Online Politics Quotes

I think a lot of campaigns mis-learned the lessons of Obama 2008. They overly focused on the particular tools, and less so on the fact that the Internet enables a kind of culture of trust to be translated into real power.

In 2012 there was a megafoolish, if well-funded, effort by a group called Americans Elect to raise an independent Cincinnatus to run for president via an Internet draft. It flopped, spectacularly.

The Internet empowers individuals to play a more active role in the political process, as Obama's campaign has manifested.

In truth the social media elements of the Obama campaign, while extremely innovative, did not produce a lot of results.

I think Twitter will be a fundamental part of how people interact with their government.

Campaign analysts say that Dean has produced the most innovative web site in this year's presidential race. I particularly like today's blog, which consisted of the sentence 'I hate myself,' typed four billion times. In Dean's case, this may be the first instance where the actually entity represented by the web site has crashed more often than the site did.

The Internet is a politically contested space.

In social networking sites, individuals hide their identities and indulge in individual attack on celebrities and others. It's a wrong kind of politics.

It's very much the currency of discourse on social media where political disagreements very quickly become very personalised.

The Internet didn't cause Donald Trump, and it certainly can't solve Donald Trump.

Social media is natural to me, and it's a very immediate way of saying something. It's the way politics are done these days. In modern politics, you can't ignore that even if you wanted to. I can't imagine doing politics without it.

Legislative action will never bring genuine campaign-finance reform. Consultants will prove endlessly inventive in gaming whatever system the reformers can devise so as to give their candidate an edge and allow the power of massive money to be felt. But reform laws will become irrelevant and redundant as the Internet replaces the special-interest fat cats as the best way to raise money and takes the place of TV as the most effective way to get votes.

The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles - decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots - create a ceaseless buzz.

I started freelancing, writing op-eds and book reviews, one at a time. I then got the opportunity to write recurring freelance pieces for 'The Nation' magazine, focusing on how the Internet was changing politics.