Netroots

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Netroots is a recent term coined to describe political activism organized through blogs and other online media, including wikis and social network services. The word is a portmanteau of Internet and grassroots, reflecting the technological innovations that supposedly set netroots techiques apart from other forms of political participation. In the United States, the term is used mainly in left-wing circles.^[1]

The term necessarily overlaps with the related ideas of e-democracy, open politics and participatory democracy, all of which are somewhat more specific, better defined, and more widely accepted. Netroots outreach is a campaign-oriented activity that uses the web for complementing more traditional campaign activities, such as collaborating with grassroots activism that involves get-out-the-vote and organizing through interconnecting local and regional efforts, such as Meetup, and the netroots-grassroots coalition that propeled the election of Howard Dean to the DNC Chair in January, 2005.

Advocates claim that the essential quality of the netroots is its flatness and inter-linked web connectiveness: that it constitutes communication points that reach out to influence traditional media, but is not directed outward from any one point. Through events like a blogswarm, the netroots displays non-hierarchical and decentralized features.

1 American origins of term
2 Similar activities elsewhere
3 External Links
4 See also
5 References

[edit] American origins of term

The first popular use of the term in its modern definition is Netroots for Howard Dean, by Jerome Armstrong in December 2002 on MyDD. Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi credits the success of his then-client Howard Dean to their listening and taking the lead from netroots activity.

The netroots also played a key role in drafting General Wesley Clark into the 2004 Presidential campaign. The growing power of the netroots was seen most recently in the Paul Hackett campaign for Congress where blog users organized their efforts to raise more money for the political candidate than did the Democratic Party institutions. Netroots activists also supported Ned Lamont in his 2006 primary victory over Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, wrote Ari Melber in The Nation magazine [1].

In a December 2005 interview with Newsweek magazine [2], Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of Daily Kos, described the netroots as "the crazy political junkies that hang out in blogs." He is also the co-author (with Jerome Armstrong) of the book Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots and the Rise of People-Powered Politics (ISBN 1-931498-99-7).

William Safire explained the term's origin in the New York Times Magazine on November 19, 2006:

... the Nation's Web site [3] cited the unabashedly liberal Jerome Armstrong's praise of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee "for reading blogs and being ready to work with the netroots." From these citations and a few of the million and a half others in a Google search, the word netroots has a left-of-center connotation. The earliest use I can find is in a Jan. 15, 1993, message on an e-mail list of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from an "rmcdon[ell]" at the University of California at San Diego, apparently complaining about an internal shake-up: "Too bad there's no netroots organization that can demand more than keyboard accountability from those who claim to be acting on behalf of the 'greater good.'" ... Popularizer of the term — unaware of the obscure, earlier citation when he used it — was the aforementioned (great old word) Armstrong on his blog, MyDD, on Dec. 18, 2002, as he went to work on the presidential campaign of Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont.^[1]

[edit] Similar activities elsewhere

So-called netroots activity also takes place in Iran, which has a disproportionately high number of bloggers; in the United Kingdom, where They Work For You and strong support for e-democracy in the form of local issues forums have become an approved form of feedback on government performance; and in Canada, where heavy usage of broadband and a fractious bilingual four-party political system have combined to create an active open politics movement focused on wikis, and where some parties have experimented with online authoring of platforms and answers to citizen questions.

[edit] External Links

NetrootsCampaigning.com — Netrootscampaigning.com is a site dedicated to educating and spreading knowledge of how Netroots movements are implemented.
Netroots For Democracy — Netroots is a community-oriented website platform that allows people-powered campaigns and organizations to thrive.
Swing State Project — Blog focusing on netroots and political news from and about the key swing states in the 2004 Presidential election.
My Democracy Directory — My Democracy Directory helps activists find each other so they can team up to make change in their communities and across the country.
Crashing the States — Crashing the States is a cross-country journey to capture firsthand the excitement and activism of netroots-supported campaigns.