OT: [RRE]Real-Time Politics (long)
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Real-Time Politics:
The Internet and the Political Process
Philip E. Agre
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520
USA
pa...@ucla.edu
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
This is a draft. Please do not quote from it or cite it.
Version of 16 February 2001.
Footnotes and references to follow.
5900 words.
//1 Introduction
The Internet is good to think with. Its promise of ubiquitous
transport of information makes it a perfect screen for projecting
the hopes and fears of a society. Nowhere are these projected hopes
and fears more elaborate than with regard to politics. Closely
bound to national and thus personal identity, yet also by its nature
also a permanent source of disappointment, the political process is
being intensively reimagined in the context of new information and
communications technologies. But while forms of imagination are
always valuable data, they are rarely sufficient guides to analysis.
By arraying before us the most prominent ways in which American
culture, at least, has imagined the wired political process, and by
subjecting these forms of imagination to the somewhat harsher light
of social analysis, it will be possible to discern the contours of
a structural theory of the Internet's actual and potential role in
politics. (For convenience I will allow the meaning of "the Internet"
to shift as needed across the whole universe of convergent digital
information and communication technologies.)
Let us start right in with brief discussions of ten common proposals,
both to clear the ground for alternatives and to gather materials
for their construction. (For a broader survey of the literature, see
Harrison, Stephen, and Falvey (1999).)
(1) Many theorists, explicitly or not, have equated wired democracy
with online discussion fora, for example on Usenet, the Well, or the
Web. Some proceed to focus on particularly promising cases of virtual
self-governance, and others on the triviality of a forum chosen at
random. In each case the online forum is evaluated relative to an
idealized model of the public sphere, with its norms of subjectless
rational debate. The Internet gets credit for its ability to support
a pluralistic diversity of intersecting public spheres (Buchstein
1997: 251), and it is dismissed as yet another site for the silencing
of voices through various easy-to-imagine forms of psychological
terrorism. The problem in either case is that the public sphere
is, and always will be, a much larger phenomenon than an Internet
discussion forum. This is true in several ways. First, the debates
in online fora interact with goings-on in other media, television
for example. Second, different online fora are embedded to various
extents, and in different ways, in larger social structures such
as professions and social movements, and their dynamics are hard
to understand except in terms of this embedding (Wynn and Katz 1997).
And third, online discussion fora comprise only a small proportion
of the uses of the Internet and other convergent digital media in
politics. When the Internet is used to distribute talking points
to partisans, press releases to reporters, or administrative memos
to the staff of a political organization, that too is a potentially
significant "impact" of the Internet on politics.
(2) A related strand of thought judges the Internet by its ability
to bring about a condition or unmediated intimacy often known as
political community. Again different estimates of this criterion are
optimistic or pessimistic, and again the criterion is misguided. The
norm of intimacy has different sources in different national political
cultures, but in each case it is a form of nostalgia, whether for the
religious communitarian city on a hill or for the village community
that supposedly predated the upheavals of modernism or capitalism.
Unmediated intimacy may well be feasible in a small group; it may even
be necessary and beneficial. But modern society, particularly in an
era when everything can be connected to everything else, is too big
for that. Intimacy is particularistic; it requires an investment of
time and effort. Modern societies operate because they have learned
to operate, at least for many purposes, in the opposite extreme mode
of impersonality (North 1990). The rule of law will not function if
judges are deeply embedded in the relational webs of the litigants;
that is why judges rotate on circuits. Markets likewise require
a taken-for-granted framework of law and custom in order for large
numbers of buyers and sellers to transact business with tolerably low
overhead. Norms of intimacy may have their place -- lurching entirely
to the impersonal opposite extreme is not warranted either. But the
hard analytical problem is to understand how the intimate and the
impersonal interact.
