Beyond their impact on business, commerce, and services, emerging information and communication technologies also promise to have significant impacts on the way that the affairs of government and the military are conducted. The new technologies have potential not only to rev-olutionize how those affairs are conducted, but in some ways to strengthen—or challenge—the very philosophical foundations upon which the U.S. and other democratic governments are based.
The first two articles in Part Three make this abundantly clear. The first, "Telecommunications and Democracy," authored by a team of researchers at the Benton Foundation, raises questions about whether the new technologies will extend or impede democracy’s reach. Generally optimistic, the authors point to several specific cases in which emerging information and communication technologies may strengthen the democratic underpinnings of the United States and other popularly elected governments by informing citizens, broadening deliberations, increasing voter turnout, and empowering committees. If emerging information and communication technologies have the impact that the Benton Foundation authors outline in this portion of their study, then democracy will indeed be strengthened globally.
But the authors are neither naive nor idealistic. They also recognize that "teledemocracy" presents serious challenges. Will the new information and communication technologies help promote democracy, or will they be used to foster demagoguery? Can the concerns of technophobes be overcome so that they too might participate in the democratic advances that technology might bring? How can the disenfranchised access democratic opportunities via technology? Can equitable access to the democratic process be ensured in a wired environment?
These are serious questions, and so too are the impacts that new information and communication technologies might have on concrete areas of government activity. This section’s second article, Martin Fogelman’s "Freedom and Censorship in the Emerging Electronic Environment," explores potential impacts of emerging technologies on First Amendment freedoms. Fogelman is concerned that the new technologies may lead to increasingly successful efforts to curtail free speech and free expression as the technologies of the Information Age expand our capabilities to hear and be heard, to see and be seen, and eventually, to touch and be touched. Noting that "the natural lobby for free speech is small and shows no signs of growth," Fogelman calls on "the vigilance and activism of general citizen groups, and of telecommunications and information industry professionals in particular" to fight the good fight to preserve First Amendment freedoms.
Beyond questions of First Amendment freedoms, in the Information Age virtually all areas of government activity will be affected by information and communication technologies. The last four articles in this section concentrate on two areas in which government actions will be affected by information and communication technology, decision making and warfare. (The impact of these technologies on warfare and the military will be explored in greater depths in a later volume.)
Three articles on government decision making, by Peter Huber, Jeffrey Record, and Johanna Neuman, find a middle ground between the Benton Foundation’s general optimism and Fogelman’s basic concerns about the impact of the third modern information and communication revolution on the relationship between government and society. Huber explores the impact that new information and communication technologies are having and will have on government bureaucracies and regulators; Record addresses the bulk of his commentary to the impacts that these technologies will have on congressional decision making on national security issues; and Neuman addresses the role that the media plays in foreign policy decision making. In all three articles, the arguments that are made could easily be extended to all areas of executive and congressional decision making. However, there is an underlying philosophical difference between the three articles. Huber argues that the new information and commun-ication technologies will drive governments to become better, while Record and Neuman believe that the new technological capabilities will have little overall impact on government behavior.
At the same time, this difference should not be overemphasized. At a deeper level, all three authors are convinced that the individual, not technology, will continue to make government decisions. There are no technological determinists among these three authors, only disagreements over the degrees of impacts that these technologies will have on human behavior.
In "Cyberpower," Peter Huber makes the case that new information and communication technologies are likely to change the equation of how political power is used once elections are over, but fundamentally, people will still be making decisions. "The old game of big promises on election day, soon forgotten in the enjoyment of power, is over," he argues. There is a simple reason for this, Huber maintains. Just as you can "drive to Reno for marriage, divorce, or gambling" if you do not like the laws that exist in your home state on these activities, the new technologies increasingly allow people to expand their outlooks, avoid taxes, evade inept central bankers, and sidestep other forms of government regulations.
Huber believes governments will have no choice but to respond to this new mobility or risk losing tax revenues and suffering depressed economies. If people do not like what government officials, bankers, or regulators are doing under one jurisdiction, they will simply move whatever mobile assets they have to another jurisdiction, whether it be a different city, county, state, or country. By increasing the mobility of many types of assets, but especially financial and intellectual assets, Huber argues, competition between governments will inevitably increase as individuals decide where their various types of assets should reside. The quality of government will improve because of this competition.
