Page 37 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information and Political Change
same time create new possibilities for mass politics – a trend counter
to the group-based politics of the second information regime. However,
in the later stage of this information revolution, the rise of cable televi-
sion and the multiplication of channels began a process of fragmentation
and division of communication and information. These developments
set the stage for the contemporary information revolution involving the
Internet and associated technologies.
It should be clear that an information revolution is not simply an
abrupt change in the technology of communication. A set of techno-
logical changes becomes revolutionary when new opportunities or con-
straints associated with political intermediation make possible altered
distributions of power. These new capacities and possibilities are a func-
tionofthepoliticalandsocialcontextinwhichtechnologyevolves.More-
over, an information revolution need not necessarily be driven by com-
munication technology at all. My approach to analyzing political history
has not been to draw up a list of technologies – telegraph, steamboat, rail-
road, telephone, radio, television, and so on – and ask how each affected
politics. I have approached the problem orthogonally, by asking when,
if ever, the properties of information and communication have changed
abruptly, and then inquiring how such changes influenced politics. This
approach implicates some technological innovations in abrupt informa-
tion revolutions but not others. It identifies sources of informational
change that would not make most lists of interesting technologies, such
as the postal service. It also includes socioeconomic developments in-
volving technologies but which are not, strictly speaking, technologies at
all, such as the industrial revolution.
To argue that some very important features of American democracy
have roots in informational phenomena is not to suggest that other
factors have been unimportant in influencing change. Social science
has at its disposal a well-stocked tool kit of explanatory structures that
can be used to account for political change in the United States. The
tools in this kit include models of the strategic choices through which
instrumental people pursue goals, features of institutions and the ways
that they shape behavior, the power of ideas to effect change, the often
intangible elements of culture, the machinations of economic interest
and power, the influence of social movements and identity, and even
the contingency and idiosyncrasy of history. Rather than suggesting
that these factors be set aside in favor of a causal explanation dealing
exclusively with information, I claim that informational phenomena
must be added to the picture for a complete account. This book explores

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