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Information technology in the political process
``` [What effect does the Internet have on social institutions? The standard answer is "disintermediation": the Internet eliminates intermediaries, middlemen, go-betweens, middle managers, elected representatives, and other people who mediate social relationships. In the whole realm of absurd ideas of the cyberpundits, disintermediation is one of most absurd. It does have some advantages: it is fun to say, it sounds very technical, and it promises to reconcile a tension between the desire for total earth-shattering revolution and the desire for perfect predictability. It has only two problems: (1) it makes no sense, and (2) it bears only the most glancing relationship to reality. Why should the Internet eliminate intermediaries? Intermediaries are useful because they help their clients to economize on information, search effort, and other expensive things. A market institution, for example, maintains relationships with a large number of buyers and sellers, bringing the buyers and sellers together in ever-changing patterns and then taking a little of their money off the top. Why would the buyers and sellers want to approach each other individually? That would be terribly cumbersome. Indeed, the Internet, being a well-established data transport standard, makes it easy for a market institution to bring more buyers and sellers together, perhaps consolidating the efforts of market institutions that had previously been distributed all around the social or geographic landscape. The Internet does lead to changes in patterns of intermediation. One prominent story along these lines is the unlamented decline of traditional stockbrokers in the face of competition from online trading services. What's happening here is not disintermediation but an unbundling of different aspects of an intermediary service. Stockbrokers have a conflict of interest when they both provide investment advice and make markets in particular investments, and investors are very pleased to get their trading services and their advice from different sources. Disintermediation does make sense in the cases when an intermediary serves purely and solely as an information conduit that can be completely replaced by a mailing list or conferencing system. That is the standard explanation (invented by Peter Drucker) for the alleged slaughter of middle managers through "delayering" in the early 1990's. It is also the standard explanation, though in a less direct way, for the partial displacement of warehouses by superstores and just-in-time manufacturing methods. Further examples are available; I agree, for example, that new cryptographic techniques, combined with the Internet, have a decent chance of disintermediating much of the clearing- house system for commercial settlements. But that is an unusual case, and hardly representative of what most intermediaries do. Indeed, as the editors of a new cyber business magazine called Release 2.0 point out, the people who are making money on the Internet are mostly intermediaries. They (and others) describe what's happening as "reintermediation", a term that seems entirely fair. (Not that I entirely approve of Release 2.0. What can you say about a publication that plasters on the cover of its first issue some executive saying, "We want to have the paranoia of Grove and the ruthlessness of Gates"? When we have business-leader wannabes openly proclaiming their desire to be immoral and crazy, what has become of us?) The point is, there is very little reason, either in theory or in empirical reality, to suppose that we are headed for a world without intermediaries. What we will see instead is a complex reshuffling of the systems of intermediation in the world. Whereas disintermediation envisages a veritable thunderclap of intimate contact between formerly intermediated parties, reintermediation envisages a much more complicated process that is hard to generalize about. What we need is fewer broad generalizations about the "effects" of information technology and more useful concepts for analyzing the great diversity of interactions between information technology and its institutional contexts. This sort of thing is not the cyberpundits' stock-in-trade. The cyberpundits need to make headlines, offer simplicity and optimism, and declare ever-grander revolutions. What society needs is the kind of analytical precision that comes with the more sober varieties of social analysis -- in other words, what intellectuals do. Intellectuals shouldn't be running the world, but they should be engaged with the world, plugging the conceptual vacuums that ideas like disintermediation are always prepared to fill. The Internet makes such engagement easier, and we should be ragging on intellectuals to make greater use of it.]
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Information technology in the political process
Philip E. Agre Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California 90095-1521
pagre@ucla.edu http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
This is a revised version of my remarks at the Congressional Seminar on "Technology and Social Change" organized by the Consortium of Social Science Associations, June 1998.
What effect has information technology had so far on the political process? One answer is "nobody knows". Little research has been conducted on the matter. My own expertise derives not from research but from practical involvement. In 1993, for example, I observed that many Internet-based issue campaigns were doing more harm than good, and so I wrote the first manual on the subject. Some research does exist, however, and I will draw on it in my comments.
That said, another answer is "not much". In the political process, television is still the most important medium. The campaign workers who buy the TV ads are far more powerful than the ones who maintain the Web site. Surveys of the people who spend the most time on the Internet demonstrate that even those technically advanced individuals get only a small proportion of their political information on the Internet (Bimber 1997). Even more surprisingly, those individuals also conduct only a small proportion of their interaction with the government online.
