Taking Control: Politics in the Information Age - Hardcover

Winograd, Morley; Buffa, Dudley W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805044892 ISBN 13: 9780805044898

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1996

Synopsis

The authors offer a blueprint for politics in the technological age that takes advantage of the capabilities of high-technology information delivery systems to appeal to the most educated, powerful players in the economy. National ad/promo.

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Reviews

Arguing that the computer age requires new politics and public policies, Winograd, a v-p of AT&T in California, and Buffa, a Colorado lawyer, offer a grab bag of observations and prescription. Both are members of the influential neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council. Some of their dry report is predictable, some is practical and some is Pollyannish. Drawing on recent election results, they argue credibly that the emerging "new information age constituency" will support candidates who want to use government more efficiently. Winograd and Buffa support market-driven government regulation, cuts in corporate welfare, worker training for welfare recipients, boot camps for nonviolent criminals and replacing the income tax with a national sales tax (including an exemption for the poor). More dubious are their assumptions that the health-care market can be made to evolve into a universal insurance system, their hope that video conferencing can extend elite educational opportunity (and relieve affirmative action pressure) and their call for a single national presidential primary in which new media, rather than retail politics, prevails.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When the machines of the information society take over, will the old political machine throw a rod? Two Democratic Party activists answer in the affirmative. Noting the profound economic shift in the last half-century, which began with three in four workers being employed in manufacturing and is ending with a labor force largely centered on the knowledge or service industries, the authors suggest that decentralized, nonhierarchic organizations (including a streamlined government) are best equipped to respond in a timely way to new social and economic demands. For all the info-wonking of a Newt Gingrich or an Al Gore, the authors assert, neither right nor left understands this profound economic shift and the demands it makes on organizations of all kinds. Their call for a new politics, however, is less than resoundingly made. Hard-pressed to explain why Republicans won the 1994 elections, given their putative devotion to industrial-age politics, Winograd and Buffa prophesy the victorious rise of a ``New Democrat'' who will equip people to help themselves and crush the Contract with America. That prophecy seems to be mere wishful thinking, and the authors are no more specific elsewhere in the book, which abounds with airy pronouncements. There is, for instance, their assertion that the only way to address critical questions of public policy is to ``give up old ways of thinking and explore new possibilities for the future.'' This is a manifesto rich in data (the authors note that in 1995 Americans sent 2.2 billion fax messages abroad), but frustratingly short in thought-through ways to realize the authors' call for ``an entirely new political structure, in which each citizen will have the ability to take control of his or her own economic destiny.'' Students of the Information Age will find little new here, but Winograd and Buffa still offer useful points for debate. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805044892
• ISBN 13: 9780805044898
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 294