Politics of The Digital Communications Revolution

Presentation at the panel on Networked Political Communication at The 1994 Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York City, September 1, 1994.

URL: http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/jcma/apsa94/cpk.html

Community, Power, and Knowledge

• Political Science is about power and its use.
  • History
    1. Oral Systems.
    2. Clay Tablets.
    3. Monasteries.
    4. Printing Press.
  • Today: Interactive Participation
    1. Textual.
    2. Televisual.
    3. Multi-Media Pluralism.
    4. Centralized Top-Down to Decentralized Bottom-Up.
• New Technologies are always integrated.
  • Is there a preferred outcome for the democratic system?
  • How do we get there from here?
• Community in an information age.
  • Power is an emergent property of knowledge.
  • Knowledge emerges from a process of dialog within a community.
  • Community and Power are related.
  • What are the paradigms for Community and Power for the 21st century?

The General Welfare

• The Common Good and Community
  • The Common Good is a proper subject for Political Science.
  • Problem: Community is an undefined term for the 21st century.
  • Not agrarian.
  • Not industrial.
• Which Power Paradigm best supports the Common Good?
  • Hierarchical power-over?
  • A relational model of power-through?
  • see Wellesley College Stone Center
• Self as an emergent property of a complex adaptive system of relationships.
  • What does this suggest about community?

Modern Societies

• At the Cross Roads
• Stasis and Certainty - 16th Century Clock Work
  • Orthodoxy of external causation.
  • Pragmatism of internal causation.
  • Emergent properties of complex adaptive systems.
  • Multi-directional, power-through, participation in process.

The Outlook

• As the technology of the book radically altered the political science of the monasteries
• The new computer mediated communications will alter the political science of the book era.
• The alteration will be larger in scale and more dramatic.
• Increase in the rate of knowledge production is related to the increase in cultural complexity and the decrease in knowledge centralization