Politics in Wired Nations

Politics in Wired Nations presents Pool's pioneering work on the social and political impact of communication systems. Included are the first studies of trends in a global information society, and of social networks and the "small world" phenomenon that creates new relationships and routes of informal influence and political power, both domestic and international. Pool describes a nonviolent revolution in freedom and political control as the world changes from the era of one-way mass communications -- targeted to national audiences -- to a new era of abundant, high-capacity, low-cost, interactive, and user-controlled communications on a global scale. He discusses policy choices for freedom, the battlegrounds ahead, and the risks of government involvement in the regulation of new telecommunication technologies.