When discussing the role of the Internet in the political process, therefore, we are mostly talking about anecdotes -- anecdotes that have been invested with hopes and fears out of all proportion to their actual impact. And we must distinguish between the thousand small- scale experiments that are happening now and the transformational innovations that we imagine might occur in the future.
It is particularly important to talk about the hopes that people invest in distributed information technology. Compared to the citizens of other countries, Americans' hopes for the Internet appear to be distinctive in certain ways. Let us consider a sentence from a respected scholar that epitomizes those hopes:
"telecommunications technologies ... are breaking down the barriers of time and distance that originally precluded the nation's people from voting directly for the laws that govern them" (Grossman 1995: 6; quoted in Bimber 1997)
I have read this sentence many times, and like many widely held beliefs about the new communications media, it seems to oscillate between common sense and absurdity. To begin to unpack the issues a little bit, I want to suggest five ways in thinking about it.
(1) The sentence I quoted is a relatively mild case of a new grammatical form that might be called the future present tense. Proponents of cyberspace use the future present tense when they issue a prediction -- that is, when they describe something they think will happen in the future -- as if it were already happening now.
(2) The assertion is also ahistorical; it suggests that the founding fathers of this country would have instituted direct democracy if telecommunications has been invented. The experiment is hard to do since the founding fathers are long gone. But it turns out that Madison spoke to the issue directly in the tenth Federalist paper -- the celebrated paper on faction. For Madison, it mattered that information, and particularly the information used by social movements, traveled slowly, so that a movement that arises in one part of the country will have difficulty spreading to other parts. He regarded this as a necessary condition for the success of republican government. Indeed, if the Madison were alive today, he would probably regard the Internet with horror.
(3) The idea of direct democracy is also deeply embedded in cyberculture, that is, the cultural construction of the Internet by technologists. At the same time, the idea of direct democracy makes little sense. Information technology does facilitate the distribution of political information, a phenomenon with many consequences. But many things happen in the political process that nobody knows how to automate. Examples include legislative analysis, research, agenda formation, and coalition building. These are, not coincidentally, the primary functions of political intermediaries such as interests groups and political parties, not to mention legislative staffs. The Internet may be able to redistribute these activities geographically, but it will not eliminate them. (I owe this point to Francois Bar.)
(4) An even more straightforward technical problem arises with the notion, also widespread among technologists, that direct democracy will enable people to vote at home on a great many issues using the Internet. Few things are more clearly impossible. We employ neighborhood voting stations and voting booths for a good reason: you cannot prove that people's votes has not been coerced unless you physically remove them from their normal surroundings and associations. This problem can be hard for technologists to conceptualize because they define the notion of "voting" in a technical way for which the problem does not even arise.
(5) I will dwell on my final point at the greatest length, even though I do not have time to defend it fully. The sentence I quoted for you illustrates a deep-seated and specifically American idea: that the Internet will bring about a state of unmediated intimacy. The ideal of unmediated intimacy goes back to 17th- and 18th-century reformed- Protestant communitarianism in New England (Shain 1996). Even though many of the early utopian communities failed, the ideals that inspired them entered the national conscience in a powerful way, and they have structured cyber-discourse to an extraordinary extent (Agre 1998a). The concept of cyberspace, in other words, is an American social ideal projected onto technology, and the prediction is that the technology will bring about this American version of utopianism.
I should emphasize that my complaint is not with the utopian vision -- we can talk about that another time -- but with notion that the technology will inevitably bring it about, or that it is even capable of bringing it about. Yet professional discourse about the Internet offers a standard story about the way in which the Internet is supposed to change things, namely through "disintermediation". The paradigm case of disintermediation is Wal-Mart. Sam Walton realized that people will to drive further to save money, and that information technology can track and predict inventories continually and in detail. As a result, Wal-Mart can ship products directly from the factory to the store, thereby eliminating the double-handling at the warehouse.
The notion of disintermediation is central to the social imagination of many computer people: it provides their theory of changes in markets, political institutions, business firms, higher education, and so on. For example, I sometimes receive electronic mail from computer people who have a political problem with college professors; their plan is to disintermediate me using information technology. They see me as a middleman standing between the students and the material that the students are learning, and they want to cut me out by distributing this material centrally over the Internet. Perhaps the most significant example of disintermediation is the so-called delayering of organizations that is said to have taken place around 1990; Peter Drucker (1988) explained this phenomenon by pointing to the communicative function of middle managers -- they convey information up and down the hierarchy -- that computer networks are well-equipped to replace. Whether it really happened that way is hard to know. The point here, though, is that this idea holds a great deal of power among many technical people. And these people want to disintermediate the democratic political system. They view political representation as the equivalent of warehouses.
