Copyright 2006 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
The question that we pose here is whether technological change has implications for democracy. We should begin by getting our minds clear on what technology is. Then, we should ask whether technology has social consequences at all. And finally, we should explore what consequences in the US have political impact. Much of this material can be found in the curriculum of Science and Technology Studies.
As the philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out in his essay, The Question Concerning Technology, we make a significant mistake when we conclude that technology is merely a bunch of artefacts --- tools and machines. In the deepest sense, technology is a name for the diverse and broad ways in which humans re-arrange the natural world. The word itself comes from the Greek word 'techne' which is one form of the Greek concept "poiesis", or "bringing forth". Another important form of "bringing forth" lies in the word 'episteme' from which we get our word 'epistemology' for the concept of "knowing". So things come forth in the world of our experience by two paths --- something coming forth out of its own nature can be known and someting coming forth through human agency or intervention is made. In modifying the natural world, humans do much more than just making new objects; they also create systems of interaction that were not likely to arise out of the natural world on their own. These products of technology are so clearly pervasive, today, that it is a challenge to understand what the "natural world" ever was or remains to be.
Clearly, technological change has social consequences because humans interact with and through their worldly environments which technology shapes. One of the examples that Heidegger uses is the impact of building a bridge across a river where none has existed before. Through the presence of the bridge, numerous new social and political relationships are established implicitly between the people occupying the two sides. For example, the bridge provides new opportunities for trade of agricultural and manufacturing products. But, on the darker side, it might also provide a new opportunity for one group to wreck havoc on another. In some sense, the bridge is just a mass of inorganic materials, but its existence alters the world experienced by the people of the locality. Why was the bridge built? Just to stack up materials in the river? Clearly, the design and organization of materials were motivated by more serious human ends. Here, however, is where the issue becomes really interesting. Did the humans involved understand by foresight what social consequences lay implicitly in the existence of the bridge as they hoped to realize it? In that respect, is any technological innovation ever truly value-neutral?
Since our political relations are a subset of our social relations, it is probable that certain technological changes will have political consequences. For example, the American democracy is a representational system which requires periodic elections of our representatives. People must gather in central poling places to cast their votes; thus, building increasingly effective transportation systems helps people to gather and improves the prospects of exercising our democratic rights.
Bruce Bimber makes it clear that the issues of transportation and information were already anticipated within the debates over the Constitution. A national government of the scope anticipated, if it would meet the needs of a democracy, would require large flows of information back and forth between the center of power and remote parts of the country. Representatives would have to travel to and fro in order to meet with the people they represent. All in all, as Bimber demonstrates in his discussion, none of this was truly available in the early period of the republic and central authority, consistent with the fears of the Anti-Federalists, was left floating in isolation.
The first important revolution in systematic gathering and distribution of information was the combined development of the United States Postal Service and creation of informative newspapers --- indeed, the development of journalism as a means of acquiring and distributing news. This was well underway by the 1830s; and it meant that representatives in Washington could remain in touch with issues back home as well as news about their performance coming out of Washington to inform the voters. Combined with rising numbers of people being qualified to vote and the origins of effective political parties, this revolution made an enormous difference on the effectiveness of democracy at the national level.
The second revolution resulted from the massive industrialization of America in the late Nineteenth Century. The social structure of the country was transformed from a relatively simple rural agrarian form to an urbanized industrial work force. The same transformation had occurred in England and portions of Europe almost a century earlier and the social impact was well documented. The social re-adjustment would take many decades and its first obvious feature was complexity. Government was not only called upon to meet new needs; it was required to understand and meet a massively complex set of new needs. All of this far outstripped the abilities of the old technologies of communication. Information had to be gathered from all new sources, broken down into focused issues, and communicated to relevant units of government. What was required was a massive bureaucratization of communication.
The third revolution was, unsurprisingly, the development of broadcast media from the 1920s through the 1950s --- first radio and then television. Obviously, these media had pervasive effects on the American public but Bimber focuses on only the political effects. The largest of these was the development of candidate independence of parties and the party system, an effect that is seen most strongly in national offices. In earlier times, candidates needed parties to put their names before masses of people, often in remote parts of the country. Also, candidates were presented through the written word, in newspapers, newsletters, and fliers. Even radio offered a direct and almost instant connection of candidate and people. The candidate's voice, and later the candidate's appearance, exercised enormous psychological advantages in communication. As Bimber observes, candidates for national offices could run entire campaigns largely outside of party ties by using their own support staff, organized simply for the short-term event of the campaign. None of this, of course, came without resources; the cost of media time is very high. Aside from the decline of parties, Bimber observes that interest groups also took advantage of broadcast media. An interest group with a well focused set of causes and with good resources in back of them could command the attention of politicians because they could effectively feed information about political processes to a wide public audience. In the 1980s, this took yet another turn with the advent of cable media, allowing highly localized targeting at lower costs and outside of the domination by a few huge media systems.
Bimber's fourth revolution is, of course, the rise of digital communication and the internet in particular. At this point, one of the main features of this revolution is the combination of much lower cost with the empowerment of individuals. You don't need a broadcast station in order to get onto the internet; and even the prices of computers have dropped far enough to make them generally available. While it continues to be argued that the internet is an elitist medium, that is an argument that will have declining validity over the next decade. Meanwhile, both electronic mail and the World Wide Web have captured a great deal of commercial activity, all of which brings people into the media where they can be influenced in other ways. Bimber's Chapter 4 details five case histories in which WWW and e-mail were used effectively by interest groups to affect legislation and policy formation in Federal, state, and local contexts. Effecient search engines like Google and Yahoo make it easy to locate organizations and access helpful information on topics of concern. Once a person shows some interest in a topic and shares some contact information, organizations can funnel relevant information to him/her as well as help to put the person in touch with politicians who matter in the debate.
As Bimber demonstrates through his case studies, the internet favors interesting changes in organizational structure and financing. It also allows organizations to work in highly focused regions and to keep the flow of lobbying efforts to small numbers of specific targets. All of this is possible because of the effective ways in which computers can filter and organize data. One of the more interesting aspects of this trend is the fact that organizations can work through several levels of membership participation and commitment. In the least committed realm, large numbers of people interested in very specific issues can be used effectively over a short period of time and then allowed to recede into the background. As a consequence, it is difficult to judge what an organization's actual membership size is.
The Web offers interesting ways in which diverse organizations can cooperate. Deciding to work together on a specific issue, a number of organizations can craft a Web site which may or may not actually reflect who they are. The important feature of such activity is being able to draw on large databases of potential members (especially when there is sufficient data on people's interests or concerns) and large pools of reliable information. Information can be funneled to members as well as to important policy makers; at the same time, members can be put in touch with key policy makers. When that issue has been dealt with, the Web site and the coalition can simply go away.
The obvious features of the Internet Information Age are its relatively low cost, the enormous increase of available information, and the effectiveness with which information can be searched, organized, and handled. For all of that, however, it is not clear what the political benefits will be so far as democracy is concerned. It would definitely be entirely premature to label the Internet as a "great democratizing force" as some people have been eager to do. Early studies seem to demonstrate, to the contrary, that people simply carry their established habits into the Internet. The profiles of voter participation have not significantly changed. Of course, beyond voter participation lies the much more relevant issue of "voter attention" --- the degree to which voters pay attention to the performances of their representatives and other political leaders. No matter what levels are achieved in voter participation, the quality of democracy is directly related to the availability of information about performance, the variety and quality of choices available through balloting, and the degree to which voters take advantage of this.
Updated on April 18, 2006; click here to return to My HomePage or here to return to Course Index Page.