Yale Information Society Project

An interesting panel on politics and information, including full-text papers from Mosco, Drezned and Noveck. Must read.

The Global Flow of Information Conference
1-3 April 2005, Yale Law School

Yale Information Society Project

Panel 4: Politics and Information Flow

Daniel Drezner, University of Chicago
'Weighing the Scales: The Internet's Effect on State-Society Relations'

Vincent Mosco, Queens University
'Politics and Policies in a Networked World: A Perspective from Canada'

Beth Noveck and David Johnson, New York Law School
'Society's Software'

Saturday, April 2, 2005, 4:00 - 6:00pm

Politics shapes information flows, but is also shaped by them. Information flows can change the political dynamics both within countries, and internationally. Information flows can also reinforce or destabilize governmental and nongovernmental power structures. The flow of information made possible by digital networks can support new political coalitions, new virtual communities, and, perhaps, new public spheres. At the same time, traditional politics, through governments and international organizations, often defines how information, and what kinds of information, will be permitted to flow across borders. In addition, governments establish regulatory frameworks for information flow, control the various layers of networks and communications systems, and impose filtering strategies to control information flow. Some of these strategies work well, while others fail. Some help their societies, while others help oppress them.

Using the Internet, individuals and groups have created international communities that try to convince governments to ban landmines, stop genocide in the Sudan, influence the WTO and the World Bank, and to deliberate globally on U.S. and other elections. Conversely, governments have tried to modify or restrict what people can do on the Internet, and what information they can find, as well as imposing detailed regulations on mass media existing largely within their borders.

This panel will discuss how global information flows affect national and international politics, and how politics in turn affects information flows.

Questions before this panel may include:

- How do international institutions and governments attempt to control information flows in networked environments? How successful have these attempts been, and what are their unexpected side effects?
- Will digitally networked environments help undermine, or, in some cases, actually reinforce, authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes?
- How will the flow of information affect the power of relatively disempowered groups in existing national and global decision-making spheres?
- Will new information technologies produce a global public sphere? If so, who will be able to participate and how is most likely to be excluded? Will the global public sphere be coherent or will it be fragmented and separated by differences of language, culture and access to technology?