Political science has a lot to contribute to—and learn from—the study of the politics of information and communications technologies (ICTs). The two books under review illustrate these possibilities and limitations as the academic discourse on “IT” is currently configured.

Both volumes are clearly written and well organized. Both engage systematically with important works relevant to their particular topics within the burgeoning field of ICT studies, as well as with broader social science literatures—with references ranging from Jürgen Habermas and Karl Marx to Thomas Jefferson and Manuel Castells. They display a welcome willingness to take on big issues of democracy, inequality, and justice. At the same time, both are marked by a healthy, scholarly skepticism for the received faux wisdoms of techno-determinism, either in its techno-optimist or techno-pessimist guise. And most importantly, both insist on the embeddedness of technology within social power and legitimacy. Where technology and society meet, the architecture of social power is a far more important determinant of outcomes than, for example, the architecture of the Internet. Missing from each, however, is an adequate theoretical specification of the actors that wield structural or situational power. As I suggest in the following, the problem of agency is underanalyzed, even when it is acknowledged.

Democracy Online consists of 18 high-quality chapters that cover a wide range of topics written by law professors, political scientists, communications and environment experts, policy studies scholars, and an impressive number of authors who are also real-world policy practitioners. One sees the forceful hand of a strong editor at work since the authors stay largely on track, complete with conclusions that actually reach conclusions. The editor, Peter Shane, provides a brief but useful review of the essays, making his case for what he terms a “cyberrealist” approach to the possibilities for democracy online.

Unlike some work in this field that gets bogged down in the details of the technology, this collection analyzes the actual or possible intersections of real political institutions, such as legislatures and parties, and currently available hardware or software technologies that may affect the beliefs and behaviors of citizens, voters, and officeholders. Authors devote considerable attention to issues that will be of special interest to political scientists. For example, several chapters analyze issues of how new technologies do, or should, intersect with institutional design when pursuing social goods, like participation. Authors describe in detail the actual processes that groups go though to develop software programs designed to promote certain kinds of cooperative behaviors and to discourage others, software that is then inserted into institutional rules and repertoires.

The chapters on “Unchat” and “virtual deliberations” make fascinating reading for political scientists and point to some of the difficulties in making cyberspace truly democratic and deliberative, rather than merely informative or distracting. In “Unchat: Democratic Solution for a Wired World,” Beth Simone Noveck demonstrates Lawrence Lessig's point that software architecture is a form of rules and laws, since software shapes permissible individual and collective behaviors: “[D]esign matters; value choices translate into design choices…. [Therefore] if we are to structure the space and procedure for deliberation in cyberspace, we need to be explicit about what the procedures of deliberation ideally comprise” (p. 22).

Like other authors in the volume, Noveck argues forcefully that merely providing “Internet access” will not automatically improve democratic and deliberative practices online. The anarchy of the unmediated chat room is not much better for careful deliberation than the anarchy of a city sidewalk. She describes the evolution of a Yale Law School international cyberlaw discussion group, wherein about 20 technologists, professors, and policymakers from around the world, and law students from Yale, “met” once a week for two hours. They developed a sort of constitution through rules embedded in the software in order to promote a deliberative, mutually respectful discourse. Starting with first principles like accountability, transparency, equality, and responsiveness, they designed a framework that also allowed some experimentation; it gave power to a moderator (rotating) and allowed participants to “speak,” to “shout” (i.e., to jump the queue, for a limited number of times), and to “whisper” to another group member.

In his contribution, “Digital Deliberation,” Thomas Beierle looks at the Environmental Protection Agency and compares online deliberation with other forms of policy engagement, such as public hearings and formal advisory committees, and also finds that online dialogue was informative and reciprocal but not truly deliberative. Like other authors, he too recommends institutional reforms, such as reaching out to demographic and socioeconomic groups “not normally represented in policy making,” which tends to be dominated by particular interest groups, even online.

