appropriately enough, the democratic process

Bruce Bimber spends a great deal of space in his first chapter of Information and American Democracy describing the “gap in research” that his book covers. Perhaps I’m sensitive to these formal moves because I work in the Writing Center, but it seems to me that there’s a huge gap here that Bimber is trying to fill. Or, at least, he’s eager to make that gap seem especially large. Political scientists don’t seem interested in information’s impact on government and politics, and information scientists care little about politics. In comes Bimber—a techie (which he pointedly notes in his acknowledgments) who also is a political science scholar. Finally! An answer to the pressing questions about information and democracy!

I may be poking fun at his zeal to establish his own authority and to color the gap as gaping, but Bimber does seem to be accomplishing important work here. The isolation of fields of study within academia means that new fields or the intersection of fields are often undertheorized. Ironically, in an age of information richness, as Bimber describes, we’re relying on a lot of old methods to produce scholarship on it. So his work in straddling the fields of political science and information technology is essential for us to understand just what is going on with communication in democracy nowadays.

I like that Bimber refuses to tie “information revolutions” as he calls them to technology necessarily. It’s important to be open to alternative explanations to phenomena, and Bimber does just this when he promises to look beyond information technology to explain information revolutions. He also indicates his willingness to entertain alternative when he doesn’t blindly accept the claim that increased levels of information and internet communication are creating a decline in civic engagement. Instead, he asks, just what does civic engagement mean within this information regime? I’m interested to know his answer to the questions he poses at the beginning of his book.