We face, therefore, the intellectual challenge of identifying the elements of truth in the disintermediation story and separating them from the elements of the utopian vision that do not fit the data. It is crucial to discern a hidden assumption of the disintermediation story: the idea that information technology has an "effect" on the world through its own autonomous action. As a professor working on Internet issues at the local university, I am sometimes called by reporters who ask, for example, "What effect will the Internet have on privacy?", or (a real example) "What effect will the Internet have on relations between men and women?". If a reporter is calling on the phone and treating me as an expert on relations between men and women, clearly something is wrong. What's wrong is the notion that technology is having a unilateral effect on the world. Information technology certainly participates in important social changes, but it does so in several different ways, depending on its interaction with other factors. The disintermediation story may direct us to a real phenomenon, but it also direct us away from other phenomena that are frequently the predominant ones. Such is the case with the political system.
In particular, disintermediation is a story about information technology replacing things and destroying things. But another kind of effect is often more important: information technology can allow the same people to do more of the same things that they already do, amplifying some activities and not others, so that the whole system shifts to a new equilibrium. Although the whole matter requires further study, my personal sense is that the latter effect is the better way to understand the role of information technology in the political process.
Let us consider some examples. The Internet has a role in real-time mobilization and coalition work. One might, for instance, broadcast a message to one's coalition partners about an activity taking place in Congress. Electronic mail makes it easier for a coalition to agree on a unified message or draft a collective letter. The group might agree that dissents from a proposed draft should be raised within 24 hours, and that silence will be interpreted as agreement. This practice is certainly widespread, and it has the potential to increase the number of people who participate in political work from day to day. Yet the qualitative structure has not changed. We are still talking about interest groups, their coalitions, their memberships, and their work of mobilization. Preestablished social networks among the members of a potential coalition are still crucial. The technology makes it possible to accelerate these activities and broaden their scope. A lot of things that have happened extensively through fax machines can now happen on a much greater scale because of the Internet.
What is the actual magnitude of this phenomenon? Nobody knows. I know of no attempt to measure it, and indeed I have rarely encountered any curiosity about it. Such is the state of our models about these things. Its extent is easily overestimated because of the prominence of anecdotes from cyber-enthusiasts and press releases from political consultants, as well as the use of the future present tense in the magazines where such things are discussed.
One aspect of the phenomenon for which the anecdotes are particularly compelling is in the role of the Internet in the globalization of the policy process. We have seen, for example, the emergence of globally organized interest groups such as women's and environmental groups and business organizations. The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) for example, has been slowed by a highly effective global alliance of labor groups who have conducted coordinated actions in numerous countries (Drohan 1998).
The MAI story is an anecdote; what, intellectually speaking, do we do with it? The important analytical point is this: we are not watching the Internet unilaterally causing the policy process to globalize. Rather, globalization is a much larger phenomenon, and the Internet fits into that frame. The Internet, in other words, is not having an effect on the world. Rather, the Internet is part and parcel of something much larger.
Another example is the use of marketing methods in campaigns. Ideas, language, and methods from marketing have been used to fashion campaign messages for some time. More recently, information technology has made it possible to engage in much more of (what marketers would call) a "one-to-one" model of campaigning, in which a database records individuals' political leanings and hot issues. Such databases can be used to customize mailings to potential voters and establish priorities for get-out-the-vote activities. This sort of thing existed before information technology, but information technology makes it cheaper. Its magnitude is easier to measure than the use of the Internet in interest group mobilization, simply from the tables that are published in Campaigns and Elections magazine. It is a significant phenomenon, and it may be the most significant use of information technology in the political process. Real numbers, however, are once again elusive.
All of that concerns the political process in a formal sense. Let me back up and say a few words about civil society more generally. One important thing that Internet has done, almost subliminally, has been to make much more visible society's processes of collective cognition (Agre 1998b). Most of what happens on the Internet, especially in the tens of thousands of online discussion groups, is that people who have something in common get together to compare notes, answer one another's questions, hash out issues, and share news. In other words, people mostly use the Internet to think together, and they do so on the basis of an extraordinary variety of common interests. These activities are commonly held to occur in a brand new place called cyberspace which is qualitatively different from the rest of the world. Analytically, however, it is more useful to see online discussion groups as simply one more medium by which those people who have something in common can think together. People already think together by means of conferences, newsletters, professional organizations, and consultants who travel from place to place. A tremendous variety of social mechanisms, both spontaneous and planned, have arisen throughout history to enable people to pool their thinking. The Internet is just one more of those mechanisms, and we cannot evaluate its impact unless we understand its relationship to all of the others.
