Page 79 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
THE SECOND INFORMATION REVOLUTION AND THE
ROOTS OF PLURALISM

The first information regime would finally be altered in a substantial way
toward the end of the nineteenth century. During the Gilded Age, the
structureofpoliticalinformationaswellasopportunitiesandconstraints
on communication began to change, in conjunction with the industrial
revolution. 76 Industrialization would bring more than mechanization,
mass production, urbanization, and demographic shifts; it also entailed a
new scale of organization, radically altered communication patterns, and
vastly more complex information of all kinds permeating human activi-
ties. As sociologist James Beniger has argued, industrialization and Pro-
gressivism entailed as much a revolution in information as in industry. 77
Thispointcanbeseenmostobviouslyintheeconomy,whereindustri-
alization brought increased complexity and differentiation of function.
That in turn left mechanisms of communication and coordination from
the preindustrial economy inadequate for businesses and individuals. In
businesses, one result was new industrial control technologies, bureau-
cracy and rationalized administration, new systems for the distribution
of goods, new methods for advertising and communicating with mass
markets, and the use of techniques such as polling for obtaining feedback
from the public. 78
Fortheirpart,consumerswerefacedwithnewgoods,unfamiliarretail-
ers,andagrowingcultureofadvertising.Thetrustonceplacedinfamiliar
local shopkeepers and sellers was inadequate in the face of large-scale re-
tailing activities. Walter Lippmann captured vividly the new complexity:

For the scale on which the world is organized to-day discrimination
has become impossible for the ordinary purchaser. He hasn’t time

76 Scholars assign various beginning and ending dates to this period of general transfor-
mation in U.S. society, economics, and politics, but most agree within a margin of five
or six years that the two decades before and two after 1900 capture industrialization
and its immediate consequences.
77
Beniger, The Control Revolution.
78 For an argument that the origins of the information revolution lie in the indus-
trial revolution, see Beniger, The Control Revolution, who argues that solving these
information problems was requisite to the maturation of the industrial revolution.
Without new informational techniques adequate to an industrial economy, the ca-
pacity to make mass-produced goods could hardly be fully realized. This argument
expands the ancestors of the Internet beyond simply the telegraph and stagecoach,
to encompass regularized freight and delivery schedules for goods, standardized wire
sizes and railroad gauges, vertical integration of firms, uniform standard time, and
other informational innovations of the nineteenth century.

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