There are additional essays on how Jeffersonian and other institutional ideals might be designed to enhance the democratic potentials of the Internet and other forms of ICT, such as A. Michael Froomkin's chapter entitled “Technologies for Democracy.” These authors are fully aware that institutions must be codesigned if they are to realize even partially the democratic, participatory potentials of the new technologies. The authors implicitly and occasionally explicitly build on Noveck's and Lessig's arguments that software code is itself a form of institutional and political architecture that shapes outcomes and power. The more general reflections of the book are complemented with a handful of cases that include local and national institutions, as well as some international bodies like the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

The scholarly tone of Shane's collection is also apparent in Darin Barney's The Network Society. He painstakingly guides the reader through a series of models and arguments—of postindustrial society, information society, postmodernism, and so forth—to analyze their strengths and weaknesses in a balanced, scholarly, and compelling way. Even when he turns to his core chapters on network politics, network society, and networked economy, and offers up his own preferred interpretations, he scrupulously provides counterpoints to them from other authors.

While the treatments of network society, technology, and economy are compelling, to the political scientist the value of our discipline is revealed in what the author chooses not to do. Rather than describe the ins and outs of contentious political engagements over the design and deployment of IT where they occur with the greatest frequency and the greatest consequence—local and national levels—the author chooses to illustrate the case of modern network politics by describing transnational and global politics, reviewing such matters as the rise of nongovernmental organizations with global reach and their implications for democracy. Certainly, these are important matters. But the author's insights on politics in the network society are less compelling for the political scientist than his contributions in the other chapters. He admits that the introduction of new ICT resources seems to have special appeal for dispersed social movements, but he recognizes that other actors like the state also have access, and so the net impact on winners and losers is not obvious. One sometimes wishes that Barney made bolder claims, but since this is a volume in the publisher's “Key Concepts” series, his balance is warranted.

Here is where Shane's collection provides a useful complement to Barney, and also where Barney's macro treatments of global and historical trends add elements missing in Shane. As a careful and useful consideration of things networked, The Network Society is a good single volume for a course, and repays reading for the scholar and researcher as well.

At the same time, both books share a similar weakness, which characterizes ICT studies as a whole, whether in political science, sociology, communications, or other fields: They operate comfortably at the macro, society-wide level, and often at the institutional or group level, but they fail to analyze the micro behaviors, interests, and incentives of real flesh-and-blood individuals who choose to go online or not, to vote or not, to open IT businesses or not, and who use ICTs to repress or liberate their countrymen. There are references in both books to aggregate data that shed some light on individual behaviors, typically polling data on computer or Internet use. However, the authors fail to describe precisely who these actors are. There is a rhetorical commitment to exploring “agency” and some actual speculation about it. But very few agents appear in these pages—neither wild-eyed information revolutionaries nor steely-eyed ICT conservatives; no flesh-and-blood human beings pop up in these pages. And except for some consideration of network culture in Barney, there is little interest in how macro, meso, and micro levels might be tied together theoretically to shed more light on the dynamics of the new networked societies. Yet at the early stages of important political phenomena like the politics of the transition to a networked society, we miss a great deal, and risk misrepresenting a great deal, if we lack a sense of the people behind the technologies and how they fit into the broader picture.

Both books wrestle with what have become classic research questions for scholars on these issues: To what extent do online dynamics and behaviors reproduce offline conditions, or do they vary significantly? What precisely are the dynamics that actually occur online, and how do these new behaviors impact on broader societal conditions? Ultimately, both books agree that much will depend on the “priorities and interests animating the actors and institutions controlling the medium's development” (Barney, p. 53). Barney also reminds us that our scholarly definitions of important terms like “information society” or “network society” may sometimes affect the ways that citizens and policymakers understand and act on practical matters of politics and public life. Such terms are conceptual tools but are also part of “an ideological discourse that serves a performative, prescriptive function” as well (p. 181).