Personal Democracy Forum: Symposium of Post-Election Thought

Nice fresh meat. Yes, over at PDF: Personal Democracy Forum, where I write about politics, we're posting a number of excellent writers and their post-election thoughts.

Don't miss it. Here are a few tidbits:

I think the big lesson was really that technology mattered very little in this election. Many people used the Net; some even posted blogs, wrote or disseminated campaign messages, and otherwise used technology. But in the end, I don't think "technology" changed many people's minds about any of the issues. -- Esther Dyson

And this too:

Video is the most convincing mass media ever invented-- and it is starting to come to the Net. Stepping beyond the few broadcast companies, we can have a plurality of voices, which would be refreshing. This election we saw the first starts: the Jon Stewart on Crossfire video was downloaded 1.5 million times just from iFilm; Eminem's Mosh video was downloaded around 1 million times just from the Internet Archive ... -- Brewster Kahle

And one more I like a lot:

We clearly now have a much more connected electorate, and we will have much more connected governance. Campaigns on the Democratic side — especially Dean's and Kerry's — famously made use of the Net to raise money and drive grass roots support. What the Democrats missed, along with the mainstream media (which, by November, had annexed A-list political bloggers on both sides) was the equally — and far more effectively — connected grass roots work fed artfully by the Bush campaign on the Right. President Bush's "moral" messages, especially those regarding gay marriage, resonated with many of the country's (reportedly) 80 million fundamentalist Christians, who have long viewed the Net as an ideal environment for the evangelical work that energizes their faith. -- Doc Searls