aka Ken Smith: Online Berkman?

Online, everyone who wants to read can read and everyone who wants to write can write, but it's not clear how folks who want to read and write together can do so. I mean folks who want to organize themselves in a public way for some kind of action and for the shared thinking and talking that precedes and supports action.#

Historical episodes like the U. S. civil rights movement readily show that only people who team up have a chance for successful activism and for other kinds of large group projects, and so the ability to read and write together is essential. Lacking it is a stumbling block to innovation and democratic process. The tools we have in place tend toward the individual reading and the individual writing. I'm not sure we've gone as far down this road as we can go. I am sure we haven't gone as far as we need to go.#

There is no democracy without spaces for the unstifled, unedited voice of a person, and when a tool like [favorite social media] structures itself almost entirely around the individual voice, that seems unstifling (neutral, unbiased, and apolitical) but at the same time it tends to strip away the tools and options for affiliation and activism. Or maybe it just never gets around to inventing those tools.#

No March on Washington is going to come of that. But remember, as someone once said, the rich march on Washington every day. They march on Washington so often that they keep permanent offices there, on K Street. The rich and powerful certainly are organized.#

And maybe a few of those organizing tools we need used to exist in some basic form on the campaign website Obama in 2008, but they're largely forgotten.#

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I'm not sure, but possibly I'm responding in this piece to this posting about small pieces loosely joined and this paragraph about Old School Berkman on the open web.#