(3) The Internet is often held to make intermediaries redundant,
and this has suggested to many authors that the future of politics
lies in referenda -- or, depending on your stance toward them, direct
democracy or plebiscites. The arguments has some merit -- to the
extent that political parties, legislative representatives, and other
political intermediaries serve as communications channels, networking
with their constituents with one another, the spread of ubiquitous
digital networks should be able to automate them and undermine their
gatekeeping power. In a sophisticated polity the increased use of
referenda may well be justified. But experience has shown that simple
disintermediation scenarios are rarely accurate, and that the reality
is more often a reshuffling of the many functions of intermediaries,
including the ones that go beyond the mere transport of data
(Brown, Duguid, and Haviland 1994; Sarkar, Butler, and Steinfield
1995; Spulber 1999). New information and communication technologies
are helpful not least because they compel analysis of such things,
thereby making visible phenomena that might have been taken for
granted. Political parties and legislatures, for example, do not
simply transmit information; they actively process it, especially
by synthesizing political opinions and interests into ideologically
coherent platforms. They also engage in the discovery process of
negotiation. New technologies will not automate these intermediary
functions, but they might support them and change their dynamics
in ways that can be investigated once the fact of their survival is
allowed.
(4) Debates over information technology in politics are hardly
new, and a common, almost taken-for-granted proposal during the
1970s has been called managerial democracy: the intensified use of
computer decision-making tools by government staffs to rationalize,
professionalize, and ultimately depoliticize many of the functions of
government. Once the administration of public services is reduced to
an operations research problem, it was held, the problematic aspects
of the political process would become redundant -- an end to ideology
and its irrational conflicts. The reality, as scholars such as the
UC Irvine school made clear, is that rational public administration
does not live up to its promises (Danziger, Dutton, Kling and Kraemer
1982). For one thing, the politics largely goes underground, with
the dominant political coalitions manipulating the technology for
their own ends under the guise of rational methods. For another,
the technology was simply incapable of living up to its promises.
Real-world public management problems are more complex than the
models admit, and one is often left to set the valves of hundreds of
largely subjective and inevitably political parameters. Of course,
rationality and professionalization do have their place in government.
But computerized decision-support tools do not eliminate the
tension between politics and expertise that is central to all modern
government.
(5) Many other proposals focus on the voting process. Voting is a
central ritual of democracy, and it is also a process of information
capture and aggregation, and so it seems natural to use digital
networks to facilitate it. The idea is reasonable enough in the
abstract, but the devil is in the details. In particular, proposals
to bring voting to the home over the Internet are problematic.
Low voter turnout may well be reversed to a degree by making voting
easier, but the requirements for a sound voting process are complex.
Even supposing that the injustice caused by the unequal distribution
of the technology is overcome with time, problems of vote fraud are
more serious. Any voting method that can be overseen by others is
susceptible to vote-buying and intimidation. Physical isolation of
the voter, for example in a voting booth, is the only sure answer,
and the rapid spread of absentee voting in the United States, as well
as vote-by-mail system such as Oregon's, is a matter of great concern.
(6) Other voting proposals are constitutional in nature; they argue
that more advanced technology will support more complex voting methods
that allocate representatives or decide referenda in mathematically
more advanced ways. The problems here are numerous: the difficult
challenges to legitimacy posed by any attempt to revise anything
so central to a constitution as its voting methods, the narrowly
formalistic concern with mechanisms that only treat the symptoms of
a troubled political culture, and the cognitive and information-design
problems that complex voting systems entail. Although modified voting
systems might be part of a larger picture, they are a small part of
the picture and inadvisable until that picture becomes clear.
(7) One libertarian school of thought holds that the Internet largely
dictates the content of public policy by creating the conditions for
an idealized, decentralized global market. By facilitating capital
flight and making operations mobile, for example, the Internet is held
to promote regulatory competition among the world's jurisdictions,
with capital migrating to wherever it is well treated. This theory
certainly has its elements of truth, but it is far from completely
accurate. Information exhibits vast economies of scale, which promote
economic concentration. Many business activities require geographic
proximity, and the use of computer networks to loosen some geographic
bonds only increase the forces of aggregation that cause other
functions to centralize in world cities like New York or regional
innovation centers like Silicon Valley (Mitchell 2000). Furthermore,
the conception of market and government as vehemently opposed to one
another has always been wrong; the conditions of the modern market
were largely brought about by robust intervention by governments
(Polanyi 1944), and governments to this day are deeply allied
with their domestic industries in using their diplomatic leverage
to promote exports. This process has developed for centuries, and
has now been internalized beneath a veneer of neoliberal ideology
in mechanisms such as the World Trade Organization. Regulation is
routinely a competitive weapon. These dynamics are only intensifying
as new information technologies make it possible to coordinate
industrial and political activities over wide geographical areas.
