Work
Ithiel de Sola Pool's early work as a graduate assistant and later collaborator with Harold Lasswell was quantitative methods of "content analysis," a method for the emerging era of mass communications in world politics (democratic, totalitarian, and revolutionary). Early quantitative methods were crude and expensive and used frequency counts (e.g., symbols of democracy). The pioneers of content analysis set aside most of their research programs to await reduced costs and new technologies (now emerging in the 21st century). Most had personal experience with psychoanalysis and shared views of early critics of content analysis that counting the frequencies of words was simplistic. Their vision was to develop capacities for empathy and build the study of communication flows as the equivalent investment for the wider social science understanding of the world that national income statistics achieved for the early growth of macroeconomics. (The GDELT Project, with contributions from Pool's tradition and MIT Political Science graduates, has provided new data for evaluating this strategic idea for the social sciences.)
Pool's most original theoretical contribution probably was the mathematical analysis of contact networks, public opinion, and influence that became known publicly as the small world hypothesis and as the Six Degrees of Separation.
Pool became a leading authority on the social and political effects of communications. He served as senior editor of The Communications Handbook (1973), which included his highly regarded chapter "Public Opinion." In 1983, Pool pioneered "retrospective technology assessment" to study forecasting methods for the impact of innovations in communication technology with publications such as "Forecasting the Telephone" and "Communication Flows." His book Technologies of Freedom framed policy discussions in the early decades of the digital revolution.
Pool's 1983 publication "Tracking the Flow of Information" made a series of predictions that came to accurately describe aspects of 21st-century digital communication: growing quickly and increasingly electronic, with people experiencing information overload and fragmented streams of information.[7] This work and collaboration with Roger Hurwitz and Hirshue Inose (to organize an early census of communication flows in Japan and the US) were among the pioneering studies of the growth of the global information society.
Pool was the chair and founder of the MIT Political Science Department.[8] He often studied public policy challenges (e.g., the impact of television on violence) and advised the United States and others on various matters. His American Business and Public Policy (Bauer, Pool, and Dexter) remains the best study of lobbying and Congressional influence as American corporations faced, in the early 1960s, issues of trade policy and a globalizing national economy. Pool and collaborators (Abelson and Popkin) pioneered the first large-scale computer simulation of public opinion and election strategies for the Kennedy Presidential campaign. After the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1965, Pool wrote "The Kaiser, the Tsar, and the Computer," a computer simulation of international crisis decisions exploring the theory that the outbreak of WWI was based on stress-induced misperceptions and errors. (The early work on content analysis identified the study of stress effects as a revealing line of analysis: Irving Janis, involved from these early years in thinking about uses of micro-level content analysis, evolved this work in his Victims of Groupthink applications to American foreign policy.) Perhaps Pool's most influential contribution to national security was his "Deterrence as an Influence Process," which quietly and effectively articulated a Cambridge arms control view that contrasted quietly with the bolder rationalism of threats, mutual assured destruction (MAD), and nuclear deterrence by Thomas Schelling. Pool's analysis viewed MAD with an added understanding of the dangers of instilling fear and the demands of revolutionary movements for respect.
The passion for freedom shaped Pool's life. As a young man, Pool was a devout Trotskyist, and a student firebrand as an undergraduate (although his aggression was verbal). He became disillusioned with this form of Communist revolutionary politics after seeing people's ideals used to take away the freedom for which they had initially fought.[9] His book Technologies of Freedom united his social science expertise and personal values to shape the rapid adoption of the digital age as a gift of freedom and liberation beyond what the conventional ideologies and revolutionary movements of the era of mass communications promised.
Controversies
Pool quietly advised the American government's Voice of America and Radio Free Europe on their programs to evolve Communist regimes and build democratic oppositions in favor of freedom. His work with the Simulmatics Corporation included Department of Defense contracts to predict, understand, and manage Communist insurgencies in Vietnam. He was also involved in Simulmatics' efforts to predict where race riots would occur in the United States.[11] The Simulmatics work was not published and debated based on its scientific evidence. Pool's Vietnam War work for the government made him controversial in the social sciences and on the MIT Campus. Daniel Ellsberg, an anti-war convert and activist, would later say of Pool, "I thought of him as the most corrupt social scientist I had ever met, without question."[11]: 230 In the late 1960s, Noam Chomsky viewed him as a New Mandarin, and he sometimes was called a "war criminal." Later, his Technologies of Freedom made him seem more charismatic on the same campus.
Beginning in 1975, Pool protested the growing power of Institutional review boards (IRBs). His first involvement in IRB issues was when an MIT IRB told one of Pool's colleagues he could not interview Boston anti-busing activists, reasoning that his colleague's research could be used against them. Pool believed that much social science work was roughly equivalent to journalism and deserved equal protections against prior restraint. [13]
