Grassroots Politics. Mob spots..
Steven Johnson writes about people creating their own campaign ads. These ads can become with group involvement very polished and popular. I’m just thinking about all those internet jokes and phenomena that start off on blogs and slowly filter up to mainstream news in papers and on TV. The web is the source/momentum for more and more mainstream ads. Fucks sake I saw an article in the Examiner that was practically lifted word from word from Aint It Cool News.
Now I’ve also been reading about Emergent Democracy , Liquid Democracy and Open Source Democracy and they all seem to mention how online collaboration will change the face of democracy and maybe empower the people more. ( I do need to read some of the docs on these more though)
Reading about these and things like the Howard Dean campaign give me that feeling I used to have years ago as a kid where I thought I had the power to change the world. I think we can create some sort of Hybrid version of this for Ireland.
Get some of those kiddies off boards (and by kiddies I mean anyone since we are all kids at heart. Immature is what I really mean. ) get people to come up with anti-ff, anti-fg or anti-labour or whoever the hell else and get them to come up with some good ads. Theres bound to be some good video makers about too who could help out. With the upsurge of broadband and people emailing bigger and bigger files via email in work daily, the vids and pics will easily get circulated at a lightning speed throughout the country and the world. Couple that with an online archive and central core where people can discuss and contribute and you can start allowing people to become more empowered.
You’d be surprised that once people get the feeling that they can make an impact you’ll have some pretty motivated people. .. Or am I just ranting.
As a sidenote I have to sya the net is great. Reading Stevens site I’m thinking “this guy is making lots of sense I’m adding him to my aggregator” and I realise he is the same guy that has a book published that I wanted to read. Billions of webpages online and the some six degrees thing is still in effect.
In my next post I’ll add some picture to keep people happy. 🙂
Edit: Jason has more of the same idea here.