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Internet: A Technological Tool & Changes in Political Power
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【按】这是应西班牙某社会学刊物写的一篇discussion paper。也许算是个评论性的文字，用英文写的，不想译成中文了，好在大家英文都不错，没关系的。有兴趣者就看看吧。
Professor Bruce Bimber gives us a sound description between technology and political power in his Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power. It is an interesting topic and as the subtitle of the book shows, he is very much concerned with the evolution of technology. Evolution is a big word that could be employed in any situation. Bimber, however, confined this big word to a small area in the world and in an even narrower manner to political power.
America is a young country with advanced technology, especially Internet, which is so popular at present. Bimber’s interests also focus on the new technology with what he called post-bureaucratic pluralism during the information age with its pervasive computing. Actually, politics has to be adapted to changing technology, that is to say, bureaucracy should have an alternative form with respect to previous ones. In this book, Bimber provides a historical framework of the four political information revolutions from the “very birth of the American constitution” to the “technological revolution driven by the Internet” in the United States. And different conventions have their own ways of spreading information, hence political powers have to use these means for their own convenience to achieve their political endeavors.
The author argues that political organizations and structures in the United States have adapted over time to the changing opportunities and constraints for managing political information and communication. These changes in the cost and distribution of communication and information have not occurred continuously, but have gone through long periods of stability punctuated by rather rapid moments of transformation arising from technological developments or changes in the economic and institutional complexity of society. These information revolutions advantaged certain kinds of organizations and structures over others in the political marketplace, leading to adaptation in the world of politics.
These were not changes in the structure of state institutions, though they have clearly evolved over more than two centuries. Changes associated with information revolutions have been concentrated in the domain of the linkage organizations and intermediaries that connect individuals in a sometimes rapidly changing society to the more slowly evolving structures of the state. The rise of the Internet and the adaptation of political organizations to changing circumstances in the 1990s and 2000s produced the fourth information regime in the US, which is characterized by abundance in information and communication, and which has weakened relationships between the distribution of material resources and the ability to organize certain kinds of political action.
Transforming matter into material is certainly a social process. However, nobody would assert that it is fully controlled by society, even less so when material is combined to form complex artifacts and systems. Technology is not a conscious subject; it is not an independent object by itself. It forms visible and often frightening environments, which are enabling and forbidding at the same time. Observations such as are the foundation of the dilemma of technological determinism: Is society the High Priest or the apprentice? Or are both residents within society? Is there agency in technology or only behind it?
Nonetheless, Bimber is optimistic about the post-bureaucratic pluralism or information regime as he called for the political engagement of the citizen via Internet. Especially, he concluded that the information revolution will be in the middle. A well informed citizenry is a “well-established tenet of American popular culture.” Good citizenship as the core value can be much better attained in the information revolution, and […] “the rise of contemporary in information technology raises questions about this ideal of informed citizenship.” What questions? Bimber puts out a few, for example, if the evolution of media and the changing characteristics of information across time lead to changes in the nature of political intermediaries, what about levels of citizen engagement? Is the rise of information abundance and new post-bureaucratic structures for collective action in the contemporary period linked to the broader engagement in politics?
In the Preface to the Chinese edition of his book, Bimber observed that two
important developments have occurred since the book was written. In the world of technology and politics itself, a new generation of Internet tools that rapidly came to be called “social media” appeared. Beginning in 2003 and 2004, new ways of employing the Internet and cellular telephony gave primacy to people’s ability to create and distribute their own messages, images, and other content, and to organize their communication and sharing of information around social networks – their own networks, the networks of the people within their networks, and networks further removed. A key feature of this development for politics is that boundaries have broken down between these layers of networks of individual citizens on the one hand, and on the other hand the mass media and political organizations. This phenomenon has been global in scale, and through social networking tools has touched politics in other countries. In the US, these collapsing boundaries between citizens in their social networks and formal political organizations have thus far reached their peak during Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign in 2008 – a campaign that featured the intensive and adept use of technologies that had not existed even a few years before. In the midst of the present information revolution, five or ten years is a very long time.
The second development involves advances in research on media and politics. In the world of academic research, five or even ten years is not such a long time, though there has been much new work on digital media and politics. In the US context, and also to some extent in Europe, Asia and other places of the world, a question of central fascination for many people has been whether or not the Internet would precipitate an increase in various kinds of democratic participation. Those findings have been interpreted variously as evidence for and against an effect on participation from Internet use. It is now much clearer that a small positive association does exist between Internet use and participation in some cases, and this can not be explained away as an artifact of political interest. It is likely that the effect is concentrated among younger generations, and it appears increasingly clear that interest in public affairs and other motivational characteristics interact with the use of digital media – something that was not explored in this book.
Beyond the lingering question of participation rates, the larger argument in this book was that the real action in politics and technology in the US lies in changing political structures for engagement and in new ways of organizing, not in how many people do or do not engage. Bimber believes that most of that argument is holding up well. The social media revolution has done nothing if not accelerate those processes of information revolution. New structures of political association appear and fade away through social media tools, often focused on specific events such as protests or political decisions. At the same time, long-standing formal organizations are adapting and exploring new strategies.
It is said the number of the Internet users in China is the largest in the world. So far as the question of democracy is concerned, it is always a sensitive topic because of the wide and instant spreading of information across the Internet. And the consequence might be drastic in a country with such a large population. In contrast to the information regime, China is trying to adopt a deliberative democracy in order not to trigger the problem as Bimber observed with regard to the Million Mother March, etc.
Public forums break through the limits of time and space resulting in direct and indirect communication for citizens to negotiate with the traditional bureaucratic officers, forcing them to encounter the questions in real society, which were often concealed due to the bureaucracy system. Politics is regarded as a topic within the government. However, with the rise of the Internet in China, discussion and engagement beyond the government has come into being. In pluralistic environments many common topics in relation to politics and policies are being debated and communicated. This, in my opinion, provides momentum for the evolution of the political structure on the one hand, and on the other, it dissolves the unstable factors during the process of modernization and stimulates the democratic consciousness of citizens. However, we have to admit there is still a long way ahead in a country that has experienced such an accelerated social transformation in the last 10 years. Bimber’s book is an outstanding mirror for the Chinese scholars in which we can see that the new technology will sooner or later change the political scenario of China.
https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-105489-521237.html
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