(8) An opposed school of thought, for example among the followers
of Innis (1951), see new communications technologies as inevitably
centralizing, precisely because they allow peripheral regions to be
integrated more tightly into the systems of economic and political
centers (Gillespie and Robins 1989). When the emperor is far away, a
degree of de facto regional autonomy remains; but the Internet makes
the emperor ubiquitous in the same manner as other technologies of
control. This, too, is a partial truth that becomes disastrous when
treated as the whole. New information and communication technologies
are not inherently technologies of control; after all, they include
privacy-enhancing technologies such as cryptography that stand
available as one social choice among many. They also facilitate great
flexibility in the construction and reconstruction of associations and
networks; they facilitate the many forces of disembedding that pull
individuals loose from the close-knit orders of communitarian social
control. The picture is complex, in short, and social structures are
centralizing and decentralizing, both, in different and interacting
ways.
(9) E-mail and chat-room interactions arrive tagged not with visible
faces but with cryptic addresses, and so many people have held
that the Internet is a force for social equality. In the words
of a much-reprinted New Yorker cartoon, "On the Internet, nobody
knows you're a dog". Conventional markers of social difference
(gender, ethnicity, age, rank) are likewise held to be invisible,
and consequently it is contended that the ideas in an online
message are evaluated without the prejudices that afflict
face-to-face interaction. This argument exemplifies the dangers of
overgeneralizing from particular uses of the technology. Different
forums construct identity in a great variety of ways. Some forums,
such as role-playing MUDs, do permit the construction of entirely
"virtual" make-believe identities, although even in those forums "real
names" are often the norm (Schiano 1999). Other forums authenticate
their participants to prevent abuse. In many settings, such as
academia and business, it is normal for individuals to construct
elaborate public personae, and a someone who receives a message
from a stranger can research that person's background much more
readily than in the pre-Internet world. So it is not true, as a
broad generalization, that the Internet decouples communications
from identity. The reverse is often the case. Depending on how the
Internet is used, it can even reinforce the conventional constructions
of identity, or impose even finer gradations of status.
(10) Finally, it has often been argued that the Internet is a
democratizing force because it facilitates open information. There
can be no doubt that the Internet and related technologies have played
a positive role in opposition movements in several countries, but the
picture is more complex. First of all, the Internet has no power to
make information open on its own; the political culture has to want
it, and in many societies authoritarian habits beyond a narrow stratum
of intellectuals run deep. New technologies also serve as instruments
of surveillance, commercialization, and propaganda, all of which
are entirely capable of negating the benefits of open information
in practice (Buchstein 1997). More factors have to be taken into
account.
//2 Institutions
The picture that emerges from these analyses has many elements, but
some broad patterns are clear. Political activities on the Internet
are embedded in larger social processes, and the Internet itself is
only one element of an ecology of different media. The Internet does
not intervene de novo to create an entirely new political order; to
the contrary, to understand its role requires that we understand much
else about the social processes that surround it. Single factors do
not suffice, nor do one-sided generalizations. Instead one encounters
a pattern of tensions: between centralization and decentralization,
between intimacy and impersonality, and between professionalism
and politics. Above all one finds complexity: if the Internet has
"effects", it has many effects scattered throughout the structures
of society, so that it is difficult if not impossible to compute a
resultant of the many vectors along which the various effects run.
To make sense of these phenomena, it helps to take an institutional
approach (Commons 1970 [1950], Goodin 1996, March and Olsen 1989,
North 1990, Powell and DiMaggio 1991). Society is organized by
a diversity of institutions, each of which defines social roles
and identities, rules and enforcement mechanisms, situations and
strategies. Banking is an institution, and so is the newspaper
business. The family is an institution, as is the church, the English
language, and contract law. The political system is comprised of
several institutions -- political parties, legislatures, aspects
of the legal system, various types of associations, the customary
forms of debate and other communicative interactions, the rules of
parliamentary order, the methods of interest group organizing, the
profession of news management, and many more. These institutions are
centrally concerned with information, but also with power and identity
and many of the other central categories of social life.
