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Conceptions of the state underlie all information and communication policy,' for the state uses policy as tools of power. This is true whether those conceptions are well or poorly formed, understood or not, explicit or implicit-but, as Bell (1995) points out in this issue, failure to understand the state leads to an inability to analyze policy. Historically, however, policy analysis has tended to treat the state generally as a venue, a justification for particular positions, or one institutional player among many. In the area of communication policy, few policy analysts have attended to the state.In this, the field joined both political science and sociology, which for decades were characterized by "statelessness" as they turned instead towards systems, societies, or classes as their units of analysis. Ironically, attention returned to the state in the m i d -l 9 8 0~,~ at a time when it was widely believed that the state was losing power.Understanding information and communication policy as power is particularly important in today's environment because there has been a qualitative shift in the level of dependence upon information technologies and in the degree to which activities are informational (Braman, 1990(Braman, , 1993. Regulation in this domain has come to dominate political and economic culture. The use of new information technologies permits the state, like other institutions and cultural forms, to evolve; a new form of the state is emerging, specializing in forms of power specific to the environment of the global telecommunications network (the "net").ating the conditions under which future activity (including policy-making) will take place (Braman, 1990). This is critical in an environment oriented towards the two poles of the global and the local and in which boundaries of the state Information policy plays self-reflexive and constitutive roles for the state, cre-' Information policy is defined here as policy relating to any stage of an information production chain that goes from creation through processing and storage to destruction.

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