Study Group: Introductions and Overview

Tuesday, January 18, 2000

After participant introductions, William Drake kicked off the meeting by outlining the study group’s agenda for the months ahead and highlighting some of the analytical challenges involved in assessing the information revolution’s impact on world politics. In this context, he argued that it would be desirable to avoid the sort of technological determinism that is common in much of the popular discourse about the information revolution. While technology is an enabling force that expands choice sets, alters incentives, and is a necessary condition of the changes of interest to the study group, it is not an independently causal force. What really matters is the technology’s organization, control, and use by societal actors, and these factors are often contested by competing social interests and shaped by power dynamics.

Technological change is not the only causal driver of interest; conceptual, economic, and political-institutional change in the information and communication technology (ICT) environment are also important, and the contingent interactions between these forces shape the varying ways in which the information revolution plays out across time and space. Hence, while there have been dominant tendencies at different points in the historical development of the information revolution, there have also been many significant exceptions to and local variations on such patterns. Like the agricultural and industrial revolutions of centuries past, the information revolution does have identifiable core dynamics (most notably over the long-term), but we need to be careful not to over-generalize about its shape and scope.

In parallel, Drake suggested that just as the information revolution’s development and character have varied over time and space, so too have its effects on world politics. The information revolution undoubtedly has reshaped in some respects the operational environment in which foreign policy and international relations are conducted, but the extent to which it can be said to cause particular outcomes in a direct and unmediated manner is less clear. Many factors within nation-states and in the organization of relations between them may interact with the information revolution and modify the effects we might expect it to have. Differences between international issue-areas also matter. For example, the information revolution has had palpable and direct effects on international military and economic affairs, but in many other arenas its consequences may be more subtle. Given such considerations, while it would be ideal to identify strong explanatory and predictive generalizations, we need to avoid simplistic and reductionist meta-narratives and to specify the conditions under which precisely defined cause-effect relations apply. In short, Drake sounded an introductory note of caution about the complexity of the subject and the lack of easy answers.

In the ensuing discussion, study group participants offered their thoughts on some of the "big picture" trends that could inform our discussions of specific issues in the months ahead. The comments tended to cluster around four main themes. First, a key dimension of the information revolution’s impact on international affairs is that an ever-widening range of actors now has access to powerful tools for the rapid collection, production, and dissemination of information on a world-wide scale. The globalization and mass popularization of the Internet provides governments, businesses, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), terrorists, criminals, and others with capabilities that formerly were in the hands of only the largest and most powerful entities. Their diverse uses of cyberspace have challenged the power and steering capacity of major states and have significantly increased the turbulence and unpredictability of the international policy environment.

Several participants focused on the recent example of the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle, where scores of NGOs and activists from across the political spectrum used the Internet and cell phones to organize protests that paralyzed the city and disrupted trade negotiations. Such "swarming" activity among networks of non-traditional political actors, they argued, is having a definite impact on policy—national, international, and corporate. In addition to facilitating the logistics of protest, the Internet also may have played a role in the spread of negative popular impressions of the WTO. But while acknowledging that Seattle could be a harbinger of information age political dynamics, some participants urged cautioned in interpreting the events. Seattle is hardly the paradigm of NGO activism, one argued, noting other cases such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the International Criminal Court, where civil society actors have taken on a proactive, rather than reactive, role. Others maintained that while NGO protest was a very visible element of the Seattle summit, the WTO’s failure to launch a new round of trade talks was due mainly to unresolved differences between, and the unreasonable negotiating positions of, certain governments. One member added that intergovernmental disagreements were also more important than NGO opposition in the failed negotiations of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.

A second theme concerned the strength and scope of the information revolution. Several participants urged caution in interpreting the magnitude of this transformation, suggesting that we tend to overestimate it because we are among the most heavily wired of the world’s population. The changes that we often associate with the information revolution—shifts from hierarchies to networks, the rise of an information economy, etc.—are undoubtedly occurring, but their scope may be much more limited than mainstream discourse suggests. The information revolution will impact all societies, they argued, but its effects may not be nearly as fundamental in Latin America, Africa, or Asia, where majorities of the population often do not have local access to telephones, much less to computers and the Internet. Other participants pointed out that Internet access was sparse in the United States just a decade ago, and the rate of growth since then has been exponential. The developing world, they argued, could be in the initial stages of similar technological growth, a process that we overlook because the current numbers are so much smaller than our own. Rather than overestimating the magnitude of change in the information revolution, they claimed, we may have difficulty grasping its true proportions because we are in the midst of the process ourselves. Still other participants maintained that the information revolution is less about technological change than about the primacy of ideas and information in politics, economics, and social relationships, a dynamic that can apply equally to more- and less-wired societies.

The third major theme of the discussion dealt with the question of historical continuity versus disruption. Several participants argued that the Internet is qualitatively different from the ICT of ages past, opening possibilities to a wider group of individuals than any other technological innovation and changing popular notions of who we are and how we fit into the world. Others argued that throughout history, the introduction of new ICT has caused fundamental disruption of the social and political order of the time; the specific character of the Internet’s impact on society may be unique, but the occurrence of ICT effects are not unprecedented. Still other participants claimed that when we look at history, we see more continuities than disruptions from one technological age to the next, and that the era of the Internet may prove to be no different. One participant suggested approaching the question counterfactually by imagining what the world would be like without the Internet. Another maintained that efforts to hypothesize about the shape of historical trajectories in the absence of any one element may prove fruitless, since such an analysis probably would fail to account for unique contextual dynamics present at the time of the technology’s introduction.

The fourth main theme of the evening concerned the question of human agency in the information revolution. Several participants argued that we should view ourselves as the actors, rather than the subjects, of the information revolution, steering its trajectory according to our interests, needs, and visions. Historically, technologies have not evolved and impacted society according to any intrinsic properties; they have been designed, built, and perfected by individuals and organizations that were seeking to solve specific problems. One participant maintained that the Internet is yesterday’s technology; rather than speculating about its evolution, we should focus on what we want to create that is fundamentally different. While most participants seemed to believe that steering the information revolution was an important and worthwhile task, not everyone agreed that human beings could have predicted or designed the full range of outcomes that have accompanied the development of the Internet. The eventual impact of the information revolution on world politics may be a product of both human agency and unexpected consequences, rather than an outcome that we can fully design and implement. The discussion closed with a reflective question on whether the Study Group should seek only to analyze the information revolution’s effects on world politics, or should also suggest approaches to steering—a question that was left to be answered by future sessions.

Rapporteur’s Report prepared by Taylor Boas