"What in your view are the most important implication of recent
changes in information technology for political participation in
democratic societies? Comment on both the extent and nature of
the participation."
I.   Information Technology (hereafter called IT in several
places) can be thought of in this context as the most recently
developed tools for networking and organizing people/data/events,
collecting information from a wide array of sources, analyzing
it, and publishing or broadcasting information for internal or
public use. These would include cheaper access to; use of imaging
and communications satellites, powerful personal computers and
software, long distance and portable telephone communications,
and so on.
     Relatively cheap IT has begun to see use by groups within
society that were until recently too small or had memberships too
poor to afford such tools. The ability, using IT, to work and
communicate together across distance also creates opportunities
for groups whose memberships are geographically thinly spread and
would otherwise be unable to cohere into a group with a
particular agenda.
     In providing this opening for diversity in political
participation, IT has come to be seen as more than just the fast
track towards centralized bureaucratic government and technocracy
(an image it held up until the 1980's) but something more
ambivalent and complex. The pages to follow will map out some of
these complex and ambivalent effects.
     This decentralizing trend is good in that it empowers groups
that have been marginalized to have at least some influence on
government action and public opinion. And even if influence isn't
forthcoming it provides new opportunities to communicate within
the group, building solidarity and group identity on the members'
own terms. Of course, there are some groups such as hate groups
that one hopes would stay marginalized. But for every one of
those there are many more which are benign and help to bring
people together in new and constructive ways in an otherwise
atomizing and (for marginalized groups) rather oppressive
society. This in turn helps advance diversity in the society and
may keep members of some of the most disaffected groups from
feeling like that they must use violence to demand the public's
attention.
     On the other hand, the energy put into these new mini-groups
by their members may be reflected in a declining membership in
larger catch-all institutions like big political parties or
religions. This might be bad if one believes that the goals of
these groups are as worthwhile as the new ones and that they can
accomplish a great deal more (e.g. in resisting the political
power of big business/government) through their large size.
Whether this is so depends largely on value judgements about the
worth of the goals of the big groups versus the new groups and
the worth of the increased de facto freedom of association in the
new environment of a greater diversity of groups to choose from.
Also one must ask if, assuming that larger groups are more
effective at getting heard and getting changes made than a bunch
of small ones with different agendas, reduced membership in big
groups in favor of smaller groups may lead to more political
frustration and alienation by those members of the new groups.
     Another effect of a rise in power of new small groups may be
more politicians attempting to win the support of these less
centrist groups, some of them progressive, some of them locally-
oriented, and some of them of them extreme. This could lead
reduced room for these politicians to cooperate with other
politicians in creating legislation: leading to tougher more
divisive rhetoric, hindering coalition-building, and making
changes in policy more discontinuous as power changes hands.
Whether this reflects less (or less functional) participation
depends on if one believes that the status quo system effectively
allowed participation to more people or if merely paid lip
service to most of them.
     Yet another effect might be a reactionary behavior by the
dominant groups who controlled the big institutions guarding
their position in society and resisting changes in the publicly
accepted view of the world that the new small groups are pushing
for with some success. Pat Buchanan's popularity with white males
and his "Culture War", while surely the product of many other
causes as well (see below), seems to be an example of this.

 II. Information technology has helped break up of the public
sphere that is TV.
     Paralleling the proliferation of political groups we have a
proliferation of channels with cable-tv that has allowed the
creation of ideological ghettos within TV (with similar effects
happening on talk radio and some internet discussion groups) that
prevent real discourse between opposing views and provide a non-
hostile forum for more extreme views of the sort that the program
caters to. While long true of print, at least in the partisan
political journals, this is a new thing for television, which has
an audience orders of magnitude bigger than the combined
readership of every partisan political magazine combined. One can
already see this happening. No liberal programming on the Family
Channel (formerly Christian Broadcasting Network) or the new
Conservative channel run by the Republican party. No anti-
business stories on the financial channels. No news stories or
programs embarrassing to a religion's leaders (or hostile to its
beliefs) on channels run by a particular religion or
denomination. While the big networks may indeed be suppressing
the opinions of the far left or right, the bias with these new
channels is going to be much more extensive and one-directional.
Of course those with the wealth or audience size to support such
channels look forward to this. It is those without the resources
to play this game and those who dislike non-centrist politics
that most fear this trend.

