Page 82 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Roots of Pluralism 10:39
industrialization, industrialization to social stresses and the subsequent
failure of markets to meet human needs adequately, and market failures
to state building or state change of one kind or another.
This familiar account provides a great deal of insight into changes in
democracy at the turn of the century. But it leaves out the role of the
changing information regime. No less important than new demands for
state action was the fact that the complexity, scale, and intensification of
relationships overloaded old communication and information channels
in the economy, in civil society, and in the political system. Whereas in-
formation had before been simply and spatially organized, it was now
highly specific, associated with narrower and more diverse groups of ac-
tors and issues, and organized in particularistic, cross-cutting ways. As
human relationships grew far more complex, they required new, more
complex patterns of communication to sustain them. These new patterns
had to accommodate social reality: a multiplication of relationships, in-
terdependence, and heterogeneity.
A number of scholars writing about these changes have commented
on matters of information, communication, and complexity, although
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few have made these matters the central focus of their analysis. Robert
Wiebe describes the effect of these changes on individuals as the decay of
the “personal society” of the early and mid-nineteenth century. A society
once comprehensible to its members in terms of individuals had become
a society comprehensible only in much larger, more complex terms, and
it “lacked those national centers of authority and information which
might have given order to such swift changes.” 86 For Samuel Hays, the
changes of 1880 to 1920 entailed a “massive reorganization in the scale
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and scope of human activities.” For Durkheim, it was a society whose
complexity made it susceptible to anomie.
The fact that Americans were increasingly taking their problems to
government for redress created a mushrooming public agenda unlike
anything that had gone before. New issues that piled up before the fed-
eral government included labor matters, punctuated by strikes and riots;
battlesoverregulationofindustries,fromrailroadstoutilities;childlabor
in factories and mines; community services, such as water and sewage;
public health, including food and drug safety; education; and manage-
ment of the public domain. It was not simply that the public as a whole

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The important exception is Beniger’s The Control Revolution, although this volume
does not address political development.
86 87
Wiebe, The Search for Order,p.12. Hays, The Response to Industrialism,p.69.
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