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CHAPTER ELEVEN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND THE SKILLS, NETWORKS, AND STRUCTURES THAT SUSTAIN WORLD AFFAIRS JAMES N. ROSENAU It is more permissive than dismissive to argue that information and information technologies are essentially neutral. They do not in themselves tilt in the direction of any particular values—neither toward good or bad, nor left or right, nor open or closed systems. They are, rather, neutral, in the sense that their tilt is provided by people. It is people and their collectivities that infuse values into information. For better or worse, it is individuals and organizations that introduce information into political arenas and thereby render it good or bad. Accordingly, the neutrality of information technologies is permissive because it enables the democrat as well as the authoritarian to use information in whatever way he or she sees fit. There is, in other words, some utility in starting with the premise that information and the technologies that generate and circulate it are neutral. It enables us to avoid deterministic modes of thought in which people are seen as being deprived of choice by the dictates of information technologies. Put more positively, the neutrality premise compels us to focus on human agency and how it does or does not make use of information technologies. This is not to imply, of course, that consequences do not follow from the degree to which information and information technologies are available. Clearly, their availability can serve as either opportunities or constraints and, clearly, both the opportunities and constraints influence the way people conduct their political affairs, with the opportunities clarifying and facilitating the choices to be made and the constraints inhibiting and narrowing the choices. To posit the choices as facilitated or constrained by information availability is not to specify independent variables. Information and its technologies are about the contexts within which decisional alternatives are considered. They set the range within which ends and means are framed, alternatives pondered, and choices made. 275 As range-setting factors, information and its technologies may be forms of power, as several of the preceding chapters suggest—especially those by Braman, Comor, Deibert, and Kim and Hart—but variations in the power possessed by human agents cannot predict the outcomes—the reactions evoked by the uses of a technology’s power. Reactions and outcomes derive from the audiences toward whom the power is directed and they can vary as widely as the circumstances of the audiences and their relations with those who employ the technologies. To be sure, as indicated in Aronson’s chapter, different information technologies can deliver information in different forms that, in turn, can underlie variations in the way issues are structured and debated. Still, and to repeat, such differences are best regarded not as causal determinants, but as setting different ranges within which human agents make choices. Viewed in this way, it is misleading to analyze information technologies in causal terms. Causality accounts for the choices that are made and why information is interpreted in one way rather than another. By treating information technologies as neutral, we cast them as background conditions and not as immediate stimuli to action—as second-order dynamics that influence, contextualize, facilitate, permit, or inhibit courses of action, but not as first-order dynamics that change, transform, foster, impose, or shape courses of action. The distinction between the two types of dynamics is important; it differentiates between the operation of structures and those of agents. Put more forcefully, the distinction prevents the analyst from mistaking second-order for first-order dynamics, for treating information technologies as an unseen hand that somehow gets people, groups, or communities to pursue goals and undertake actions without awareness of why they do what they do and, accordingly, without taking responsibility for their conduct. A good illustration of the dangers of positing information technologies as first-order causal dynamics is evident in the adaptation of vertical business organizations in the 1980s to the horizontal flexibility required by the globalization of national economies. When diverse enterprises first seized upon the new technologies , they treated them as labor-saving devices and as means to control labor rather than as mechanisms for organizational adaptation. The result was an aggravation of their vertical bureaucratic rigidities. It was only after they made the necessary organizational changes in order to keep abreast of their operational environments that the information technologies “extraordinarily enhanced” the success of their enterprises (Castells 1996, 169). For all practical purposes, the restructuring of businesses away from hierarchical and toward network...

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