Howard Rheingold, (ja, der!) bei http://www.ojr.org.

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Auszug aus: Smart Mobs Revisited By Howard Rheingold

Now, by subscribing and linking to online sources we trust, the consumers of blog content are becoming a kind of collective editorial system. The more attentively we sift and analyze and share our discoveries online, the more the writers of blogs (and whatever blogs evolve into) can grow a social intelligence: personally tunable but collectively produced sense-making and way-finding. At least that's a plausible ideal.

For all its entertainment and social networking value, the most important promise of blogging is that it could help revivify the moribund public sphere that is as essential to democracy as voting. The petitions, letters to the editor, pamphleteering that preceded the American and French revolutions were essential enabling institutions for the experiments in self-government that followed.

But the arrival of political public relations and the "massification" of mesmerizing media have degraded the public sphere to the point where vituperative talk radio has married the brutal fascination of television wrestling with the verbal venom of online flame wars.

There are signs that after more than a decade of political insignificance, the democratic potential of the Internet is being realized by more people every day.

Artikel von Howard Rheingold beri www.orj.org: Moblogs Seen as a Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism - Smart Mobs Revisited By Howard Rheingold.

... the most important remaining ingredient of a truly democratized electronic newsgathering is neither a kind of hardware nor a variety of software, but a species of literacy ...