Page 63 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
state of democracy in general. Here are the roots of a theory of informa-
tion and American democracy.

When and under what circumstances have features of political informa-
tion varied across American history? Prior to the contemporary period,
three eras of transformation in information since the founding stand out
as candidates. The first of these occurred in the early nineteenth century,
when national-scale transmission of information became possible for
the first time in the United States. In the age of Jefferson, virtually no
arrangements for the communication of national political information
existed in the United States. Indeed, the process of information aggre-
gation and communication envisioned by Publius had all but failed to
materialize by the 1810s, and the effects of that failure were enormous.
Yet by 1841, when Tyler took over the presidency after Harrison’s death, a
new national political communication and information system existed.
This system was both qualitatively and quantitatively different from what
had existed before, in ways that the Federalists would have recognized.
The second period of major change occurred between the 1880s and
approximately 1920. Whereas the developments of 1820 to 1840 made
national communication possible for the first time, events between 1880
and 1920 expanded dramatically the volume and cost of political infor-
mationattendanttopubliclife.ItwaswhatsociologistJamesBenigercalls
a “control revolution” and its central issue was complexity – a Federalist
theme playing out a century after the founding. 30 The third period of
change was the 1950s to the late 1970s, when television became so potent
a force in American culture and politics. The many influences of televi-
sion on the evolution of politics are important in two ways here. Up until
the late 1980s, the development of television is the story of the rise of the
mass audience for political communication – the acceleration of high-
cost political communication and the institutionalization of a limited set
of gatekeepers on the flow of political information – the rise of a par-
ticularly potent form of informational mediation. From the early 1990s
on, with the spread of cable and satellite television, the development
of television becomes the story of a tension between the mass audience
and the narrower audience, between mass communication and selective,
targeted communication that exploits an abundance of “channels” and
falling costs for communication.

30
James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the
Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
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