Colloquium: Power in the Informational State

Power in the Informational State:
The Social Effects of Information Policy

Sandra Braman
Dec. 7, 3 pm, 244 Merrill Hall


There has been a phase change—a change of state—in the extent to which governments exercise power by deliberately, explicitly, and consistently controlling information creation, processing, flows, and use. Informational power exerts its influence by altering the materials, rules, institutions, ideas, and symbols that are the means by which instrumental, structural, and symbolic forms of power are exercised. Three types of knowledge must be brought together to understand just how this change of state has come about and what it means for the exercise of power domestically and globally: In addition to knowledge of the law itself, research on the empirical world provides evidence about the policy subject (the world for which policy is made) and social theory provides an analytical foundation. Bringing these types of knowledge together makes visible the social effects of information policy as they affect identities of the state and of its citizens; the nature of social, technological, and communicative structures; the borders of those structures; and how those structures change. This talk will look at ways in which legal trends in information policy – wherever they come from across the traditional silos of the law – interact to affect society in each of these dimensions. Legal issues discussed include not only familiar topics such as intellectual property rights and privacy, but also lesser-known issues such as hybrid citizenship, the use of “functionally equivalent” borders to allow exceptions to U.S. law, research funding, census methods, and network interconnection. Such trends in information policy both manifest and trigger changes in the nature of governance itself.