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The social web and civil life: the future of participatory politics in America.

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The web has been creeping up on civil life and into politics for quite a while. The Clinton White House established an official web presence in 1996, and FirstGov.gov (the official U.S. federal government website, now USA.gov) launched in 2000. In early 2004, media pundits were wowed by Howard Dean's popular net-centric campaign (powered by the very capable campaign strategist Joe Trippi) until that primal roar (or scream, depending on your politics) brought it all down.

By 2008, we were expecting something big from the web for the elections. We'd had MoveOn.org and Redstate.com, The Daily Kos and the Conservapedia, and we all, even the crustiest of us, had been getting into deeper waters on the web. Grandpa's MySpacing a bit and dipping a toe into Facebook; your cousin has begun tinkering on her profile in Ancestry.com; and, hey!, your high school football captain is posting pics of the reunion on Flickr, tagging candid shots with all those raunchy old nicknames we thought so kuh-uhl back in the day. By 2008, we were more ready, and folks such as political operators James Kotecki and David Plouffe (though not so much Steve Schmidt, apparently) were ready to "teach 'em what they don't know how."

People are living online and leveraging their online presence as political actors. The web has insinuated into the way we reach our representatives, the way we contribute money to campaigns, and the way we learn about (and react to) voting records and political platforms. I don't write graphite-and-manila letters to senators Kay Bailey Hutchison or John Cornyn anymore, I email them. And they consistently email (and snail mail--for good measure, I guess) back to me. (They never do what I suggest, but at least they read and reply--or someone in their offices does.)

Just like the way I write these days (with a web-based word processor 'in the cloud'), the way I live my civil life is increasingly online. So is yours.

Trippi's use of Meetup.com to organize Dean supporters in 2004 worked really well to build early and committed support for the good doctor. It was a tool that lived in a space many young people were already confidently swimming in, so it reached lots of fresh voters and also validated online media as legitimate for many more. The actual support turned out to be inflated and fickle when compared to the shoe-leather and road-dust results. He lost Iowa, despite support online, and spiraled down from there, but the energy that web tools brought to his campaign made it clear that younger voters and voters online, perhaps even the web itself, were new political actors.

It took a good 15 years for the web to ramp folks up into more intensive political participation. But despite slow starts, the old gung-ho WIRED magazine ethos of laying lots of T1 cable and moving ones and zeros into dollars and euros is now well ingrained. Some interesting mutations of "webby" politics are starting to grow the gills and...

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