Proposal for a Government and Politics Comprehensive Exam
                        in Technology and Politics

                               Shayne Weyker




Approved:


                         Dr. Dennis Pirages (Organizer)


                         Dr. Ken Conca


                         Dr. George Quester
     With your permission, I would like to create my own second field exam
in Technology and Politics. 

In my time at Maryland I have been consistently interested in questions
regarding how the devices and systems people construct and use relate to
politics in many of its forms including such things as the good society,
class conflict, social movements, political communication, constitutional
law, political economy, national security, north-south politics, and so on.
This can be seen from the following examples from my coursework.

While taking Dr. Pirages' seminar on Technology, Resources, and I.R. I did
a review of recent trends in the technologies of warfighting and of
reporting, and how they affected on another. I also considered what this
meant for national security policy and the democratic role of the free
press. I later greatly revised this paper for a Post-Modern Social Theory
sociology seminar, which had more emphasis on how these trends related to
the ideas of some of the Post-Modern and Critical Theorists.

For a Library Science graduate seminar on Information Transfer and Less
Developed Countries I reviewed what role information (computing and data-
communication) technologies had played in recent World Bank development
projects. Some key questions asked were: What role did the technology play
in development projects? Why did the Bank choose to use the technology in
the way it was used? What were the primary reasons for success and failure
in applying information technology to development projects? In what ways
could one question the measures of success used?

For U.S. Public Law I reviewed the constitutional law of Unreasonable
Search and Seizure as it regards surveillance technologies and counter-
surveillance technologies. The purpose was to see whether a clear trend
could be detected where the privacy a person was entitled to by law was
eroding over time due to the progressive introduction of new technologies
of surveillance and the approval of their use by the courts and congress
without a counteracting approval of citizens' use of new counter-
surveillance (privacy enhancing) technologies.

Most recently, for Latin American comparative politics I studied the
adoption of new information technologies by social movements working for
human rights and environmental protection. This involved two things: 1)
reviewing theories of the dynamics of how these groups achieve mobilization
at home and mobilization of politically powerful reference groups abroad,
and 2) using a combination of lit review and interviews to map out the ways
different kinds of advanced communication and information technology could
turn out to aid, prove ambivalent towards, or even undermine such
mobilization.

I propose that the format of the exam be identical to the standard format
(5 days to answer 3 questions out of a larger number, 10 pages per
response) except that there would be only three categories of questions:
Theory, Relationship to economics/society/politics, Relationships with war
and security. These latter two categories may seem to be rather ad hoc. I
think they do, however, exhaust the scope of substantial real-world kinds
of interaction between technology and people which is of interest to
political science. Further, in thinking about the second category I was
unable to conceive of or discover through reading important discussions of
technology's role in political events, economic change, or social change
which did not have elements of the other. Technology's role in war and
security is somewhat less prone to this kind of overlap, hence its being
given it's own category. I also decided not to build second and later
categories of questions around the main theoretical groupings discussed
below since the questions worth asking (see sample questions below) are
best answered by a dialogue between the different theoretical approaches.

I am asking professors Dennis Pirages, Ken Conca, and George Quester to be
the readers, with Dennis Pirages being the organizer. Their signatures
assenting to this can be found on the cover page.

It is my understanding that a proposal of this type must show that the
field being created must, 

1) Have a defined scope and key theories/debates mapped out
2) Be relevant to the study of politics.
3) Cross several of the boundaries of (or be tangential to) the major sub-
disciplines of political science.

I think all three of these concerns are answered in this document. Number
three I hope has already been addressed in outlining my course of study.
Numbers one and two (and to some extent three) are dealt with in the
following discussion of schools of thought and the sample questions
provided for the exam, as well as in the opening paragraph above.

                         Defined scope and theory

Most analysis of technology and politics starts with the assumption that
the technologies humans use are not entirely flexible in their application.
The goals of the end-user of technology are only part of any accurate
understanding of how technology and politics relate to one another. 

Once one decides that technology (either as a general process or the
aggregate of particular technologies) is politically charged in some way,
one then needs to pay attention to the following things:
1) Who and/or what is important in deciding which technologies get
developed and adopted.
2) What kinds of changes and costs the adoption of a technology requires of
(or imposes on) users' both individually and as groups and societies.
3) Whether the process of choosing what technologies to develop and adopt
as well as the nature and distribution of the effects of adopting are fair
and compatible with a humane and just society.

