personal democracy forum

Personal Democracy Forum Day Two

by Allison Fine on 24 Jun 2008

Amazing set of speakers at the plenary this morning at PDF.

Doug Rushkoff, the author of Open Source Democracy, opened the session. He gave a passionate denunciation of the oxymoron of putting the ideas of “personal” and “democracy” together. Going back to the origins of the notion of the individual in the Renaissance, Rushkoff explained that the rights of the individual reduce a sense of community and inevitably to more centralized, and powerful, government. Read more »

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Personal Democracy Forum (cont'd)

by Allison Fine on 23 Jun 2008 1

Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post gave a typically candid and sassy talk. I’ll summarize her pointed jab at the mainstream media: Read more »

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Personal Democracy Forum Live

by Allison Fine on 23 Jun 2008

Kari and I are at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City today and tomorrow.

You can see a live stream of the happenings here.

We’ve seen a few fascinating presentations this morning. We saw a demo of Linkfluence, neat spirographs of communities of bloggers through links between blogs.

Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake was a great example of how a blogger can taken an issue (hers was the Valerie Plame affair), run with it, and build up a following. However, I questioned her “actions” boiling down to taking ads out in newspapers. It’s very MoveOn.org. Is that the best we can do, take online passions, and take it to on land media?

Then Patrick Ruffini spoke (he’s a conservative blogger). He said, “A small networked group beats a large atomized group any day of the week.” Interesting — but I wonder when those small groups become impenetrable cliques?

Interesting stuff, more to come!

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