Page 263 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information, Equality, and Integration
intermediation is a tendency to stabilize and generalize political com-
munication. John Ehrenberg writes that the deintegration of the public
sphere is the result of the unraveling of public communication “into iso-
lated acts of individual reception,” 33 while David Swanson sees “newly
porous political systems struggle to maintain coherence in the face of
34
new entrants into the policy arena.” For philosopher Philip Brey, it is a
matter of increased “presence competition” as citizens disengage from an
35
expanding and shifting body of elites seeking their attention. Problems
of deintegration of the public sphere can be found in the literature on
political pluralism in the United States at least as far back as Theodore
Lowi’sclassicpolemic,TheEndofLiberalism.Lowi’sblastingofpluralistic
governmentforfailingtoaddressthetrulypublicandforitscommitment
to bargaining about the private instead is a concern with the common
and the integration of interests in a public realm. 36 For Lowi, writing
decades before the rise of the Internet, the deintegration of the public
sphere is a product not simply of economics or technology, but also of
a political philosophy that privatizes what ought to be public and there-
fore validates fragmentation as a way of political life. The technologies
of the fourth information revolution show every sign of accelerating and
advancing such problems.
The lesson here is that the extent to which institutionalized elites can
dominate the flow of information in a democracy regulates the extent
of integration and coherence in the public sphere. A limited and stable
body of organizations and elites provides order and clarity to the public
sphere and helps to integrate interests into a common public opinion –
whateverothereffectstheymayalsohave.Technologicalchangethatmul-
tiplies elites and diminishes the bureaucratization of the public sphere
may, as Dahl argues, enhance political equality, but it does so at the cost
of political coherence. It is an unwelcome conclusion that information
abundance creates possibilities for greater equality and for a less intelli-
gible public sphere through the very same mechanisms.
Whether these developments constitute a secular decline in the health
of the public sphere or simply a setting of the stage for a reconstitution of
political order and publicness is not yet clear. Meaningful and productive
33 Ehrenberg, Civil Society, p. 221.
34
See Swanson, “The Homologous Evolution of Political Communication and Civic
Engagement,” Political Communication 17(2000): 410.
35
Philip Brey, “New Media and the Quality of Life,” Philosophy and Technology 3, no. 1
(1997): 1–23.
36
Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States,
2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1979).
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