While all authors don't discuss all of these key questions, the ones given
above seem to encompass most of what theorists and historians of the
subject are discussing.

What follows are thumbnail sketches of the major styles of thinking about
technology's relationship to politics. It is difficult to give many
examples for each since many scholars have elements of more than one in
their work.

Instrumentalists such as Mesthene think that technologies are all neutral
instruments designed to solve objective problems discovered by human
beings. As such, their effects are due entirely to the intentions (good or
bad) of their users and designers (with the occasional case of technologies
failing to work as designed). Only a few serious theorists of technology's
relationship to politics agree with this view, since it is by its nature
empty of any particularly interesting observations or conclusions about
technology and politics.

Social Determinists, such as Marxists, followers of Kuhn, and Bureaucratic
Politics scholars think that there are particular kinds of determining
social forces which will shape the kind of technologies adopted. Some
favorites seem to be static power hierarchies, introduction of new power
hierarchies, the process of competition for power, and cultural
predisposition towards certain types of social arrangements. Many of these
can in turn be considered at multiple levels of analysis including global,
international, national, class, corporate/bureaucratic [both in government
and in the community of technologists], gender and so on. Finally, the
pursuit of wealth, steady/satisfying work, or other kinds of well-being are
as much the goal as power itself at some levels of analysis.

A key argument of this school is that which problems are determined to be
important enough to fund research for and adopt a technology to solve, as
well as the way the problems are subjectively defined is dependent on non-
technological social factors.

Hard Technological Determinists such as Ellul, Heidegger, and several of
the Frankfurt School think that there is an internal logic to technology's
spread and advancement independent of any human intention. The inevitable
conclusion of this logic as it is played out in the world in the
destruction of vitally important things such as human autonomy, the human
spirit, community, democracy, and so on. The key elements of this line of
thinking are:
1) New technologies' effects are unpredictable and sometimes even hostile
to the goals that ought be pursued if what the social determinists'
"dominating social factors" were producing choices about which technologies
to adopt.
2) Technology in general has imperatives for human behavior built into it
which humans both individually and collectively must conform to if they
wish to take advantage of technology (ex. agriculture, factories, the
atomic bomb).
3) The proliferation of ever more complex and giant-scale technology (with
ever greater concentration of power in the hands of technocrats who can
maintain it) is the only possible outcome of continued reliance on
technology. 
4) Fundamental human principles/virtues/ends are being displaced by a
desire for more effective means for the control of nature and ever greater
efficiency (material wealth). Acquiring more advanced technology becomes an
intrinsic good above all others.

Soft Technological Determinists such as Winner agree that there is a
visible trend towards ever larger scale and complexity in our technological
devices and ever more technocracy in our social systems in which those
devices must operate. But they disagree with the hard determinists that
this is a product of technology's internal logic and that no human action
short of forgoing technology could stop it. 

The key distinction from the hard determinists seems to be that technology
places imperatives on peoples behavior, but usually only in the sense that
particular instances of technology (such as the automobile), once adopted
and spread though society shape their users. In the design and research
stage a particular instance of technology could, given certain new social
conditions, be selected which will not produce undesirable shaping of its
human users behavior. Therefore, technology as an abstract process
encompassing all instances of technology can not be said to be determining
of human behavior. Incidentally, they also disagree with the Marxists that
putting socialists in power is the only way to get good technology with
positive effects.

To rephrase, the soft determinists argue that:
1) People could, if they chose to, pay attention to technologies while they
are still being designed and figure out what requirements for the
functioning of that technology would impose on users and people at large.
2) Having done this they could impose human (as opposed to economic or
technical) criteria on technologies' design. 
3) They would then reject or modify to a more human scale those
technologies which place unacceptable demands on people and concentrate
power too much.

As it stands now the soft determinists argue, this kind of review largely
isn't being done because of 
1) The way scientists and engineers define their responsibility, their
resistance to the imposition of alien criteria on their work, and the
incentives from corporate and government funding to create new technology
quickly which maximizes efficiency on narrow grounds such as profitability
or military effectiveness.
2) The acceptance by people of narrow economic standards of the good and
their insensitivity to the erosion to and the importance of fair
distribution (across society and across generations) of benefits, hazards,
and influence in public decisionmaking.
 
These obstacles are real but not insurmountable for an aware and
politically active public. Number two to a large extent underlies number
one.

