Page 29 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information and Political Change
of information among citizens and their associations and organizations,
among citizens and government, and within government itself.
More to the point, the structure of information in America at the out-
set of the twenty-first century is very different from that at the outset of
the twentieth century, just as its structure then differed from that in the
age of Jefferson. Not only the volume of political information available
in society, but also its distribution and cost, have varied from one age to
another. This important observation introduces the central theoretical
problems that this book addresses. How do historically changing prop-
erties of political information affect the evolution of democracy? What
patterns might exist in the evolving nature of information and its rela-
tionship to politics? To what extent can the character of democracy be
traced to causes rooted in the informational characteristics of a particular
age? To pose these questions is to situate modern technology and applied
questions about the contemporary information revolution in the larger
sweep of American political development.

OVERVIEW OF THE THEORY
Surprisingly, information and political development have been under-
stood far better in isolation than in relation to one another. Scholars
of democratic politics typically do not explore the possibilities of infor-
mation serving as a motive force or an independent variable. For most
researchers who attempt to find cause-effect relationships for political
outcomes, information at best constitutes context rather than a cause, a
factor that remains on the sidelines. As a result, ideas about information
and democracy typically achieve no better than a skeletal existence, as
in Francis Bacon’s aphorism in The Great Instauration about knowledge
and power being synonymous. His famous observation provides little
insight into the real relationship between knowledge and power, and in
any case was intended as a reflection not on politics but on science and
human agency in the natural world.
How can the relationship between information and political change
be approached theoretically? My perspective is based on the observa-
tion that many features of social and economic structure were derived
from the characteristics of information during the period in which they
arose. Throughout most of the twentieth century, for example, the in-
formation necessary for economic transactions, education, social inter-
action, and many other facets of modernity had certain properties. It
was hierarchically organized, costly to obtain and difficult to manage,

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