Social Networking Grows Up

Shadowman doesn’t endorse political candidates, but this blog is liking what we are seeing at play here.

A major presidential candidate is allowing a community of dissent to live and grow on his own website. The idea is that it is more democratic and healthy. The same social networking that helped the candidate win his party’s nomination is now an instrument to influence, or at least disagree with, that candidate’s policies.

Social Networking has been around for awhile, and it has so far offered some fun and commercial opportunities to the world. But if this kind of interaction continues, social networking will begin to have a larger impact on how society is shaped and nations are governed.

Ari Melber: Surveillance Protest Group Now Tops Obama Website – Politics on The Huffington Post

So a grassroots group of activists has been organizing on MyBo, Obama’s official social networking portal, to protest the Senator’s recent decision to back controversial legislation granting the president more spying powers. The effort hit a big milestone on Tuesday afternoon: It is now the largest self-organized group on Obama’s website, topping networks that were launched over a year ago. The spying protest, “Senator Obama – Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right,” launched last week. (I posted about it on HuffPo and for The Nation here.)

Membership spiked to about 8,900 people on Tuesday, edging out a student group with roughly 8,600 members, and one organizer estimated that the growth rate reached a rapid four percent during the daytime. The group initially spread through the Obama network, since the site’s platform instantly connects members through a dedicated email listserve. On Monday, for example, over 200 emails shot across the wire, reaching the roughly 2,300 members who opted to receive individual messages. The exchanges ranged from policy debates, like whether immunity was acceptable if the telephone companies acted in good faith, to organizing strategies, such as promoting the group on sharing sites like Digg. Then some activists open-sourced the project, creating a wiki-hub for additional actions — from calling Obama’s office to urging Keith Olbermann to promote the group — and launched partner groups on other sites like Facebook.

Hmmm. Wonder what operating system all of this new democracy is running on?