Institutions persist, and their ways of ordering human relationships
can remain relatively unchanged for decades and centuries. The
recalcitrance of institutions may be masked during a period of
rapid change in information and communications technologies, when
a swarm of specific innovations focuses attention on novelty and
its opportunities, but even these changes cannot be well understood
except against the background of the many dynamics that tend to keep
institutions functioning in the way they already do. Institutions
shape thought and language, for example, and alternative institutional
forms can be hard to imagine -- even at a time when such imagining
is fashionable. Participants in an institution must coordinate
their activities, and for sheer purposes of compatibility it is
often rational to do things in the ways that others are doing them --
the ways that, for that reason among others, they have long been done.
Institutions must likewise continue to complement one another, and
the transition of several interlocking institutions to new forms is
almost impossible to coordinate. Institutions persist because of the
bodies of skill that have built up within them; another institutional
form might be preferable after a long learning period, but in the
short term it is the existing forms that people are good at. Above
all, institutions persist because they provide a terrain upon which
individuals and groups can pursue their goals -- goals that the
institution itself has taught them, to be sure, but goals that inspire
people to forgo substantial opportunity costs anyway.
To say that institutions coordinate activity is not to say that
they are wholly cooperative; more often the institution provides a
relatively stable and predictable framework for segmentary politics
that incorporates elements of cooperation and competition, among other
things, in shifting combinations. The framework that the institution
provides is itself largely political, and it is well understood as a
routinized accommodation among the stakeholder groups that comprise it.
When institutions change, it is not because a technology such as the
Internet descends and, deus ex machina, reorganizes the institution's
constitutive order in its own image. Institutions do often change as
a result of the opportunities that a new technology makes available,
but it is only through the workings of the institution that the
dynamics of the change can be found. Simply put, people use the
Internet to do more of what they already want to do. They use
the technology to pursue the goals that the institution provides,
using the strategies that it suggests, organized by the cognitive
and associative forms that it instills. If the technology is
incomprehensible within the thought-forms of the institution then
it will probably go unused (Orlikowski 1993). If nobody can devise
an action-pattern for deploying the technology in ways that mesh with
the existing gears of the institution, then likewise no significant
effects are likely to be found. It follows that the Internet creates
little that is qualitatively new; instead, for the most part, it
amplifies existing forces. Social forces are nothing but coordinated
human will, and institutions channel that will in some directions
more than others. To the extent that institutional actors can pursue
existing goals by reinterpreting existing action-patterns in a newly
available technology, the forces that their massed actions create will
be amplified.
To predict the "impact" of the Internet, therefore, it is necessary
to survey the forces at work in the existing institutions. This
may be difficult if the institutional forms have long remained in
equilibrium; the exact nature of the forces might only become evident
as the equilibrium begins to move. The Internet will not amplify all
forces equally, and not all of the forces will be headed in the same
direction. The Internet is amplifying hundreds if not thousands of
forces in scores of institutional fields, each with its own logic and
resources, and many of those forces conflict. If we ask what effect
the Internet will have on the political process, for example, then the
question is ill-posed: the Internet has its effect only in the ways
that it is appropriated, and it is appropriated in so many different
ways that nobody has enough information to add them up. Some of the
changes will take the form of "the same, only more so"; others will
be qualitative, as the existing accommodations become untenable.
Institutions may implode, or fragment and reconfigure, or their
functions may be absorbed by rivals. Each case needs to be evaluated
on its own. In an old vocabulary we can safely say that the
contradictions are heightened, but past that the dialectic must be
sought in its particulars.
This perspective on the Internet's place in society aligns itself
neither with the optimists nor the pessimists but with the realists;
it is a story neither of continuity or discontinuity but of measured
components of both. It is sensitive to the dual roles of institutions
as both constraints and enablements, and it is tuned equally to the
real workings of the technology and to the workings of the social
mechanisms with which the technology interacts. It concerns phenomena
that are localized not simply in organizational centers but in the
distributed sites of practice where institutions shape action and are
thereby reshaped in turn. It seeks neither to escape this enmeshment
in social process nor to enclose it. It is impressed by the Internet
but sees the Internet as 5% of the story. It lives with tension; it
is neither conservative nor revolutionary.