III. Information technology has helped hollow out the public
discourse on TV through a fascination with immediacy.
     The form of television news, which most people use to stay
informed about political events, has, with the aid technologies
that allow live reporting from around the globe, become
increasingly capable of causing a fascination in the audience
with the immediacy and the virtual presence of the news (with the
geographic extension of their ability to see). (McKenzie Wark)
Creation of a fascination effect with the spectacle of global
live TV that directs attention away from important substantive
questions of economics, history, and morality that are not easily
expressed in terms of a rapidly presented sequence of images and
soundbites (particularly dramatic entertaining ones). Put a
different way, that pseudo-participatory spectacle of horse-race
style election coverage and military-hardware-focused war
coverage discourages real political participation and discourse.
As the quote goes, "Everyone want big screen TV but no one see
Big Picture". (Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Gitlin,
Edelman, Rotenstreich, Postman, many analyses of the Gulf War
coverage).
     Related to this spectacle of live TV is the instant
telephone poll (or even real-time audience-metering) designed to
provide ultra-rapid feedback from the public to the leaders (and
the public itself). But the form of such polls forces poll
respondents to react very quickly (both in terms of the time
allowed to consider each question and the time allowed between an
event and the polling about it) to the little sound bites and
two-minute stories given about the issue in the news. Such
instant reactions to instant coverage become the one legitimate
voice of the people. Several authors have taken issue with
whether this is really a democratic form of political
participation. (Gitlin, Baudrillard, others)
     The perennial cheerleading for increased democratic
participation using direct voting by the public on a regular
basis through their TV sets or the like has yet to deal with
issues of cost, protection against vote fraud/coercion, universal
access, what quality of deliberation we can expect from the
public on the questions put to them (see above about instant
polling), a fair procedure for determining the phrasing of the
questions, and so on. Thus this particular application of IT to
participation still remains a non-issue.

IV.  Information technology has led to an increased automation of
white-collar work and skilled physical labor, contributing to
greater disparities of income between the few high-skill
technicians/engineers/executives and the many low-skill clerks of
the world. Automation also eliminated many of the high-skill
physical jobs that tended to be highly unionized. The erosion of
union power (see section I above on the decline in power of large
groups) and the increasing class differences within the workforce
do not seem to be helpful for workers' participation in democracy
at a time when they are struggling to keep corporations from
gaining too much power as global competition for jobs grows more
severe. The fact that workers and governments are having to
bargain with corporations for jobs in a global rather than
national or regional labor market is itself the case largely
because of information technology allowing the smooth functioning
of organizations working across great distances. Also, the slide
of increasing numbers of insufficiently skilled and newly-
deskilled white males (in U.S./Canada/Europe) to the bottom half
of the growing class divide is probably another major contributor
to reactionary and racist political movements (see discussion of
Pat Buchanan above), while people in the top end of the divide
become more concerned with keeping hold of their wealth and
positions. (Webster and Robins, McDermott)