The Environmentalists:

There is an another take on the problem of technology where the argument is
that technology (combined with Capitalism/Liberalism, population growth,
etc.) is pulling ever more people into a system whose growth is
impoverishing and will eventually destroy humanity physically, rather than
spiritually. It will do this by progressively wrecking the ecosystem on
which humans depend on for survival, pushing them into ever more rapid
exploitation of remaining natural resources which accelerates the process.

I believe that the environmentalists (an admittedly diverse group
oversimplified here) need to be tied to the hard technological determinists
even though the environmentalists share some features with the soft
technological determinists and social determinists in that they frequently
blame dysfunctional social institutions/hierarchies and human greed for the
problem.
 
The environmentalists boundary with the more humanistically oriented hard
technological determinists is a fuzzy one since some environmentalist
authors are interested in both the dehumanizing and ecologically
destructive qualities of the spread of technology. Such authors advance
arguments where dehumanization or ecocide (or both) help to accelerate the
other. Others might say that they are both simply effects of the same
cause. 

Nevertheless, one can note a certain lack of concern about the environment
on the part of the humanists and a somewhat differently conceived and
lesser concern about humanity's autonomy/soul on the part of the
environmentalists. I speculate that this gap comes from the following. The
major humanists were largely writing when technocracy and totalitarianism
were much bigger concerns than the environment (early-mid 20th C.). Also,
many of the humanists were left-leaning and probably absorbed some of
Marx's optimism about the boundless plenty of nature once the communist
society was achieved. The major environmentalists were writing later when
knowledge of environmental degradation was greater. They also had a lower
proportion of philosophers and social theorists among their number and a
higher proportion of scientists and naturalists than the humanists.

The Technological Optimists 
(Economists and pro-capitalist sociologists/futurists)

Arrayed against those who fear ecocide and the spiritual/intellectual
destruction of humanity there are those who refuse to worry and offer
optimistic predictions. The economists are a kind of social determinist and
the pro-capitalist sociologists/futurists are a kind of technological
determinist. They are grouped together here separately from the others
because of the similarity of their conclusions (the status quo is fine) and
their common rivals (all the other technological and social determinists
who say the status quo is bad).

Economists like Simon believe in a boundless plenty of nature based on the
incentive structure of a free market and the infinite capacity of human
ingenuity to find affordable and acceptable substitutes for any important
scarce resource or stretch out remaining supplies of those for which no
substitute is found. Ironically, this is a kind of mirror image of Marx's
claim that socialism's introduction will lead to skyrocketing productivity
and far more rational and efficient allocation of surplus. The economists
claim about a lack of resource scarcity and problems with the environment
also comes from assumptions about which resources are "important" and what
determines a give thing's value to the good human life ("something's market
price is its value") which environmentalists and others find repellent,
false, and legitimizing of the desires of the economically powerful
minority and delegitimizing of the interests of the majority.

Futurists like Toffler and Sociologists like Bell on the other hand offer a
vision of technological advancement in the latter decades of the 20th C.
which involves a retreat of the hierarchy, dehumanizing working conditions, 
and concentration of power in the hands of a small number of people that
the technological determinists and Marxists warned of. This is called the
coming of "post-fordist" or "post-industrial" age. The optimists see this
as a good thing, emphasizing how the age of cheap, global and personalized
(de-massified) flows of information will empower the average individual and
disenfranchised groups, as well as enhance opportunity for human community
and culture under the free market. 

Meanwhile the (neo-)Marxists think the new autonomy for workers in post-
industrialism is a sham for all but a lucky highly-technologically-educated
few while the overwhelming reality for the many (in the developed world) is
the same old dehumanizing/alienating role in production (plentiful
information technology is used by corporations to spy on workers) with the
new features being unemployment, loss of job security, and erosion of real
wages. This differing vision between marxists and the humanist-optimists is
due partly on assumptions about what is important to human happiness (one's
life as producer versus one's life as a consumer), whether this can be
compatible with capitalism (no versus yes), whether the pluralist theory of
politics is accurate (no versus yes), and estimates about the relative
availability of good jobs (few versus many). 

Finally, the Marxists and Optimists differ on what the mass-movement of
industry to the developing countries will do for the developing countries
even as it places (more or less) stress on the people of the North. The
Optimists (to the extent that they think developing nations won't be able
to leapfrog straight to post-industrialism) think this will lead to higher
standards of living in the South as employment and wages rise and
birthrates due to an industrializing society fall. The Marxists and
Environmentalists think that between continued population growth,
disintegrating rural social structures, scheming by the multinational
corporations to keep profits to themselves, and aggravated pollution due to
weaker regulations in the South the people there will be worse off than
before.

