Page 49 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information and Political Change
the modern theory of the social construction of technology. 41 In place
of the concept of autonomous technology is now a set of claims that
technologies embody and advance political interests and agendas – such
as industrial efficiency – and are the product of social structure, culture,
values, and politics as much as the result of objective scientific discovery.
Information technology is a ripe subject for analysis from this
perspective, because of the collaboration of the U.S. government, private
corporations, and universities that went into the development of the
Internet. That is a story of Cold War military spending and strategy,
the effect of institutions on policy, and how a public good once rejected
by the market and subsidized by the government evolved into a mixed
public-private good driven almost purely by private enterprise and
increasingly contested between industries. Nonetheless, it will not be
my purpose to explain the political origins of the Internet or other
information technology, and for that topic I refer readers to other
sources. 42 The Internet is indeed a “social construction,” but I do not
explore that issue here.
Technology can be understood as political in the following ways with-
out invoking either technological determinism or social construction-
ism.Bydefinition,technologicaldevelopmentproducestoolsthatpermit
novel forms of action, novel behaviors, and in some cases novel forms
of value. When people engage in new acts with their new tools, their
behavior sometimes falls outside the boundaries of extant rules and in-
stitutions. Governing institutions are rarely able to anticipate new forms
of action that will be made possible by technology, such as cloning of
life forms, mass distribution of pornography, or the collection and sale
of personal information about citizens by businesses. When such acts
first emerge, they are often ungoverned or undergoverned by existing

41 A good single-volume introduction and overview of this literature is Sheila Jasanoff
et al., eds., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage
Publications, 1995).
42 For works presenting historical essays relevant to the history of the Internet, see:
Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus (New York: Pantheon, 1998); Michael
Margolis and David Resnick, Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace “Revolution” (Thousand
Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2000); Bruce L. R. Smith, American Science Policy since
World War II (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1990); David C. Mowrey
and Nathan Rosenberg, Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th Century
America (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David M. Hart, Forged
Consensus: Science, Technology and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Katie Hafner and Mathew Lyon, Where
Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1996).

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