Page 265 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information, Equality, and Integration
major traditional media outlets, from NBC and CNN to USA Today,
provide the most highly subscribed news sites on the web would appear
to be evidence of the sustained dominance of a few traditional firms
over information and communication.This has led some observers to
a conclusion that traditional patterns of political communication will
simply reproduce themselves in the new information environment. 41
Despite the obvious and continuing influences of a few media con-
glomerates, there are reasons to doubt that old patterns of power will
map directly onto new media. It may be true that the most highly sub-
scribed news sites are the products of major firms, but the vast number
of alternatives to those sites simply has no parallel in history, especially
during the period when three networks monopolized virtually all broad-
cast television, and also earlier when citizens in any particular city chose
between just a few newspapers for their access to the public sphere. The
direct and indirect effects of an effectively unlimited number of news and
information sources, even if they share among them less than a majority
of citizens as patrons, limit in new ways the capacity of a few elites to
dominate the content and pace of news. The array of readily available
electronic information sources sponsored by individuals, nonmedia or-
ganizations, and government offices has no comparable analogue in the
world of traditional media. At the same time that the economic power of
a few media businesses to control communication is indeed expanding,
technological developments are making information and communica-
tion fundamentally less controllable by any narrow class of interests.

Thisconfrontationbetweentrendstowardmediaconcentrationandfrag-
mentation is a central feature of the modern public sphere. A decade ago,
W. Russell Neuman argued correctly that the future of media would be
driven by a tension between the increasing technological capacity of in-
dividual citizens to control their information environment and a set of
economic and social forces that tend away from diversity, openness, and a
42
free marketplace of ideas. The tendency of contemporary information
technology toward individualization and accelerated, fragmented plural-
ism is opposed by two forces. One is the political economy of the media
business, which favors centralization, economies of scale, and the mass

41
SeeMichaelMargolisandDavidResnick,PoliticsasUsual:TheCyberspace“Revolution”
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2000); and Richard Davis, The Web of
Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
42
W. Russell Neuman, The Future of the Mass Audience (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1991).
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