Power and Information Technology: Determinism, Agency, and Constructivism

Abstract

Information communications technologies (ICTs) have occupied a curious place within International Relations Theory. ICTs have often been accorded a central role in changing the international system, with new media altering interaction capacity, posing problems of political control for established actors, and opening up new spaces and new possibilities for different political actors to emerge and exercise influence (Buzan and Little 2000; Buzan and Albert 2010; Keohane and Nye 1998; Deibert 1997;Krasner 1991;Rosenau 1990, Scholte 2005). Implicitly, ICTs affect international power dynamics, enhancing, eroding, or altering the distribution of power and the context in which power is exercised. Yet, for all the apparent weight that ICTs carry in such analyses, the design, development and diffusion of these technological artefacts — the actual physical development of these technologies — has remained relatively understudied within the discipline. Instead of inquiries into the construction of technological objects, IR Theory has tended to treat non-human artefacts as given.¹ Whether technological objects are viewed as neutral tools or as having inherent properties that cause social change, a deterministic technological rationale has been prominent in the field (Herrera 2006: 27–30; McCarthy 2011a, 2013; Peoples 2009).² As a result, a precise conceptualization of the relationship between forms of social power and the creation of biased technologies has been foreclosed.³