Cyborg Politics

The example of the deconstruction of gender in Internet MOO communities illustrates the depth of the stakes in theorizing politics in the mode of information. Because the Internet inscribes the new social figure of the cyborg and institutes a communicative practice of self-constitution, the political as we have known it is reconfigured. The wrapping of language on the Internet, its digitized, machine-mediated signifiers in a space without bodies, [.On this issue see the important essay by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "A Farewell to Interpretation" in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds., Materialities of Communication, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) pp. 389-402.] introduces an unprecedented novelty for political theory. How will electronic beings be governed? How will their experience of self-constitution rebound in the existing politcal arena? How will the power relations on theInternet combine with or influence power relations that emerge from face-to-face relations, print relations and broadcast relations? Assuming the U.S. government and the corporations do not shape the Internet entirely in their own image and that places of cyberdemocracy remain and spread to larger and larger segments of the population, what will emerge as a postmodern politics?

If these conditions are met, one possibility is that authority as we have known it will change drastically. The nature of political authority has shifted from embodiment in lineages in the Middle Ages to instrumentally rational mandates from voters in the modern era. In each case a certain aura becomes fetishistically attached to authority holders. In Internet communities such aura is more difficult to sustain. The Internet seems to discourage the endowment of individuals with inflated status. The example of scholarly research illustrates the point. The formation of canons and authorities is seriously undermined by the electronic nature of texts. Texts become "hypertexts" which are reconstructed in the act of reading, rendering the reader an author and disrupting the stability of experts or "authorities." [. "The Scholar's Rhizome: Networked Communication Issues" by Kathleen Burnett (kburnett@gandalf.rutgers.edu) explores this issue with convincing logic.] If scholarly authority is challenged and reformed by the location and dissemination of texts on the Internet, it is possible that political authorities will be subject to a similar fate. If the term democracy refers to the sovereignty of embodied individuals and the system of determining office-holders by them, a new term will be required to indicate a relation of leaders and followers that is mediated by cyberspace and constituted in relation to the mobile identities found therein.

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences | 1968 | Copyright

Public Opinion

I. IntroductionW. Phillips Davison

BIBLIOGRAPHY

II. Political OpinionAvery Leiserson

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I introduction

There is no generally accepted definition of “public opinion.” Nevertheless, the term has been employed with increasing frequency since it came into popular usage at the time of the French Revolution, when Louis xvi’s finance minister, Jacques Necker, referred to public opinion as governing the behavior of investors in the Paris money market. Later efforts to define the term precisely have led to such expressions of frustration as: “Public opinion is not the name of a something, but a classification of a number of somethings.” (See Childs 1965, pp. 12-28, for some fifty different definitions.)

In spite of differences in definition, students of public opinion generally agree at least that it is a collection of individual opinions on an issue of public interest, and they usually note that these opinions can exercise influence over individual behavior, group behavior, and government policy. Because public opinion is acknowledged to play a role in several diverse areas, leading writers on the subject have included sociologists (Tonnies 1887; Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; Albig 1956), political theorists (Bryce 1888; Lasswell 1927; Lippmann 1922), social psychologists (Allport 1937; Cantril 1966), and historians (Bauer 1929). Those who are engaged in manipulating public opinion have also made important contributions: for example, politicians (Lenin 1929) and public-relations specialists (Bernays 1923). Differences in definition and approach can be accounted for largely by the differing interests of various categories of students and practitioners.

The principal approaches to the study of public opinion may be divided into four partially overlapping categories: quantitative measurement of opinion distributions; investigation of the internal relationships among the individual opinions that make up public opinion on an issue; description or analysis of the political role of public opinion; and study both of the communication media that disseminate the ideas on which opinions are based and of the uses that propagandists and other manipulators make of these media.

Some researchers have simultaneously contributed to knowledge in several of these categories. An investigation in Erie County, Ohio, of the 1940 U.S. presidential election campaign not only provided statistical measurements of voting intentions over time but also explored the influence of group membership on individual opinions and evaluated the impact of mass communications on the outcome of the election (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944). Another example may be taken from a study of Norwegian opinions on a number of foreign policy issues between 1959 and 1964 (Galtung 1964). In this case the researcher was able to contribute to the body of theory regarding political behavior in a democracy by analyzing the relationship between foreign policy attitudes and social position while also taking into account the role of group affiliation and the communication structure of the society.