Five Years of Global Voices: Where they are now
The following was originally published at http://www.el-oso.net and is part of a series of posts commemorating Global Voices’ fifth anniversary and supporting of Global Voices’ 2009-10 online fundraising campaign. If you would like to support our work, please visit our Donate page. Thank you!
Five years ago I boarded a flight from San Diego to Boston to attend the 2004 Internet & Society conference at the Berkman Center. This was just a month after George Bush won the 2004 election and so there was an element of group therapy to many of the panel discussions. 2004 was the year when, according to Wired Magazine, the Internet invented Howard Dean. Dean’s campaign was supposed to be the harbinger of a new era of net politics where the progressive grassroots took advantage of online tools like blogs and Meetup.com (this was before YouTube even existed) to bring about more enlightened, representative governance. Instead, according to the ever-snarky Register, ?organized religion, not net religion, won it for Bush.?