Tom’s Two Cents

So Barack Obama announced his veep pick via text message (although he was a bit late on Twitter). In many ways technology is changing the face of politics. My current favorite is blogging. I find it fascinating how stories from personal blogs bubble up to the top and become visible to thousands. Sometime we learn a great deal about the true colors of a particular civil servant. This was the case recently in Utah, where the Utah State Senate majority leader Curt Bramble verbally abused a pizza delivery girl. 20 years ago no one would have ever known. But this girl has a blog, and she wrote a post explaining what happened. It was linked to by another blogger who is part of utahbloghive.org. Then the story was picked up by The Salt Lake Tribune’s blog, and more recently by KSL Channel 5 News. This is the way things can snowball on the Net. You might think that one little blog post would be like a needle in a very large haystack — no one would ever find it, right? That’s where the Internet is different. All this Web 2.0, social networking, blogging mumbo jumbo actually works. People can find eachother. Ideas can be shared. The smallest voice can be heard. To me, this is what democracy is all about.