From the mundane to the dramatic, changes in technology have forced interest groups to update the tools they use to organize their adherents, to influence other political actors, and to compete with their rivals. Technological advancements in printing, telephone communications, television, and computing, have exerted a powerful influence on the organizational capacity of interest groups. Technology has created the potential for interest groups in the modern world to reach out to their audiences in ways that groups a century ago scarcely could have imagined. It has also created new burdens for groups who must find the means to pay for the expertise and equipment the newest technology usually requires. Technological change forces organizations to integrate new tools and techniques or lose ground to competing interests.
The contemporary explosion in information and communication technology has made much political activity less labor intensive and more capital intensive. Labor intensive activities, such as holding meetings or engaging in other kinds of face-to-face contact with potential supporters, rely primarily on mobilizing human labor. Capital intensive activities require a larger share of an organization's costs to go to paying for either non-human resources, such as machinery - for example, computers, copiers, and phones - or expensive, specialized professional services - such as pollsters, media producers, and lawyers. As these brief examples suggest, interest groups engage in both labor intensive and capital intensive activities. But as politics has become more dependent on technologies as varied as cell phones, personal computers, data management software, and, of course, television, interest groups activities have become ever more capital intensive.
As the Internet has grown as a mass medium, some observers have made grand predictions about the potential of digital media such as the World Wide Web to significantly reduce the costs of political activity, offsetting some of the effects of the shift from labor-intensive to capital-intensive politics. Building and maintaining websites and the electronic bulletin boards known as weblogs (also known as "blogs") can be done relatively inexpensively, especially when compared to the production costs of television advertising, the dominant (and expensive) political medium. Numerous grass roots organizations have used the Web to perform many of the core functions of interest groups, including informing the public, recruiting and training members, coordinating lobbying campaigns, collecting contributions, and organizing public demonstrations. In an environment in which politics is ever more capital intensive and expensive, the Web helps groups with limited resources achieve more with less.
Some, interest organizations attempt to aid other groups in their efforts to implement technology to increase their capacity for political activity. For examples of the different ways in which interest groups in Texas are using the World Wide Web, explore the links in the Interest Group Diversity feature.
Nevertheless, keeping up with the most sophisticated uses of digital technology costs significantly more than building and posting a simple web page. Integrating more complex applications of digital technology, such as secure websites capable of collecting contributions, requires both staff expertise and ongoing expenditures for construction and maintenance. While the Internet has created new avenues for interest group activity at relatively low cost, the application of digital technology has reversed neither the advantage enjoyed by resource-rich interest groups nor the capital intensive character of contemporary politics.