Cybernetic approaches
Beniger, Mulgan, Weiner, Deutsch [, some of Galbraith, Chandler] 

Technological change since the industrial revolution is about the search
for control of economic and social processes in order to keep them moving
towards a desired condition (increasingly efficient) and stable. This is
done using the principles of feedback, foresight, surveillance, and
minimizing lag in responses. Generally the idea is to maximize the
leadership's ability to know as much as possible of what is going on in and
around their organization and to make communication between the leadership
and everyone in the organization as efficient and transparent as possible.

For some of the cybernetically oriented theorists this is a socially
determined end decided by those with a large stake in the status quo. But
it is treated separately here because for some authors in the school like
Beniger it is seen as transcendent of the particular interests of any group
or of any particular kind of social order and is more technological in its
origin. The argument being that as long as the society in question is
industrialized it will be in desperate need of developing such forms of
control.

Beniger said that the capacity to control an (economic) system must keep up
with the capacity for that system to produce if uncontrolled "runaway"
effects like train collisions on single-track railways or massive
overproduction of unwanted goods is to be avoided. This leads to a
proliferation of rules, forms, reporting schemes, and reduced autonomy and
conviviality in the lives of workers. It also leads to a corporate
preference for oligopoly (instead of free competition), stable markets
(over maximum profits), and firm control over all inputs and demand (even
at the expense of profits, competition, and a fulfilled/happy workforce).
In return for these negatives workers/consumers get a much higher standard
of living than they would otherwise from their share of the surplus
created. Different authors within and outside this school disagree on
whether the deal was a good one for people in general.

For Weiner and Mulgan in particular, the whole enterprise deserves to be
questioned about the inherently conservative assumption that the stability
of the status quo ought to be the ultimate goal, and whether efficiency in
some easily quantified economic sense might fail to serve the real goals of
majority of people who are not textbook examples of economic man or members
of the investing class (see Environmentalists and Marxists and
Technological Determinists above).

Proposed Questions for 
Technology and Politics field exam:

Theory

1) To what extent is technological development, particularly in the 20th
century, independent of human goals and plans? To what extent is
technological advancement an "independent variable" or a "social fact"
which determines, conditions, or strongly encourages other political
realities (conflicts, compromises, changes in the relative power of social
groups, changes in institutions, changes in what is considered good/right)
to happen?

2) To the extent that technological development is conditioned on and
shaped by other aspects of society, what are the likely suspects and how do
they operate?
processes (competition for; wealth, land, believers, dominance);
actors (state and capitalist sponsors of research as well as technical
experts who allocate research funds, etc.);
values (efficiency, control over nature/others, safety/security, etc.)
and/or;
institutions (the free market, [neo-]Colonialism, the nation-state, the
Law, the Church, the welfare state, global corporations, military-
industrial complexes, etc.)

3) Their sources notwithstanding, what implications have particular
categories of technological change had for human values such as equality,
freedom, community, development of human potential? To the extent that
technology has had conflicting effects on a particular value or has
strengthened some values while eroding others, outline the borders of such
conflicting effects?

4) Erosion of certain values (such as community and, recently, economic
equality in developed nations) and promotion of others (such as efficiency
and management's tightening of control over production) has been used by
some as evidence to support the conclusion that technological change is
indeed dependent on human action, the action of elite groups who choose to
make these changes because the changes benefit them. Who are these elites?
What is the evidence for and against this argument? Is the claim
falsifiable?

5) Assume that an unacceptable number of changes in values and other
aspects of social life following from technological changes are
dysfunctional, and that technological change can be influenced by
processes, actors, values, and institutions that humans have the ability to
change. What are some of the changes in these that would counteract or
prevent dysfunctional technological development? Which of those changes are
the more easily achievable ones, why?

The implications of information technology on politics and economics

6) One can ask whether a) the benefits (financial and otherwise) from a
technological change are fairly distributed and b) the extent to which the
public can rightly demand distributional fairness of the changes before
they are allowed to occur. Indeed this is kind of debate over the 
"information society" and "post-industrial economy". Give the outlines of
this debate on both sides, describing the difference in claims about what
the social and political effects will actually be as well as the
differences in what is assumed to be fair or relevant by the two sides.