//3 Examples
Because the concept of amplification lives in the details of
particular cases, it will help to consider some cases here -- a few
simple cases to start, and then a couple of larger ones.
(1) One of the handful of people who can claim to have invented the
personal computer was Lee Felsenstein (Freiberger and Swaine 1984:
100). A red-diaper activist from Berkeley as well as an electronics
geek, Felsenstein wanted a device to automate the work of human
volunteers who ran bulletin boards for political movements. Activists
would call the volunteer on the phone to report an upcoming event or
inquire about events, and the events would be recorded on slips of
paper on an actual bulletin board. Their job was generally too much
for any individual, and volunteers would often burn out by the time
they became well enough known to be useful. Mainframe computers
were far too large and costly for this job, and so Felsenstein
invented personal computers and bulletin board systems to amplify the
existing force toward the centralized posting of notices of events.
The technology was then appropriated by others for other purposes.
(2) The Internet also amplifies the routine of issue politics whereby
temporary coalitions are pulled together dynamically according to how
the various interests sort out (Laumann and Knoke 1989). This process
has long been conducted with face-to-face meetings, telephone calls,
and other media, but the Web and electronic mail are exceptionally
useful for coordinating moderate numbers of parties in moderately
complex but largely routinized ways. The force to create such
alliances is still present, but now the competitive imperative to do
so quickly is even greater.
(5) Among relatively simple cases of amplification is the finding
that the people who make extensive use of online political information
tend to be the same people who were already strongly interested in
politics (Bimber 2000). This finding has disappointed many who have
placed naive hopes in the Internet as a force for increased civic
involvement. It has also led to denunciations of the Internet and
Internet hype by the same logic. But it is altogether natural from
the perspective of the amplification theory. It does not follow
that the Internet does not promote civic involvement, since civic
involvement might in principle be promoted in many other ways, and
we will not know the bottom line until a fuller model of the forces
influencing civic involvement in politics becomes available.
(3) The political process became much more informationally intensive
during the open-government revolution of the 1970s, when legislatures
and bureaucrats found themselves increasingly compelled to provide
rational-sounding justifications for their decisions (Greider
1992). There arose in response a substantial industry producing
justifications to order -- the so-called think tanks. While
think tanks were not simply libraries or dispassionate research
organizations, nonetheless a history waits to be written of the
exploding information infrastructure of politics, particularly at that
time and since. The forces encouraging information-intensive politics
have only increased, motivated by competitive pressures and the
epochal innovation of 24-hour news with CNN. By 1992, then, a very
substantial tactical research apparatus had arisen, and the Clinton
era consisted largely of a furious, day-by-day war of information --
not just on the part of government and party apparatus, but also on
the part of privately funded interests that did nothing but research
and publicize alleged scandals (Lieberman 1994). The 24-hour
news cycle constantly required these organizations to come up with
facts that served specific rhetorical purposes, such as defusing an
opponent's accusation by unearthing examples of comparable actions by
others.
(5) Computers are themselves the objects of political work.
Computing is a malleable technology, and every organization must
make its own choices in selecting and configuring it. These choices
have consequences in turn for the distribution of power and resources,
including information. It is little wonder, then, that a large-scale
study of local governments found that choices about computing tended
to amplify the political power of whichever coalition within the
organization was already dominant (Danziger, Dutton, Kling and Kraemer
1982). This study predated wide use of computer networking, but its
hypothesis of "reinforcement politics" bears checking in contemporary
settings as well.
For all their diversity, these examples of amplification in the
political sphere are analytically simple: no special conceptual
innovation is required to name the forces that are amplified.
Reinforcement politics, for example, was an important discovery and
certainly nonobvious relative to the theories that preceded it, but
once discovered it can be explained in plain language. This will not
always be the case. Many of the forces that the Internet amplifies
cut across the accustomed boundaries of organizational analysis,
or else they speak to the architecture of the human person in ways
that have gone largely unnamed. Let us consider an example of each.
