The Conversations Don't End The Day After

Now that (most of the) votes have been tallied and Election Day 2006 has come and gone, what can we credit to the influence of the internet?  On his blog, John Palfrey, The Berkman Center's Executive Director and Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard, asked the same question, and recieved the following response from John Bracken:

"Two years later, is there evidence that we are more energized, are there signs of semiotic democracy? Certainly, the war, Katrina and corruption scandals may have energized liberal voters, but I don’t attribute much of that energy to the internet. I suspect that the election news junkies among us would be just as junkified, with or without the Internets."

By way of response, Professor Palfrey says:
"The main addendum I’d make is to point to the use of Internet as empowering the grassroots not just to chatter and to provide information to voters, but also to organize itself and to be trusted to carry the campaign’s water effectively. There’s no doubt that the extraordinarily energetic, well-run Deval Patrick campaign was the most effective of any campaign for governor at using Internet for organizing, productivity-enhancement, fundraising, and messaging of any of the candidates in the race, start to finish. The back-end tools that were provided to volunteer organizers were terrific. The campaign was highly decentralized. The leadership of the campaign is to be congratulated for trusting the base — the grassroots — that got the campaign through the rough primary...You might in fact think of many of the bloggers on the left as volunteers working independently of the campaign..."

To read the rest of Professor Palfrey's post, check out his blog here.