Page 92 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Mass Audience 10:39
multiplicity of groups, itself an instance of technological change of the
most dramatic sort, is the revolution in means of communication,”
David Truman had in mind the utility of telephones, direct mail, and
other pluralistic communication technologies that eventually came on
the American political scene. 111 But these technologies did more to con-
solidate pluralism than to give birth to it. A truer “precondition” for the
power of interest groups was a political environment throughout most
of the twentieth century featuring decentralized, complex structures of
information and communication.

THE THIRD INFORMATION REVOLUTION AND
THE MASS AUDIENCE

The course of the information regime born out of the industrial revolu-
tion was different from its predecessor’s, because technologies of com-
munication evolved differently in the twentieth century than they had in
the nineteenth. Whereas the major technological milestones of the 1840s
to 1870s tended to reinforce the party-dominated press–postal system
until its abrupt displacement at the end of the century, the technologies
of the 1920s to 1940s soon laid the groundwork for change in the sec-
ond information regime. By the 1950s and ’60s these technologies had
blossomed into a full-scale information revolution, but this revolution
did not so much displace the interest group–based second regime as hy-
bridize it, adding a new kind of dynamic centered on the mass audience.
By at least the 1980s, this new revolution led to an information regime
featuring both group-based and mass communication.
The central impetus in these developments was the emergence of
broadcast media: the rise of radio, which was put to political purposes
from the very start, and several decades later, television. Characteriz-
ing the emergence of these technologies as revolutionary for culture and
politics is well-traveled ground, and I will not recapitulate or summarize
existing scholarship dealing with the profound impacts of mass media
on candidate selection and campaigning, leadership styles and strategies,
political identification, socialization, and media effects such as framing,
agenda setting, and priming.
Of greater concern here are the consequences of broadcast telecom-
munications for political intermediaries – especially, parties and inter-
est groups, the forms of organization to emerge in prior information

111
Truman, The Governmental Process,p.55.
75