Information to users

Information Warfare? (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1995) and Ryan Henry and Edward C. Peartree The
Information Revolution and International Security (Washington, D.C.: The CSIS Press, 1998).
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a 'label referring to the simultaneous fragmentation and integration of a panoply of global developments."36
Interdependence itself can also manifest fragmegrative
characteristics as relationships bring nations and peoples together, but also can tear them apart. The management of this characteristic may be the key to maintaining leadership in an information interdependent world.
The connective nature of information and communication
may be adapting to a more interdependent world as the
importance of these issues increases both nationally and internationally. Klapper noticed this when he said, it is very clear that the mass media [as a form of
information flows] do have important consequences for
individuals, for institutions and for society and
culture. That we cannot trace very precise causal
connection or make reliable predictions about the
future does not nullify this conclusion. . . All that
remains is to discover not whether the media have power and how it works, but who has access to the use of this power. Generally this means asking questions about
ownership and other forms of control, whether
36 Comor, 'Governance and the Commoditization of
Information," pp. 217. 'Fragmegration" was originally coined by James Rosenau. Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring
Governance in a Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 6.
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political, legal or economic.37
It may be less important to focus solely on the underlying causal nature of information flows and more important to focus on the characteristics which apply to specific,
currently relevant, situations.
There are many situations which emphasize the
importance of information and communications to the United States today. In both information content and its
accompanying technologies, the United States is
interdependent. In many ways, it is forced to be
interdependent because of the nature of information to
disregard traditional, political boundaries. In order to function, it relies on information flows from around the world, be they financial, military or the news. Yet, the asymmetrical nature of this interdependence is also clear,
because the United States is dominant in the production of both information content and the technology.38 I would add an additional descriptive term: interdependence in this case is 'highly skewed" in favor of the United States because of the noticeably large differences - in both the production of
37 Klapper, 'The Effectiveness of Mass Communication," p. 33,
(italics in original).
38 Cooper points out that the United States is influential,
though interdependence has made others have an influence on it as well. 'The postwar quip that when America sneezes Europe catches pneumonia is perhaps less true than it once was, but there is now a larger grain of truth in its converse" (Cooper, The Economics of