Page 91 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
politics had changed. Democracy had come to involve “new contexts of
control,” in the phrase of Samuel Hays. In these, the expanded scope of
enterprises “increased many fold the factors which one had to take into
account if he wished to influence the course of events . . . . The vast world
of complex circumstances intruded into decision-making and required
new perceptions of the scope and complexity of the political arena and
new devices for gathering information upon which decisions could be
based.” 109 When Walter Lippmann writes that the complexity of society
and politics had advanced sufficiently that “men have had to organize
associations of all kinds in order to create some order in the world,” the
order to which he refers is an informational phenomenon as well as an
organizational one, and it was indeed a central issue of the day. 110 A
new information regime had emerged, featuring complex structures of
information; opportunities and demands for particularistic, direct com-
munication; and a newly dominant form of organization at the center,
the specialized group.
One of the most important consequences of these developments is the
connection they entailed between information and financial resources.
In the regime that emerged from the 1920s, information did not come
cheaply. Monitoring government actions required paid staff. Identifying
interested citizens or businesses and soliciting them to join a group re-
quired time and effort and money, as did producing studies and reports.
Mass mailings of any scale were costly. Virtually all of the information
and communication functions performed by groups required substantial
resources. As the twentieth century progressed, technological develop-
ments bolstered the capacities of groups and at the same time added to
resource requirements. The evolution of the telephone system, fax tech-
nology, computerized mailing lists, polling, and the like contributed to
the maturing and consolidation of this information regime and the im-
portance of money in it. Even more so than in the first regime, where the
newspaper business and postal system had in effect subsidized political
communication, bearing the cost of information and communication
became an increasingly central part of politics.
Scholars typically date the beginning of the American interest group
system to the New Deal and they often associate it with modern tech-
nologies of computing and telecommunication. In his remark in The
Governmental Process that “a precondition of the development of a vast
109
Samuel P. Hays, “Political Parties and the Community-Society Continuum,” in
Chambers and Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems, p. 166.
110
Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, p. 162.
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