Abroad range of literature has been published recently about the worth of the new information technology to business and industry. Indeed, this technology has grown sufficiently large to merit its own slogans, the most recent being "the videotext revolution," and a computer was selected "Machine of the Year" in 1982 by Time. Yet the implications of this new technology for democratic societies have largely been overlooked, I therefore intend to address the question of the political impact of the computer technology, not from the vantage point of contending commercial proprietary interests, or to make technical distinctions between delivery systems, but rather primarily from the stand-point of political sociology. More exactly, what its effects are on societies and citizens as a result of developments that come under a variety of labels—from electronic data to information technology, broadcast teletext to interactive videotext—but which add up to the same thing: the dissemination of information from senders to receivers in formats without benefit of (or supplemental to) hard copy, that is, the printed word, I

Responses to the computer technology seem to fall into two camps. The first is grounded in what might be called the Orwellian or counter-Utopian model. The new technology is feared as inevitably dominated or controlled by a small political clique or power elite, capable of maneuvering and