Voters expect that the level of public engagement they experienced with Barack Obama during the campaign, much of it occurring online, will continue into the early period of his new administration. A majority of Obama voters expect to carry on efforts to support his policies and try to persuade others to back his initiatives in the coming year; a substantial number expect to hear directly from Obama and his team; and a notable cohort say they have followed the transition online.

Photo by Joe Crimmings

The report resonated well with me since I’ve just finished reading Joe Trippi’s excellent book from 2004, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. (A second edition is also available, including an author’s note and afterword on the 2008 campaign). (Although I do wonder about the difference between “being engaged” and “support[ing] his policies.” The choice of terms in the PEW report which seems to collapse the two. I’d argue the most important way to be engaged is to continue to examine everyone’s policies critically, not just to support them or ask others to do so. For example, the choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration, while mostly symbolic, certainly deserves widespread critical comment).

The book focuses on Trippi’s experience with the Howard Dean presidential campaign and what he calls “open source” campaigning. Although many remember the campaign’s collapse (and the “scream” which was its highly visible, overplayed sound bite), Trippi argued (in 2004) that it is wrong to think of the campaign as a failure:

. . . it was a stunning victory that will resonate long after the election of 2004 is forgotten.
In fact, it was the opening salvo of a revolution, the sound of hundreds of thousands of Americans turning off their televisions and embracing the only form of technology that has allowed them to be involved gain, to gain control of a process that alienated them decaides ago. In the coming weeks and months and years, these hundreds of thousands will be followed by millions, and this revolution will not be satisfied with overthrowing a corrupt and unresponsive political system. It won’t stop at remaking politics. And it won’t pay attention to borders.

Trippi points the way for later candidates, including Obama, who would use the power of Internet-enabled, grass-roots, bottom-up, hyperlocal organization for political change:

Imagine the presidential candidate who is able to continue Dean for America’s exponential Internet growth . . . when it grows to two, then four, then six million online Americans – which Dean would have had if he’d been the nominee – all linked up on the Internet. At that point, the election will only be the beginning. That president’s mandate would be a living, breathing thing.

Joe Trippi - Photo by J.D. Lasica

In fact, if every business and civic leader in every sector of the economy and in ever segment of society doesn’t think that in the next decade they’re in for Howard Dean-style surprises from the people they’ve been treating with total condescension, they haven’t been paying attention. Every business that spends $20 million on television advertising and just $20,000 to post a static web site that is updated once a month had better watch their backs. Every institution that doesn’t understand that the technology is finally here to allow people to reject what they’re being given and demand what they want had better start paying attention.
The revolution comes for you next.

Ultimately the key metaphor in Trippi’s tale is the contrast between the age of Television and the age of the Internet. (Trippi points to data from Bowling Alone which links the rise of television viewership and the decline of civic engagement). He argues that the ‘net has ushered in an age of empowerment:

In the beginning of this book, I wrote that we had misnamed this era The Information Age. I said that it should be more appropriately be called The Empowerment Age. This is what I meant: The Internet is the most democratizing innovation we’ve ever seen – more so than even the printing press. There has never been a technology this fast, this expansive, with the ability to connect this many people from around the world. If Madison was right, and the people can only govern when they can ‘arm themselves with the power which knowledge give,’ then the Internet is the first technology that truly gives people full access to that knowledge – and empowers them with the ability to do something with it.

Empowerment mural in Detroit - Photo by Taubuch

Related posts from elsewhere:

• The Open Source Force Behind the Obama Campaign – Doc Searls in Linux Journal
• Under Obama, Web Would Be The Way – Washington Post
• You Are Now Friends with Barack Obama – Slate

Clay’s long been a favorite speaker of mine – Perl as an act of love and the cognitive surplus being two other videos featured here – and Chris does a great interview here.

My favorite quote, as you might suspect given the tagline of this blog: “Things are going to get wierder before they get saner.” We’re in the midst of a long transformation – we’ve left point A but point B won’t be clear for some time.

Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.

• The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
• Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu
• Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, by Chris Kelty
• Designing For the Social Web: Voices That Matter, by Joshua Porter

It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.

What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?

There’s Jonathan Zittrain‘s new book, The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. (In addition to buying a print copy, you can download the pdf version under creative commons license). Presenting on that book, there’s video of Zittrain at Princeton on March 26th, at ISOC-NY on April 11th, and at the Berkman Center the following week. You can also read and comment on the book.

Finally, via Biella Coleman I found this fascinating video from an event April 16th (between the above two videos), from a meeting of the NY Chapter of the Internet Society, talking about “The Futures of the Internet.” The discussion was sponsored by the NYU Information Law Institute, Free Culture @ NYU, and ISOC-NY. (Shirky’s presentation is on the same cognitive surplus theme from his web 2.0 expo keynote I recently blogged about).

The Panelists:

• Clay Shirky, Author: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Adjunct Professor, NYU ITP
• Tim Wu, Author: Who Controls The Internet?, Professor, Columbia Law School
• Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome
• Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia and Wikia
• Jonathan Zittrain, Author: The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It, Professor, Oxford University; Visiting Professor, NYU Law,

It’s a lengthy video (1 hour 30 minutes), so I recommend downloading a version and getting comfortable to watch it. But if you’re interested in generativity, free culture, online communities, geek culture, mass collaboration, and the larger questions of the internet-as-public-sphere, it’s well worth it.

Once you’ve watched it, go read Biella’s blog post which raises the question she also asked in the video about the depth of political consciousness in “geek culture” generally and free software communities like Debian in particular, as well as the comment thread following it.

I can’t help but relate the discussion also to ROFLCon, and what I perceived as an unfortunate lack of critical and political framing to the discussion there (with some notable exceptions). Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of LOLCats and potentially subversive power of humor. But what kind of culture do we hope we’re collectively creating on the ‘net?

One attraction of the internet can be how unlike the offline world it is – but as the line between online communities and “real world” communities blurs (as more and more offline groups and communities become digitally enabled, and more and more online communities develop offline manifestations) do we risk losing the generative freedom the internet has made possible in the last decade?

As we move in the direction of cloud-based and hosted computing platforms like Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, or even the Facebook API and Open Social, do we put at risk the basic freedoms the FSF is organized to fight in support of?

There’s a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln that the best way to predict the future is to create it – so what are we collectively doing to create the future of the internet that preserves its progressive and liberational aspects?