The Internet can connect anyone and anyone else, but the patterns of
interconnection are not random. One pattern is that people exchange
information with others with whom they have something in common (Agre
1998). Choose any condition that people find important, and it is
nearly certain that a far-flung community will have arisen of people
who share that condition. These communities of practice include
professions, interest groups, extended families, and people who
live with the same disease or share the same recreational interests.
Most of the functioning online fora on the Internet are organized
around these commonalities, but communities of practice should not
be identified analytically with the technologies that support them.
Most such communities employ several media, and most of them have
some degree of formal organizational existence that is defined
in technology-independent terms. It helps to understand these
communities in institutional terms: what their members share is
a location in some institution, such as employee, patient, student,
customer, or kinship. They generally also share certain places or
activities, and recurring practical dilemmas within which questions
arise and answers make sense. The details will depend a great deal
on the workings of the institution: the members of a community might
be induced by the institution to compete with one another, or they
might have very limited resources to spend on communications or to pay
journalists or other professionals to gather information for them. By
reducing some of the costs of some kinds of note-sharing, the Internet
amplifies the forces that bring communities of practice together
(Brown, Duguid, and Haviland 1994). It bears repeating that those
forces must already exist; if note-sharing is unimaginable without
the Internet, it may still be unimaginable with it. But where the
forces are present and the resources are sufficient, the Internet is
generally adopted furiously once a critical mass of community members
sign on. The effects on society will depend on the nature of the
case; diaspora communities can more effectively support their brethren
in civil wars if that is what they wish, and human rights campaigners
can more easily spread news of the atrocities that result (Kaldor
1999: 208-209).
The pooling of knowledge in communities of practice is generally
considered a good thing, and it is certainly central to the
collective cognitive processes of a democratic polity, but it is
worth considering the consequences. When communications are weak,
local communities are relatively isolated. Best practices may
not be transferred, but neither are worst delusions. Theories of
institutional change such as that of Hayek depend on the existence
of these cognitive islands, for only then can institutional
experiments proceed relatively uncorrupted by the example of others,
much less the forces toward compatibility. Global networking does
not necessarily portend global homogeneity if other forces exist
to keep subcommunities apart, but arbitrage is a powerful force.
These concerns arise, for example, in the development of law.
The common law tradition assumes that comparable cases can be tried
somewhat independently of one another, so that the appeals courts
that are charged with bringing order to the cases in a new area can
credibly claim to have discovered that order rather than ratifying a
conventional wisdom that influenced each decision along similar lines
when other analyses might otherwise have been found. This problem
hardly began with the Internet, and surely dates to the origins
of the common-law system. Nonetheless, law firms were among the
first sectors to take full advantage of the amplifying effects of
information technology.
A final and equally complex example of amplification is found in the
very category of the human person. Every individual has a social
network, and new information and communications technologies make it
possible for everyone to stay in touch more continually with everyone
they know. In many cases no particular force impels this increased
regularity of contact. But technical limits are no longer a great
barrier when, for reasons of sentiment or self-interest, those forces
do exist. Spouses can talk ten times a day on their cell phones;
friends can exchange a steady patter of text messages. Holiday card
lists need no longer be pruned because of the costs of postage; people
who fall out of touch are easier to find again. Elaborate software
enables salespeople to manage their relationships with a multitude of
clients. The result is a sort of networked individualism (Wellman in
press).
A larger phenomenon here might be called "spacing": drawing out the
logic of institutionally organized relationships and making that logic
explicit in the workings of technology. An example might be found in
commonly observed patterns in relative affluent families in the West.
As television sets and telephone lines become cheap, the family home
tends to break apart into separate media spheres for each individual
-- what Livingstone (1999) calls "bedroom culture". Families that
are dispersed into these separate spheres need not fall out of touch;
to the contrary, new communications technologies such as cellular
telephones and electronic mail permit constant contact, a development
that children in particular do not always welcome (English-Lueck
19xx). Extended families can remain constantly in touch as well,
perhaps even more than family members who supposedly occupy the same
home.
