John Robb points to a NYTimes article on Howard Dean’s supports which makes the point that “the (mostly) young people behind Howard Dean’s campaign the brokenhearted, the techno-utopians, the formerly apolitical come together because they like the candidate. But they also come together because they like one another.”
Adds Robb: “In a round about way, it makes a good point about social software. The software works in the Dean campaign because it allows people of like mind to communicate, meet, and become friends. Generic or ‘global’ systems will never work. Social software needs an ‘interest space’ to be useful.”
Dan Gillmor, on Al Gore’s endoresement of Dean: “Blending online and offline, Dean is bringing people into politics, many for the first time and others who’d given up, in a way that could truly be the beginning of something new in American self-governance.”
It will probably require at least another election (5+ years) in India to see similar things happen. That is when the mix of technology and a new generation of candidates will help take governance to a new high.
