Always worth listening to, David Weinberger strikes me as particularly dead-on in his post of this evening about the blogging and ethics debate that has raged this weekend.
There are many aspects of what’s happened in the past few days — loosely swirling around a conference that hasn’t happened yet and around a “disclosure” that is disputed and which was public (though, I admit, I had not focused on it) long before it hit the WSJ this past week — that still merit working through, in my view.
But one key aspect of this narrative, which David W draws out, seems perfect plain to me. The people involved — Markos Zuniga, Jerome Armstrong, and Zephyr Teachout (and, to greater or lesser extent, others in the Dean campaign world) — each deserve an enormous amount of credit for their service to making politics more robust, real, and forceful than anyone could have reasonably imagined a few years ago. Their contributions have been enormous and heroic. It’s heartbreaking to think that any aspect of the swirling dispute, especially anything that I’ve written, might suggest anything to the contrary. The overall story of civic engagement by people using new technologies is much the most important part.
(In the spirit of the season: my disclosure: I was an active supporter of John Kerry’s campaign for the presidency, during the both the primary and the general, and the use of the Internet to strengthen democratic participation. Much turns on our ability to make the Internet a force for good and not evil.)
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