Another example of spacing is found in academic research. To
participate in the research community is to construct an elaborate
public persona; a research library is, in large part, a warehouse
of the public personae of professional researchers. New researchers
are socialized into an array of rituals for developing relationships
with others based on their personae, including the ritual of defining
precisely and publicly the intellectual relationships among the
individuals' research topics. The resulting professional network
is a central fact of life for numerous purposes, from job-hunting to
conference organizing to tenure and promotion.
New information and communication technologies draw out these
relationships more explicitly, so that each member of an individual's
network can be a continual presence. In addition to the lengthy
letters employed by 18th century researchers and the occasional
conference interactions of the 20th century, contemporary researchers
can exchange a steady stream of relatively brief electronic messages
with everyone in their network. Home pages on the World Wide Web
make a researcher's vita not only explicit and public but searchable.
As research publications become available electronically, the
researcher's persona becomes instantly and universally available.
Networks of relationships become visible in the bibliographies of
these online publications, and are also reified in the alias files
that map network members' names to their electronic mail addresses.
In each case -- family and research community -- the institution
defines a set of roles and relationships, with their attendant rules,
representations, incentives, expectations, and strategies. The
individual is embedded not simply in a social network but in a network
of institutional locations. New information and communications
technologies do not revolutionize these institutional facts; rather,
they draw out and amplify their logic. The connection patterns map
the institution, and the principal basis of communication shifts from
geography to relationships. The various parties become constantly
present to one another, but their interactions have a structure -- an
architecture -- that is defined by the institution and made explicit
in the workings and usage patterns of the technology. The parties
are not atomized, but neither are they merged. Rather, the technology
reflects and amplifies the spacing among them -- the institutionally
structured middle distances that define them each as distinct persons
in the social order.
Considered from one perspective, this development in the category
of the person is conservative. Oakeshott (1991 [1975]), for example,
distinguished between two conceptions of the person as a political
being: a merger of the Many into the One, all of them expressing the
unifying purposes of the state, and an individuation of personae in
the social forms of civil association, each of them contracting their
own relationships as they see fit. Civil association, in particular,
is not a simple or natural condition of negative freedom. It is an
institution; it is constituted by an authority; it must be instilled
and legitimated. It does not discover distinct individuals and
introduce them to one another; quite the contrary, it produces
distinct individuals and organizes the spaces between them. This view
of the person contrasts with that implicit in calls for community,
intimacy, or solidarity as the basis of politics. Because Oakeshott
views political order as flowing from the state, he regards any
attempt to collapse the boundaries among individuals as an invitation
to tyranny.
Oakeshott's is an especially strong endorsement of spacing as a
condition of a virtuous political order. But even if institutional
orders flow from more diverse sources than Oakeshott allows, the
larger point is clear enough. By drawing out and reifying the
informational architecture of relationships, and by making all of
a person's relationships constantly present, the Internet amplifies
a particular type of social order. This effect, once again, is
not intrinsic to the Internet; it arises through the incentives that
existing institutions create to take hold of the Internet in familiar
ways, along familiar lines. Nor does it follow that the Internet's
impact on society is essentially conservative; the tendency toward
increasingly explicit spacing among individuals is only one of the
many forces that the Internet amplifies, and many of these forces
conflict.
Nonetheless, the implications for the political process would seem
clear enough. Civil association in the 21st century is a system
of interlocking institutions, not a shapeless meeting of individual
minds, and the Internet provides allows the relational order of these
institutions to be inscribed in the finest details of daily life.
Political parties and interest groups routinely maintain databases
of individual voters' affiliations and issue positions. Political
communications are increasingly targeted, and real-time political
mobilization is growing more sophisticated. Once the members of an
interest group are indoctrinated and trained, political strategists
can call on them in precisely designed ways to communicate specific
messages to wavering legislators. Mass political communications
retain their economies of scale, but they are increasingly integrated
with political strategies on other levels. For those who are
interpellated into the political process, the relationships of
political combat are increasingly pervasive, increasingly constant.
We cannot evaluate this mode of political integration, or the emerging
category of the political subject that it entails, until many other
forces are mapped. But we can regret it, and we can set off in search
of forces to counteract it.
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