A good example, and the core example that I use in my courses, is people with cancer. A good case can be made -- this is an area where good research has been done (e.g., Feenberg 1995) -- that the Internet has changed what it means to be sick. In the old days, someone with cancer faced the medical profession more or less as an individual. Now, people who discover that they have cancer are likely to get a modem and join the highly organized community, disease by disease, on the Internet and America Online. As a result, it now makes sense to say that the community of people with cancer is interacting as a group with the community of oncologists. When a community uses the Internet to become organized for the first time, the potential for qualitative change is significant. In other areas, by contrast, professional organizations are already highly developed, and so the potential for qualitative change may be less. These are areas that we lack even the concepts to talk about, much less the numbers.
Real uncertainties aside, the Internet deserves some credit on these counts. Its reputation for incivility is overrated. This reputation derives from our selective attention to those parts of the Internet that are publicly open and visible. Those parts are, almost by definition, less self-regulated than the more closed and private parts. The vast majority of the Internet, in my opinion, is largely peaceable. Problems of information quality on the Internet are probably also exaggerated; at least no conclusions about the matter can be drawn from the small number of anecdotes that have been publicized.
The Internet, in sum, makes visible some important social processes and is changing our awareness of civil society. What is harder is to render a judgment about the magnitudes, quantities, and directions of various changes. Much is made, for example, of the alleged decline in American associational life, the "bowling alone" phenomenon (Putnam 1995). Assuming that the phenomenon actually exists, is the Internet contributing to a reversal of it? We don't know.
One thing, however, is fairly clear: the Internet does not represent a reversion to the days of the Elks Lodge and the world of civic organizations with stable memberships, regular meetings, strong claims on personal identity, and complex rules and traditions. That classical associational world is, if anything, being replaced by a world that is quite different in character. This new world is so hard to evaluate in part precisely because the Internet reaches into so many different facets of life. Many technologies have their effect at one place in the world, so that you can go look and measure and compare and document. The Internet, however, is not like that. The Internet reaches into practically every dimension of social life, and it becomes very hard to reason about.
That is why it is so crucial to be aware of the cultural system of myths and ideas that our society projects onto the technology. It is so hard to get a realistic handle on what people are doing with the technology -- the causes and effects and their magnitudes -- that a vacuum opens up. Into that vacuum pours a whole semi-conscious system of hopes and fears. If we are going to understand the technology then we must first recover a historical awareness of our ideas about our nation and about people and their lives. Once we recover awareness of those ideas, we can begin to see how the ideas are a material force, both in the shaping of technology and the ways that people use the technology in society.
References
Philip E. Agre, Yesterday's tomorrow, Times Literary Supplement, 3 July 1998a, pages 3-4.
Philip E. Agre, Designing genres for new media, in Steven G. Jones, ed, CyberSociety 2.0: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998b.
Bruce Bimber, The Internet and Political Communication in the 1996 Election Season, Research Note, Department of Political Science, UC Santa Barbara, 1997. Available online at http://www.sscf.ucsb.edu/~survey1/mobilize.htm
Madelaine Drohan, How the net killed the MAI: Grassroots groups used their own globalization to derail deal, Globe and Mail (Toronto), 29 April 1998.
Peter F. Drucker, The coming of the new organization, Harvard Business Review 66(1), 1988, pages 45-53.
Andrew Feenberg, The online patient meeting, paper delivered at the sixth International Symposium on ALS/MND: Quality of Life Issues, Dublin, October 1995.
Lawrence K. Grossman, The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age, New York: Viking, 1995.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling alone: America's declining social capital, Journal of Democracy 6(1), 1995, pages 65-78.
Barry Shain, The Myth of American Individualism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Questions and Answers
Nickell, Washington Fax: In terms of real people getting involved in the political process. With an EPA rulemaking on ozone they got scads of e-mail from ordinary citizens, way beyond the usual situation where people have to write letters in response to dockets and federal register notices. Also, the USDA, in its recent rulemaking on organic labeling, got scads of email from individuals and small farmers and they wound up changing their proposal. I've never seen anything like this. Does it appear at least at the regulatory level that real people are having a greater chance of getting involved in the political system now than they did -- other than the usual suspects -- ten years ago?
