Dan writes up his thoughts about last night’s session at the Berkman Center about the Internet and Democracy. Snippet:

I pointed out that in the last day or so, the word “blog” was sometimes as common as “newspaper” or “telephone” (and more than “mailed literature”) when we listened to major participants in the election on TV. Who would have thought that such a young technology would rise so fast to such prominence?

He goes on to compare podcasting with, well,…:

Just as blogging has an analog in the old activity of pamphleteering…, listening to recorded talks by noted individuals and passing them around has been used for years with audio cassette tapes and is still used. I remembered how we keep hearing of discoveries of cassette tapes of speeches when terrorist hideaways are raided…

Halley also blogs last night’s discussion and captures the mood just right. Here’s a snippet of what she’s concluded:

1. Let’s not let the energy of these new democratic muscles were flexing just dissipate; let’s keep at it;

2. Blogging the truth about your life and being there to inspire or give permission to other people to be do that, or simply giving them the encouragement to be BRAVE and try things is what the blogging infrastructure we’re building is all about;

3. We need to study what happened with all that momentum towards citizen democracy in the Dean campaign, understand why it wasn’t channeled into electing Kerry and not let that ever happen again.

(You know what makes me feel good about last night’s session? When Halley and Dan blogged about it, they both wrote more about what they thought about afterwards.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw