Page 47 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information and Political Change
or even singular. This premise has fueled speculation about whether the
Internetwilladvanceorunderminepoliticalequality–asifitmuststrictly
do one or the other. Historically, this kind of thinking about technology
has often been colored strongly with optimism. The development of
poweredflight,forinstance,wasmetwithexpectationsofincreasedworld
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peace due to intensified contact between nations. The development of
broadcasttechnologyledmanytoexpectincreasedcitizenknowledgeand
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the advancement of “high” culture. We now know that powered flight
did indeed intensify the peaceful links between certain distant nations,
just as it simultaneously extended the possibilities for war among others.
Broadcast telecommunication can indeed serve to inform, to disseminate
ideasandart,andonoccasiontoeducate,justasitalsoservesasamedium
of entertainment, diversion, and reduction of culture to the simple and
the lurid.
Like flight and broadcasting, information technology may have many
effects at once. It may advance political equality in certain ways and
undermine it in others, or enhance the power of states in some respects
and diminish it in others. It may increase opportunities for superficial,
thoughtless, democratically hollow speech as well as opportunities for
meaningful deliberation and public speech. It is best to assume that
information technology might both strengthen and weaken democracy,
as well as exert little influence at all on some democratic processes.
In approaching the explanatory task this way, I do not invoke the stan-
dard theories used by social scientists to explain the influence of technol-
ogy on society, especially technological determinism and its theoretical
opposite, social construction. The fundamental claim of technological
determinism is twofold. First, the evolution of technology is not ran-
dom or happenstance but follows an ordered sequence in the direction of
greatercomplexity.Thisistosaythathumanagencyandinfluencearenot
important to the direction of technological development: The Internet
wasboundtobedevelopedbecauseofthelawsofnature,asweretheinter-
nal combustion engine and the nuclear bomb, regardless of the economic
or social circumstances that happened in practice to attend their emer-
gence in history. Second, technological determinism holds that the tech-
nologies present in the human environment at each particular historical
moment “determine” the character of societies. That is, the nature of

37 Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2001).
38 Lawrence K. Grossman, The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Informa-
tion Age (New York: Viking, 1995).

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