AGRE: I don't see an easy answer. How would we measure that? My personal sense, from having been involved in some issue campaigns, and having talked to others, is that the situation is qualitatively the same as it always was. An interest group needs someone on the ground in Washington, walking the halls and talking to the agencies. Someone needs to specialize in maintaining that surveillance. What the Internet makes easier is activating a constituency to send email or make phone calls. Different parts of government have had a wide range of experiences with email from citizens. In many cases it has simply been shut off because of the junk and automatically generated messages. In other cases it has been highly constructive. I have heard compelling anecdotes from both ends.
In trying to address your question, I want to guard against the assumption that a healthy democracy means no interest groups, just individuals interacting as individuals with government people. We have 250 million or so citizens, we have only so many thousands of folks working in the government, and it wouldn't work for the millions all to interact as individuals with the thousands. We will have some system of intermediaries no matter what. So the question is not one of cutting out the intermediaries, but understanding what role the intermediaries have. I have heard anecdotes where a lobbyist will identify an issue and will not inform any congressional staffer at all that they care about it but will simply call in the guns from out among their constituency. A greater repertoire of different kinds of action becomes available. I don't know if anyone has documented the extent or the effectiveness of these strategies. It's still very much at the level of the street knowledge of the participants.
Bill Eadie, National Communication Association: In the Communications Decency Act case the Supreme Court struggled to find a metaphor for the Internet. The Congress attempted to regulate the Internet as a broadcast medium in that case, but the Supreme Court said no. The Supreme Court itself couldn't come up with a single metaphor; they were convinced that there were multiple metaphors. What does this imply for potential regulation? There are legitimate concerns about transmission of inappropriate information via the Internet.
AGRE: The legal procedure of deciding on the appropriate precedent is, in my opinion, unworkable. The Internet is, among other things, a computer. When you design a computer, you start with a metaphor and you build that metaphor right into the software. The Internet is, in this sense, whatever you want it to be, and any precedent can apply. So I think it's a serious problem. The particular case of obscenity has no single solution. If you simply give children a search engine then they are going to type in words. That is just not sustainable. Civil liberatians will insist that you can't make that illegal. And they might be right. But it's not sustainable anyway.
So how to proceed? Educators will have to build intermediating institutions between the children and the materials on the Web -- more complex, more structured, and more specific to educational purposes than the general-purpose Web filtering systems, which haven't worked. That's a lot of effort, of course. Even if the educators are not particularly organized to build those institutions, the good news is that the Internet makes that kind of organizing much easier. There are lots of educators and lots of professional schools of education, and together they can expend the necessary labor. This will not happen overnight. And many educators will resist such things because they don't want to become the content cops. But we know a lot about the efforts of Internet communities to govern themselves: different kinds of rules and informal arrangements, the relative role of technical and social mechanisms, and so on. So we have a basis in practical experience for this type of work. What we do not have is a large body of experience building complex, sustainable institutions online. Many problems call for this sort of institution building, but if we remain stuck on technological fixes and the disintermediation model then the problems have no solution.
Mike Rodemeyer, House Science Committee: I thought I'd ask a question that gives you a chance to speculate in the future present tense. The question crosses all of your presentations because it's both work and politics. When I think of an institution that has a workplace problem of having to transcend time and space, I think about the House of Representatives, where they actually meet three days a week because members have to fly in from all over the country and then fly back to their districts. If you go to the House floor to watch a debate, most members are not down there. You have a handful of members on the House floor, and the rest are sitting back in their offices doing other business or at best watching the debate on C-Span. Why can't members of Congress just stay back in their districts and vote remotely?
AGRE: I don't know. Maybe they can. Let me draw an analogy to something that serious work has been done on: the financial industry. You might think that information technology would enable the finance people to scatter to the corners of the earth so they can be close to the businesses they invest in, or to their clients. In fact, just the opposite is the case. In her study of "global cities", Saskia Sassen (1991) concluded that the financial industry is concentrating on a global basis in New York City precisely because information technology allows them to be distant from those things. It turns out that the financial people find it more important to have face time with one another than with their clients or with their investments. So in the case of the House of Representatives, the complexity of the face-to-face work done in the House may be so great that the information technology draws the members to Washington. Or perhaps the complexity of their face-to-face work back home draws them there. You have those two forces, and information technology allows the stronger force to win out. Which is the stronger force? You're the expert. My personal sense is that they are roughly equal forces and that the current situation will not change.
References
Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
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