Page 71 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

P1: IPI/IBE/IRR/GYQ
10:39
August 13, 2002
CY101-Bimber
CY101-02
0 521 80067 6
Information Revolutions
content among newspaper businesses, permitting each business to mail
a free copy of each issue to every other news business of its choice. By
Richard John’s estimate, these exchanged papers constituted between a
51
third and half of the weight of all the postal service’s mail in 1820. This
remarkably farsighted provision expanded an older colonial era practice
of “printers exchanges” and contributed directly and forcefully to the
creation of the national news media system. 52
The Post Office Act went further as information infrastructure pol-
icy. 53 Postal rates on newspapers were set so low that the postal service
lost money on them, which it made back on letters. This meant that
the law arranged for the subsidization of the newspaper-based public
sphere by the private letter business. 54 An even more important provi-
sion of the law dealing with postal rates entailed the question of setting
the charge for carrying a paper or letter proportionate to the distance
traveled. Since the labor required to deliver a letter or paper across the
country was vastly different from that required for delivery across town,
during the debate, some proponents had argued for a graduated sys-
tem in which senders would pay in accordance with the distance the
letter or paper was to travel. Legislators finally rejected that scheme
in favor of the flat rate system, specifically in order to encourage the
flow of information and to reduce the relevance of physical proximity to
communication. 55
By the 1840s, the post office and press together constituted a new
political communication system in the United States, with capacities far
beyond anything that had existed in the first decades of the century.
Together they gave citizens information about one another, informed
them about government, and created a way for government to learn
about citizens and communicate to them – the three fundamental
information tasks in democracy. News from around the nation was
available to citizens in one place, the local newspaper. The speed of
information to the most distant parts of the country could typically
be measured in days or weeks, rather than months, and its arrival was
sufficiently reliable that the public could stay abreast of economic and
social affairs and monitor political developments. Government officials

51 52
Ibid. Cook, Governing with the News.
53
I rely on John, Spreading the News for an excellent interpretation of the pretelegraph
postal service as information infrastructure, and for the Post Office Act as the nation’s
first information infrastructure policy. On this subject, also see Cook, Governing with
the News.
54 55
John, Spreading the News. Schudson, The Good Citizen.
54