, individually constructed liberal self, more free
of the force of community values and agendas that come from living in a
particular place and from interacting with others within the domain of
various institutions. As Cass Sunstein argues, democracy is enriched by
the multiplication of voices only when mechanisms for common atten-
tion and deliberation are present. 30 In their absence, the heterogeneity
of the newest information environment could contribute toward a soci-
ety that is more divided rather than less. What Dahlgren calls universal
“sense-making” and the building of shared conceptions is that much
harder as the public sphere grows more diverse and fluid as a result of
technological change. 31
The collapse of the common has been the subject of commentary
for a generation of scholars and cultural critics; contemporary infor-
mation technology exacerbates many of their concerns. Previous work
has attributed pathologies of the public sphere to the industrial and
postindustrial workplace, the replacement of the rural community with
the urban landscape, the collapse of associations in civil society, the de-
cay of the family, the rise of racial and ethnic tensions, and the maturing
˚
of political pluralism. For Eric Asard and Lance Bennett, technology
is implicated in the failing organizational coherence of politics. 32 One
of the consequences of more highly bureaucratized forms of political

30 Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
31 Peter Dahlgren, “The Internet and the Democratization of Civic Culture,” Political
Communication 17, no. 4 (2000): 335–340.
32 ˚
Eric Asard and W. Lance Bennett, Democracy and the Marketplace of Ideas: Communi-
cation and Government in Sweden and the United States (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).

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