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Bowling with My.BarackObama.com
I just got back from the Personal Democracy Forum - a conference on politics and the Internet. Much of the conference was spent swooning over My.BarackObama.com - Obama’s social networking site extrordinaire. However, many criticized the site for perpetuating a traditional power relationship where policy ideas flow down but not up the food chain.Few saw it as a vehicle for citizens to actually shape Obama’s political platform.
No doubt this assumption is right. But perhaps the real value of My.BarackObama is the fact that citizens are using the site to engage with one another often face-to-face - interactions that could trigger future organizing efforts around local issues and a more civic-minded citizenry.
In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam warns that civic disengagement threatens democracy by weakening the bonds that tie us together. Detached from our communities, increasingly fearful of others, we’ve become a nation that cares more about protecting our alarmed-houses and private educations rather than our collective rights and aspirations.
If a stronger civil society becomes a sustained outcome of the Obama campaign, than we will have won whether he wins or loses.
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