Some of the bloggers present at Senator Kerry’s birthday meeting have started a thread on their parley. TayTay, who is quoted in a story today by Casey Ross, was kind enough to e-mail her version of the goings on: “This was not what happened. There were no ‘high-profile’ bloggers there. This was a simple meeting with real grassroots people. There was no big meeting. I know, I was there.”
TayTay’s quotes under name Terri Buchman in the Herald were a little less modest: “We wanted to stay connected and say that we’re still here and we’re still listening.” I don’t know what else was said to the paper and was not used.
Look, I may be too much of an old-school pencil press type to really understand this stuff, but, to me, when a potential candidate for president meets with a group of “real grassroots people” who can either a) generate excitement, buzz and bodies for that candidate or b) whack that candidate out on the web, that is significant.
Dispatches from Seth Gitell 
December 13, 2006 at 4:38 pm |
One point I’d like to add to what Ms. Buchman said… those online communities and others like them she mentioned are not so very small at all. It’s probably safe to say that every so-called ’small blogger’ at that particular event represented a dozen who would have been there too had logistics only allowed for that. And every so-called ’small blogger’ probably influences several dozen more who read and respond to what he or she posts online. And, most significantly of all, every ’small blogger’ I know of gets his or her feet out from under the desk and out there on the ground and influences dozens or even hundreds of other people every single day. The blogosphere does not exist in a vacuum, any more than the mainstream media does. There is no hard-and-fast seam there. People will *always* communicate with other people using any means necessary — newspapers, cable tv, blogs, emails, tin cans tied to a string, furtive tap-tap-taps on jailhouse walls, whatever it takes — and people like the ’small bloggers’ are just one small subset of people who really do reach out and really do care and really do make a point of having their voices heard no matter what. What you write, they read. What they write, you read. What they say, people hear. What people say, they hear. And keeping all those many channels of communication open at all times — in *both* directions, thank you — is what makes the crucial difference between one-to-many dictating and many-to-many democracy. It has always been so, but in these times of decentralized e-ubiquity, that freedom to communicate on the citizen-to-citizen level is the most precious commodity that we can ever hope to ask for or ever seek to defend.