Conceptions of the state underlie all information and communication policy,' for the state uses policy as tools of power. This is true whether those conceptions are well or poorly formed, understood or not, explicit or implicit-but, as Bell (1995) points out in this issue, failure to understand the state leads to an inability to analyze policy. Historically, however, policy analysis has tended to treat the state generally as a venue, a justification for particular positions, or one institutional player among many. In the area of communication policy, few policy analysts have attended to the state.In this, the field joined both political science and sociology, which for decades were characterized by "statelessness" as they turned instead towards systems, societies, or classes as their units of analysis. Ironically, attention returned to the state in the m i d -l 9 8 0~,~ at a time when it was widely believed that the state was losing power.Understanding information and communication policy as power is particularly important in today's environment because there has been a qualitative shift in the level of dependence upon information technologies and in the degree to which activities are informational (Braman, 1990(Braman, , 1993. Regulation in this domain has come to dominate political and economic culture. The use of new information technologies permits the state, like other institutions and cultural forms, to evolve; a new form of the state is emerging, specializing in forms of power specific to the environment of the global telecommunications network (the "net").ating the conditions under which future activity (including policy-making) will take place (Braman, 1990). This is critical in an environment oriented towards the two poles of the global and the local and in which boundaries of the state Information policy plays self-reflexive and constitutive roles for the state, cre-' Information policy is defined here as policy relating to any stage of an information production chain that goes from creation through processing and storage to destruction.
Postmodernism and information economics, mass communications and telecommunications, popular culture and managerial theory. Until now, they have been treated separately. Each offers a conception o f the information society that is distinguished by disciplinary history and unit of analysis, yet each is like the others in addressing issues of social change stimulated by technological development and dependent upon the global information infrastructure, and in identifying dispersal of individuating subjects (whether biological, organizational, narrative, or political) and the loss of facticity as key characteristics o f this era.Analysts of postmodern culture identify this as the information age because information flows have replaced material and spiritual worlds as the basis of referentiality. Economists do so because information as both an intermediate and final product has come to dominate the economy, because the domain of the economy has expanded through the commodification of information, and because information flows have replaced the market as the key coordinating mechanism. Sociologists d o s o because information technologies are key to the restructuring of our social and political environments. For each, quantitative change has led to qualitative change.The information society, however, did not emerge full-blown. Rather, three developmental stages can be identified: A first, beginning in the middle of the 19th century, was characterized by the electr$cation of communication. The second, beginning in the late middle 20th century, was characterized by convergence of technologies and by awareness of the centrality of information to society. The third stage, beginning with the 1990s, is characterized by harmonization of information systems with each other, with systems across national borders, and with other social systems. These changes in the communications environment are significant for the future of the field because they are shifts in the nature of our very subject matter itself, and require some new ways of thinking about it.Sandra Brainan is an assistant professor o f communications at the University of Illinois, LJrbana-Champaign.
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