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Soft Power Revisited
Fourth in a series
One of the notable trends of the past century that will likely continue to strongly influence global politics in this century is the current information revolution. And with this information revolution comes an increase in the role of soft power-the ability to obtain preferred outcomes by attraction and persuasion rather than coercion and payment.
Information revolutions are not new-one can think back to the dramatic effects of Gutenberg's printing press in the sixteenth century. But today's information revolution is changing the nature of power and increasing its diffusion. Sometimes called "the third industrial revolution," the current transformation is based on rapid technological advances in computers and communications that in turn have led to extraordinary declines in the costs of creating, processing, transmitting, and searching for information.
One could date the ongoing information revolution from Intel cofounder Gordon Moore's observation in the 1960s that the number of transistors fitting on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. As a result of Moore's Law, computing power has grown enormously, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century doubling this power cost one-thousandth of what it did in the early 1970s.
Meanwhile, computer-networked communications have spread worldwide. In 1993, there were about 50 websites in the world; by 2000, the number had surpassed 5 million, and a decade later had exceeded 500 million. Today, about a third of the global population is online; by 2020 that share is projected to grow to 60 percent, or five billion people, many connected with multiple devices.
The key characteristic of this information revolution is not the speed of communications among the wealthy and the powerful; for a century and a half, instantaneous communication by telegraph has been possible between Europe and North America. The crucial change, rather, is the radical and ongoing reduction in the cost of transmitting information. If the price of an automobile had declined as rapidly as the price of computing power, one could buy a car today for $10 to $15.
When the price of a technology shrinks so rapidly, it becomes readily accessible and the barriers to entry are reduced. For all practical purposes, transmission costs have become negligible; hence the amount of information that can be transmitted...