Jeffrey Record, in his "Congress, Information Technology, and the Use of Force," sees things somewhat differently. Congress’s business is politics, Record asserts. Concentrating on foreign policy and the use of force, Record believes that congressional attitudes in these areas will be influenced by a variety of factors including but not limited to a preoccupation with domestic social and economic challenges, aversion to value-driven uses of force, and hyper-sensitivity to casualties. The additional data and information provided by energizing information and communication technologies will rarely be one of these factors, Record argues. Politics will continue to reign supreme in Congress during the Information Age and this, he asserts, is as it should be.
In "The Media’s Impact on International Affairs, Then and Now," Johanna Neuman takes an historical approach and argues that the technologies of the Information Age are much like earlier information and communication technologies in the way that they have impacted and will impact government decision making. To Neuman, "throughout history, whenever the political world has intersected with a new media technology, the resulting clash has provoked a test of leadership before the lessons learned were absorbed into the mainstream of politics." But they always have been absorbed, Neuman observes, and the key has been effective leadership. The same will be true of the new technologies, Neuman believes.
However, she also provides a cautionary note that computers and cyberspace could be different since they will provide to "interest groups and non-governmental organizations,...newspapers, local cultural groups, and corporate advertisers" the ability to compete against governments in presenting their viewpoints and perspectives. This, she observes, could lead to national governments becoming "less relevant," or lead even to a "twilight of sovereignty." Nevertheless, she concludes, decision making requires leadership, and the new technologies do not and will not change that.
While Huber believes that the new technologies will drive improvements in government, Record and Neuman fundamentally agree that little will change during the Information Age in governmental decision making. In military affairs, according to Bruce Berkowitz in his "Warfare in the Information Age," Huber’s picture of the future is most accurate, with "information warfare" (IW) having already become a central player in the formulation of post-Cold War U.S. military strategy.
Defining IW as "the use of information systems... for military advantage, either by the United States or by a variety of unfriendly parties," Berkowitz provides an overview of the origins of the concept, its relationship to the Information Age, how to deal with it, and the difficulties of deterring an IW attack on the United States. As difficult as the military challenges posed by IW are, Berkowitz cautions, coping with IW’s political, economic, and cultural parameters will be even more daunting. Harking back to some of the concerns expressed by Fogelman in his discussion of the possible impacts of the Information Age on First Amendment freedoms, Berkowitz also warns that the measures required "for countering the IW threat will often collide with essential features of the democratic free market system that an IW policy is intended to protect."
What, then, does the Information Age portend for the affairs of government and the military? Obviously, there is considerable room for debate, but there are no technological determinists among the authors whose works are presented here. Running throughout the perspectives presented in this section, even if it is not specifically stated, is a fundamental emphasis on the continuing importance of human beings in the Information Age, and the decisions that they make. The Benton Foundation’s authors caution that new technologies can strengthen or challenge democracy, depending on how human beings use them. Martin Fogelman calls on citizen groups and telecommunication and information industry professionals to help preserve First Amendment freedoms against challenges that he sees forthcoming in the Information Age. Peter Huber, Jeffrey Record, and Johanna Neuman appreciate what the new technologies can do and will be able to do, but disagree over what the impacts will be. Huber maintains that these technologies will lead people to take actions that will improve government, while Record and Neuman believe that at the end of the day, human beings will still make decisions in government much the way that they have always made decisions. And while Bruce Berkowitz is clearly impressed by the future of information warfare, he does not see the role of human beings in warfare during the Information Age being supplanted by new technologies.
This part's authors seem to agree that in government and the military, human activities and organizations will change, and change significantly, during the Information Age. But many core functions will remain the same. Although none of the authors make the case, it is not too much to return to the observation presented in the preface in Part One: when it comes to government institutions, and especially those entrusted with providing for our national security, immense organizational flexibility and change will be required to help them become better able to effectively deal with increased complexity and be more responsive to changes in their environment. This will not be an easy task, for organizational change will require alterations in the very culture of these institutions.
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