Hypercitizenship

The Washington Post featuires an article, Citizenship 2.0:

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported an important effect of the 2008 presidential campaign: For the first time, traffic at left-leaning political Web sites overtook traffic at right-leaning competitors. The Drudge Report and Free Republic had the largest number of unique visitors in September 2007, but in September 2008, that honor went to the Huffington Post.

These websites represent more than just websites.  In many cases, they represent tools for putting people in touch with each other, and different tools reach different sets of people with different effect.

There are basically two kinds of influential political Web sites: sites that use a top-down hierarchy, whereby a central organization develops a message and disseminates it using social-networking technology, and sites that use a Wikipedia-type method, in which thousands of individual users contribute content and drive the message. This latter approach is exactly the opposite of conspiratorial.

The earliest and most powerful right-leaning Web site, Free Republic, used the non-hierarchical method. Free Republic developed innovative Internet architecture to build a sort of Wikipedia of citizenship, a do-it-yourself kit for spreading messages and connecting them with local, face-to-face activism. The site's discussion lists -- which have global reach -- are fed by participants and connected by those participants to a plethora of state message boards organizing real-time, boots-on-the-ground political action. The influence of the site reflects the power of self-organizing social phenomena, not a conspiracy.

What is the effect of using these tools for political campaigns?

What will these successes mean for the future of our politics? In Federalist No. 10, James Madison argued that the geographical scope of the new country -- even with just 13 states -- would prevent the development of nationwide factions. But the Internet has eradicated barriers of geography, enabling much more effective factional organization than the Founders could have imagined. This is what Clinton was really marking when she complained about the "vast right-wing conspiracy."

Indeed, in 1994, Newt Gingrich managed to "nationalize" the Congressional elections, by proposing a "Contract With America" on which all Republican congresscritters would run.  This created a national faction where separate races had been the norm.  We may see a lot more of this.