V. The Commoditization of Information/Knowledge: The haves and
have nots
     One other major effect of IT has been to make the creation
and selling of information a large and growing part of the total
economy in advanced industrial democracies. As this has come to
be the case (along with the extreme ease of copying and
distributing information that IT provides), those who run/own the
bigger companies which create this information
(music/print/software publishers foremost among them) have become
increasingly strident in their demands that they get their profit
on their investment. The problem with this is that if all
knowledge costs money for users to acquire, then how much
knowledge one has will depend more than ever on how much money
one has. As knowledge and economic power become fungible, those
with economic power will guard knowledge tenaciously.
     So why does this matter? Well aside from the distributional
justice issues in making private property what has been more of a
public good, there is the problem that information in some of its
forms (e.g. financial data, environmental data, computer programs
needed to organize and manage a group) may also become the
lifeblood of political participation for the new groups mentioned
in section one. Denying groups access to information (or,
importantly, to the network the information must travel in order
to reach them) because of inability to pay undermines their power
and returns them to the margins of political life.
     With the right sort of intellectual property laws (which
must answer the question of how creators of the kinds of
information people want will get compensated so that they will
continue to work) IT could be very good for empowering the
politically weak and cutting those "who get rich off of stuffing
other people's work into little boxes and shipping them to
stores" out of the information industry and all its economic
power. (Barlow) But it is extremely uncertain that we will in
fact get such laws given the power of the businesses who sell the
information. (Webster and Robins)

VI. The Surveillance Society
     The same information technology that allows people to
organize with so little administrative friction and to keep tabs
to easily on big companies and government agencies also makes it
easy for political rivals to keep tabs on them. The movement of
people and money (personal associations and financial
transactions) has never been easier to track in detail than it is
today. The proliferation of opportunities for electronic
publishing has made it easier to find out more precisely what
political activists think and are planning by getting their
literature on-line. And advanced polling techniques can closely
follow the public's support for a movement.
     This scrutiny can be healthy within limits when applied to
powerful organizations and individuals, helping to improve their
accountability to the public (and catch criminals). But when
directed against smaller (law-abiding) groups whose members might
be more vulnerable for retaliation due to their membership or
opinions, it can induce organizational paranoia. Information
collected this way by rivals can also help hold groups with
enemies capable of such surveillance to a much higher level of
public scrutiny than groups without such enemies. This could lead
to decreased morale, dropping out of members, self-censorship,
problems caused by attempts to maintain secrecy, and so on.
(Burnham, Gandy)
     The possible solution to this problem might lie not just in
far tougher privacy laws but in the use of new public-key
encryption technology to make financial transactions anonymous
(through "Digital Cash") and electronic correspondence
(email/phone calls/faxes) anonymous and/or unreadable by anyone
other than the intended recipient. The catch here is that the
wide availability of such techniques will make criminal
conspiracies (including notably for our purposes here, campaign
spending rules violations), money laundering, and tax evasion
much more difficult for law enforcement to catch people at. That,
and the powerful groups that one would like to keep an eye on
will be some of the earliest users of such technology. The recent
"Clipper chip" initiative was about trying to impose a compromise
by which people could have their encryption, but not against
agents of the government, who will hold a copy of everyone's
encryption keys (and are supposed to use them only with a court
order). Many people were unhappy with this plan and it is under
review.

VII. Conclusions

Information technology can be both a boon and a curse for
democratic participation. Sometimes which it is depends on the
legal context in which the new technology takes place, as with
intellectual property laws and equality of access to information
networks. 
     Sometimes whether it's good or bad depends on one's attitude
toward the status quo, as can be seen with the decentralizing of
power from a few big social groups to many small ones, or the
division of the mass media and the internet from one (flawed, not
very representative) public sphere to an archipelago of self-
contained ones.
     Sometimes it's rather clearly bad, as can be seen both with 
þ increasing inequality in incomes due to factory and office
automation causing division among workers and reaction among the
losers, and
þ television's fascination with immediacy and rigid adherence the
entertainment aesthetic.
     Other times it's both, as can be seen with the proliferation
of means of surveillance and its antithesis cryptography.
Surveillance can be used to keep those at the top honest and pay
their taxes, and it can be used to oppress the little guy for
trying to do good. Unrestricted cryptography will enable both
sides to get away with a lot more than they've been able to in
the past. It also may lead to tighter regulation and human
surveillance of highly anti-establishment political groups since
they become more difficult to keep an eye on and will be blamed
for terrorist acts.
     The only thing that is clear is that anyone who says an
individual information technology or all of the new technologies
taken in aggregate are an unalloyed boon for democratic
participation is either lying or is highly naive.