suggested that the corporation had become a major institutional form because it successfully handled information of a commercial sort better than did markets. More recently we have discovered that the Internet reduces market transaction costs and delays, and that corporations are increasingly concentrating of core competencies and outsourcing other functions via Internet mediated markets. Essentially, market institutions have regained the lead in dealing with some kinds of information that was through most of the 20th century better handled by corporation institutions.
Thus new communications and information technology has led to a change in the institutions in the business sector. It seems likely that ICT changes have also led to changes in government and civil society institutions.
In their classical book Risk and Culture
, Douglas and Wildavsky attributed the growth in power of civil society organizations such as the Sierra Club to their increasing ability to distribute information and solicit donations at low cost; people could feel that they were helping to prevent pollution of the environment with a simple donation of a small amount of money. Surely the Internet has made the process simpler and faster than Douglas and Wildavsky would have imagined when their book was published in 1983. Surely with The Social Network up for an Academy Award for the best picture and the pervasiveness of Facebook and Twitter, it should be clear that ICT is having a major impact on the institutions of civil society."The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787I suspect that democracy was in part an institutional response to a more educated public demanding a role in government, rejecting the idea that monarchs were divinely chosen and rejecting that force makes right. Representative government as it developed in the 19th and 20th century was in part made possible by improved media and transportation. It became possible for the public to learn quickly what government was doing regionally and nationally through mass media communication, but representatives would be responsible for bringing their constituencies views to the bureaucracy.
The role of social networks (Facebook, Twitter) in the political earthquake in North Africa has been widely reported and commented upon. Social networks have clearly played a role in person-to-person communication involved in organizing public demonstrations. Al Jazeera and Al Aribiya brought visual coverage to the world, drawing upon blogs, photos and videos from mobile phones, tweets and Facebook postings. In a less traumatic but still amazing development, in 2009 the effective use of the Internet helped an African American (with what most Americans thought to be a funny name) to be elected president of the United States.
I suspect that the new information and communication technology will lead to even more profound changes in the ways political institutions work. Communication will increasingly be from the people to their elected representatives, and among the people themselves. The may show up in large numbers, as is happening now in Wisconsin, organized by social networking and drawing on the media to gain public support. Transactions between the governed and the government will be increasingly mediated by the Internet and take place on e-government sites. Political parties will continue to reengineer their processes using the technology. Indeed, the public will be able to deal more online with the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy too will use the Internet more to outsource functions, focusing more on its core responsibilities.
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