Internet and Power

Various claims have been made for the potential effect of the Internet on power relations. Some authors have deemed widespread use of the Internet to have a leveling effect, reducing inequalities and allowing previously under-resourced groups to gain access to power. Others have claimed the opposite—that the Internet creates a “winner takes all” environment and reinforces existing power relations, with some new gatekeepers to online resources (such as search engines) becoming increasingly influential. These competing claims are examined here using a number of approaches to the study of power. For the first claim, resource-based accounts of power can be used to assess the differential effect of the Internet on the four resources identified by John C. Harsanyi and the fifth later identified by Keith Dowding as important in the bargaining power of individuals and groups: conditional and unconditional incentives, authority, information and expertise, and reputation. The Internet also has the potential to work against some of the collective action problems claimed by Mancur Olson to prevent large groups from mobilizing. If this claim is right, then the Internet will contribute to a more pluralistic society, in which some groups are able to equip themselves with key resources that they have tended to lack and can overcome collective action problems that might otherwise prevent their formation. In contrast, to assess the second claim, it is necessary to examine the extent to which the Internet benefits existing elites and creates new ones.

With respect to the various resources, use of the Internet makes little difference to authority. It may make it easier for those actors possessing authority (typically state organizations) to wield that authority, particularly in authoritarian states, but widespread use of the Internet to subvert authority by societal actors generally means that it would be difficult to evidence any net gain. The Internet has some marginal influence on the ability of groups and individuals to amass money, perhaps most forcefully illustrated by spectacular fundraising through the collection of multiple small amounts by under-resourced U.S. presidential candidates such as John Kerry and Barack Obama. Obama raised twice as much as his rival Hillary Clinton (who used more traditional methods) in the early months of 2008, much of it from small donors, and the nearly 75 million dollars he raised in February 2008 was an all-time high for any presidential candidate in a primary election. Various websites geared to collect numerous small-scale donations from individuals for charitable causes have also had notable success. The widely used U.K. site http://justgiving.com, for example, had by 2008 involved 5.2 million individuals in raising nearly £300 million (more than $444 million U.S.) for about 5,000 charities.

The impact of the Internet on the other resources is more marked. First, with respect to information, the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) with around 15 billion pages and growing (actually it can be plausibly be argued that the WWW is infinite, because of its increasingly dynamic nature) vastly increases the range of information that is freely available to any Internet user, on virtually any subject imaginable. Before the rise of search engines in the early 2000s, it was often argued that meaningful information was difficult to find, like looking for a book in an uncataloged library, but search engines have revolutionized information-seeking behavior, and organizations that seek and strategize to be visible generally can make themselves so. For the growing proportion of populations of developed nations that use the Internet as a first port of call to find things out, the Internet has transformed the information environment and access to the information resource.

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