7) Civil Libertarians warn of the surveillance/dossier society that comes
with all the rapidly increasing means for collection of information about
individuals' past and present actions, and the threat this represents to
freedom. This is said to occur through (i) the technology's misuse and
abuse, (ii) it's use contributing to a creeping erosion of public
expectations of privacy--followed by laws and rulings that reflect this
increasing acceptance of surveillance and (iii) it's "panoptic" effect
leading to self-censorship out of fear of being discovered. How do these
effects work in practice? What have been the main reasons for collecting so
much data on people? Describe the outlines of the cryptography-based
alternatives to the dossier society and outline the dangers of too much
privacy.

9) Some critics point out to the danger to a democracy of making a
commodity out of information. They argue doing so would make stillborn
information technology's promise to the poor and middle class to give them
the ability to rival the wealthy and institutions in increasingly important
kinds of power which depend on access to information: because the extent of
one's ability to access information (if it is a commodity) will become
proportional to one's wealth. Is the economic status of information the
core of distributional justice and social equality in the years ahead? Why
or why not? What alternatives are there to making information a commodity?
What are the problems such alternatives must overcome?

10) Instant worldwide communications (both point-to-point and broadcast)
has significantly changed the nature of diplomacy. Efforts at persuasion or
intimidation or friendship-building that once took place face to face now
increasingly take place over the television or radio. Diplomacy that once
was private now is increasingly public. The delegation of authority to
emissaries of the state has been replaced by assertion of daily control
from the leadership at home through the telephone, telex and the "special
negotiating team" sent from home. Comment on these and what you think their
implications are for how cooperation and negotiation between states will
occur in the future.

Technology and War

11) Have the revolution in technologies of destruction changed peoples'
attitudes on the limits of what are acceptable means to victory in war
(since their use has to be rationalized out of fear the other side will be
able to overcome their revulsion for the weapon first)? What are the
limiting conditions of acceptability to the public and military usefulness
inherent in these weapons? And what changes in society have tended to
sensitize rather than desensitize people to the suffering the use of
weapons of mass destruction inflicts?

12) How are the politics of deciding nuclear strategy and the procurement
of nuclear weapons in the years after WWII affected by the fact that these
weapons have never been used and can never be tested under actual combat
conditions, much less tested repeatedly under such conditions? How does
this contrast with conventional weapons strategy and procurement?

13) One political aspect of weapons of mass destruction is that they
"radiate secrecy and control"--that political/social structures having
anything to do with them are made more hierarchical and secret so that the
threat the weapons present to human life from misuse can be made tolerable.
Describe the extent to which this effect has manifested itself with
nuclear, chemical, and biological technologies and explain the differences
in effects on political/social structures between them.

14) If technology has made civilians to be increasingly the victim of war
it has also made them increasingly them participants in war: they see more
of what happens in war, contribute more to the war effort, and have more
influence the leaders who decide when to start and stop fighting. Describe
how these have occurred and how this has interacted with the process of the
increasing victimization of civilians. How and why have governments such as
the U.S. (in choosing to; fight short wars, eliminate the draft, make heavy
use of abstract simulation of combat, hinder reporters, and use more long-
range weapons) opposed the trend of civilian emotional investment and
political influence in wars their country is fighting?
                               Bibliography

THEORY

Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, New York, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983.

                 , For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, USA, Telos, 1981. 

Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, Black and Red, 1983.

Deutsch, Karl W., The Nerves of Government, New York, Free Press, 1963.

Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society, New York: Knopf, 1964.

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, Harmondsworth, Pennguin, 1987.

Galbraith, John Kenneth, The New Industrial State, New York: New American Library,
1968.

Haraway, Donna J., "A Cyborg Manifesto" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention
of Nature, New York, Routledge, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York,
Harper, 1977.

Kelly, Kevin, Out of Control: The rise of neo-biological civilization, Addison-Wesley
1994.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of
Effects.

Melzer, Arthur, Jerry Weinberger and M. Richard Zinman eds., Technology in the Western
Political Tradition, Ithica, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993.

Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1934.

Weizenbaum, Joseph, Computer Power and Human Reason, San Fracisco, W.H. Freeman, 1986.

Wiener, Norbert, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, Boston,
Houton Mifflin, 1950.

Winner, Langdon, Autonomous Technology, Cambridge: MIT press, 1987.

               , The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology,
Chicago, University of Chicago, 1986.


TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

Bell, Daniel, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, New York, Basic, 1976.

Beninger, James, The Control Revolution, Cambridge, Harvard Univ. Press, 1986.

Castells, Manuel, The Information Economy, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap, 1977.

Dickson, David, The Politics of Alternative Technology, New York, Universe

Drucker, Peter, The Age of Discontinuity, New York, Harper and Row, 1969.

Mosco, Vincent and Janet Wasko, The Political Economy of Information, Madison,
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

Mulgan, Geoff, Communication and control: networks and the new economies of
communication, New York, Guilford Press, 1991.

Noble, David F., Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, New
York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1986.

Toffler, Alvin, The Third Wave, New York, Bantam, 1981.

Webster, Frank, and Kevin Robbins, Information Technology: A Luddite Analysis, Norwood,
NJ: Ablex, 1986.

TECHNOLOGY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES/DOMESTIC POLITICS

Annis, Sheldon, "Giving Voice to the Poor", Foreign Policy, Fall 1991, n84, p93.

Burnham, David, The Rise of the Computer State, New York: Random House, 1983.

Hills, Jill, "The telecommunications rich and poor", Third World Quarterly, Apr. 1990, v12
n2.

Konrad, George, Antipolitics, Trans. Richard Allen, Quartet books, 1984.

Lyotard, Jean-Fran‡ois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis,
Univ. of Minnesota, 1984.

TECHNOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 

DACOR Bacon House Foundation, Herbert Wilson Seminar in International Affairs,
American Diplomacy in the Information Age, University Press of America: Washington
D.C., 1991.

Rosenau, James N., Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity,
Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1990.

Scott, Margaret, "News From Nowhere", Far Eastern Economic Review, November 28, 1991.

Wark, McKenzie, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events, Bloomington, Indiana
Univ. Press, 1994.

TECHNOLOGY AND WAR/NATIONAL SECURITY

Allen, Thomas B., War Games: The secret world of the creators, players, and policy
makers rehearsing world war iii today, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981.

Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David; "Cyberwar is coming!", Comparative
Strategy, v12n2, 1993.

Barnaby, Frank, The Automated Battlefield: new technology in modern warfare, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987.

Burrows, Willam E., Deep Black: The Secrets of Space Espionage, New York, Bantam, 1988.

Burrows, Williams E., and Windrem, Robert; Critical Mass: The
dangerous race for superweapons in a fragmenting world, New York, Simon &
Schuster, 1994.

Creveld, Martin van, Technology and War From 2000 BC to the present,
New York, Free Press, 1989.

Creveld, Martin van, The Transformation of War, New York, Free Press, 1991.

                   , Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict, New York: 
Free Press, 1993.

Davis, Richard, "Spying on the Government: The Media, Remote-Sensing Satellites, and
U.S. National Security Policy", Political Communication, v9, pp191-206.

De Landa, Manuel, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Zone books, 1991.

Denton, Robert E., Jr., "Television as an Instrument of War" in The Media and the Persian
Gulf War, edited by Robert E. Denton, Jr., Praeger: Westport, CT, 1993. 

Der Derian, James, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War,
New York, Blackwell, 1992.

Ford, Daniel, The Button: The Pentagon's Strategic Command and Control System, (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).

Gerbner, George, "Persian Gulf War, The Movie" in Triumph of the Image: the media's war
in the Persian Gulf--a global perspective, Hamid Mowlana, George Gerbner, and Herbert
I. Schiller, eds., Westview:Boulder, CO, 1992.

Krepinevich, Andrew F., "Keeping pace with the Military-Technological
revolution", Issues in Science & Technology, Summer 1994.

Krepon, Michael, et al. eds., Commercial Observation Satellites and International
Security,  St. Martin's Press/Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: New York,
1990.

Libicki, Martin C., The Mesh and the Net: Speculations on Armed
Conflict in a Time of free silicon, National Defense University
1994.

Mandelbaum, Michael, "Lessons of the next nuclear war", Foreign
Affairs, March/April 1995.

Perrin, Noel, Giving Up the Gun: Japan's reversion to the sword, 1543-1879, Boulder,
Shambhala [Dist. by Random House], 1980.

Popkin, Jeremy D., Media and Revolution, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

Sterling, Bruce, "War is virtual hell", Wired 1.01, 1993.

Virillio, Paul, Speed and Politics, (New York, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1986) 

              , Pure War, New York, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983.