Power in the Informational State: The Social Effects of Information Policy
Sandra Braman
2:00-3:30 pm on Friday, November 30, 2007
Indiana University Bloomington, Herman B. Wells Library, Room LI 001
Refreshments will be available prior to the talk at 1:45 pm.
A reception for the speaker will follow the talk.
Student Meeting: All interested graduate students are invited to meet with Dr. Braman from 9:30am-11:45am on Friday, Nov. 30th, in Room LI036, for a discussion of some of her works.
Lunch will then be provided from 12:00 noon-1:00 pm in Room LI036.
Please RSVP for lunch to Kathryn Clodfelter.
Co-sponsored with the Department of Telecommunications
ABSTRACT
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 areas. 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.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Sandra Braman is Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and in 2008 will serve as the Freedom of Expression Professor at the University of Bergen in Norway. She has been doing research on the macro-level effects of digital technologies and their policy implications for over two decades, often with support from the Rockefeller, Ford, and Soros foundations. She designed and launched the first graduate program in telecommunications and information policy on the African continent, for the University of South Africa in 1997-1998. She has published over seventy scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and books; served as book review editor of the Journal of Communication; is former Chair of the Communication Law & Policy Division of the International Communication Association; and sits on the editorial boards of nine scholarly journals. Recent work includes Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (MIT Press, 2006). Her edited volumes include The Emergent Global Information Policy Regime (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Biotechnology and Communication: The Meta-Technologies of Information (Erlbaum, 2004), and Communication Researchers and Policy-Making (MIT Press, 2003). More information about her research interests and publications can be found at: http://www.uwm.edu/~braman
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