and more fungible
than hard forms of power, soft power will be a dominant political resource in the future.
2. AC640 readings: Joseph Nye’s “The Information Revolution and American
Soft Power”
a. information technology and soft power
Soft power is the power of co-optation, reputation, influence, affinity, and attraction. In this
reading in the AC640 package, we build on the original discussion of soft power in the unit
notes above, and apply it specifically to the Internet.
The “information revolution”—the transformation of society achieved by new information
technologies like the personal computer, the Internet, and other digital media—has been a
fact of life since the introduction of the first fully digital and reprogrammable mainframe
computer, the ENIAC, in 1945. It was probably difficult to imagine that a machine that
weighed 30 tons, had 17,468 vacuum tubes, and required five million hand-soldered joints
might serve as a gateway to new ways of organizing society and its politics. The ENIAC
drew so much electricity from its location at the Moore School of Engineering at the
University of Pennsylvania that it reportedly caused brownouts in the nearby city of
Philadelphia.
Despite our familiarity with information technologies in the half-century since ENIAC, Nye
argues that we have just begun to understand the implications of digital media for politics,
economy, and culture. His soft power concept represents an attempt to u英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】nderstand the
significance of the new technologies for politics. While science fiction films and spy novels
condition us to see computers as centralizing technologies, accumulating power and
information to the advantage of a few, Nye credits the new media with a remarkable
decentralizing tendency. The soft power concept accounts for the more diffuse and
decentralized nature of power, making room for many more types of political actors and
more complex forms of interaction among them. An extraordinary example of a new form
of politics uniquely made possible by the Internet is MoveOn.org, a political movement that
sought to rally support online for Democratic Party candidates during the 2004 U.S.
http://www.moveon.org/front/
presidential election. MoveOn’s URL is here:
The new political environment of soft power resembles the medieval political world prior to
the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which provided the original legal basis for the modern
nation-state. The medieval world was, like the new emergent order, one of multiple and overlapping relationships among powers. The resemblance of the old to the new prompts
Nye to define the present as an era of “cyberfeudalism,” one with a similar variety in the
levels and formality of the actors involved. Nye continues (83):
“A medieval European might have owed equal loyalty to a local lord, a duke, a king,
and the Pope. A future European might owe loyalty to Brittany, Paris, and Brussels,
as wel
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