Around this time last year, two months before my 30th birthday, I was at the height of my professional career and fielded various job opportunities: perhaps writing for magazines (I had just profiled Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker); maybe serving as editor of a news website (or starting a news website); or selling a book proposal on an idea that I had been reporting on and felt most excited about -- that we're all living under a growing "Click-o-cracy," one nation under Facebook, Google and Twitter, with video, texting and email for all. What are our rights, privileges and limitations, individually and collectively, in this unprecedented global social order?

But before my professional life and personal life -- the two are inseparable for a writer -- could go on, I finally decided that I had to reveal a central fact about myself: that I am an undocumented American, what many people call an "illegal alien" or, worse, an "illegal." Before I could explore the nature of global citizenry, I had to first come to grips with my reality in a country that I've called my home. Though I consider myself an American at heart, I am not an American on paper. And I'm just one person and mine is merely one story -- one of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants whose lives are interwoven and integrated with those of American citizens. We are here. We are part of you.

In the coming months, I'll be reporting and writing more about immigration -- which, at bottom, is more than about immigration. It's about the very question of American identity itself, about who we are as a country and whom we consider to be Americans. How do you define American?

That's a fact that's been glaringly omitted -- not to mention profoundly misunderstood -- in everything that's been written and reported about Zuckerberg this year. And due to the continued rise of Zuckerberg's company (users spent more time on Facebook than on Google this year); the critical drum-roll for Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher's The Social Network; and largely because Facebook is closing the gap between our virtual and real lives, all the while serving as an online Rorschach test of sorts; there's been a mountain of interest in and a non-stop flood of all things Zuck, including the 60 Minutes segment that aired this past Sunday.

Though at times the TV interview played like a free infomercial for Facebook, which unveiled its newest site re-design during the segment, it offered some insights. There was the obligatory exchange about Facebook's stance on user privacy, and a nod towards the most interesting story in Silicon Valley -- the battle between Google and Facebook. (Note to reporters and editors: it's not just a business and tech story; it's a story, at bottom, about changing human behavior.) But the most striking nugget in the broadcast came courtesy of Kara Swisher, editor of the Silicon Valley staple All Things Digital.

Three years ago, Swisher famously referred to Zuckerberg as the "Toddler CEO." A Harvard drop-out, with no managerial experience to speak of and a shyness that easily came across as cockiness, Zuckerberg worked through a revolving door of senior executives. Facebook was unstable. "The kid," as the old guard called him, was not up to the job. No one thinks that anymore -- certainly not in the Valley. Swisher told 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl: "The toddler's a prodigy, as turns out."

And the prodigy, unlike any other CEO of his stature, is growing up right in front of our eyes. I profiled Zuckerberg earlier this year for the New Yorker. After the profile was published and posted online, I received numerous Facebook messages, tweets and emails from readers, asking questions ranging from "Did he really turn down that much money?" (yep, he did, a few times) to some variation of "...but what really makes him tick?" As a Millennial myself, I can tell you that who Zuckerberg is cannot be divorced from the generation he represents.

A Millennial describes someone who was born between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. Members of this generation are prone to blur the line between work and home, between their personal and professional lives. Bureaucracy saddled with hierarchy is sneezed at; what's preferable is a more flattened, individually focused yet collaboration-oriented working environment. Having an impact is just as valued, if not more so, than making money. There's something that seems downright Barney-ish about all of this. "I love you / You love me / We're a happy family," so goes the lyrics to the show's most famous song. Nevertheless, this disposition represents a fundamental change, and an emerging reality, for many businesses within and outside the tech industry. Experts say Millennials comprise the fastest growing group in the workplace.

Facebook is the first major Internet start-up whose core group of founders and key executives are Millennials, from Chris Hughes, who left Facebook to work as director of online organizing for Barack Obama's presidential campaign and now serves as founder and CEO of Jumo, a social network for the social sector, to Sean Parker, the perennial entrepreneur who's the co-founder of Napster, Plaxo and Causes, an online advocacy and fund-raising application within Facebook. Hughes is 27 years old; Parker just turned 31. Though Facebook won't reveal the median age of its employees, the engineering brainpower inside "The Bunker" -- as Zuck calls his company's headquarters in Palo Alto -- skews younger than other comparable tech companies in the Valley, which is populated by CEOs from the Baby Boomer and Generation X generations. From a creative standpoint, Facebook has become a Millennial hub.

"I'm speaking in generalities here, of course, but Gen Xers are largely pragmatists. Boomers are idealists. Millennials combine the two: Let's think of idealistic things to do, but let's think of pragmatic ways to get them done using people, interacting with a community," Morley Winograd told me. Winograd is the co-author of the forthcoming book Millennial Momentum: How A New Generation Is Remaking America, which will be published next year. "Mark Zuckerberg is, right now, the most high-profile entrepreneur of this Millennial generation."

Born in 1984, Zuckerberg is a digital native who grew up in the Internet era, unencumbered by the analog world, the broadcast world, whatever we call the pre-digital age. The Internet -- not television -- has been at the center of his life. He was in middle school when Google was launched, and in high school by the time Wikipedia went live. He could always instant message someone. Everything, and everyone, was a click away, laying the foundation for how he envisions the Web.

"Mark was a blank slate in some respects. Looking at the context of this digitally interconnected world, the world that he grew up in, he was able to say, 'Ah, if this is the way the world is' -- all of us online, all of us with connecting with each other -- 'then this is how Facebook should be,'" Peter Leyden, a tech entrepreneur who was one of the founding editors of Wired magazine, told me. "The ramifications and consequences of everything he's doing are huge, because the world that he's in charge of -- what, more than 500 million users on Facebook -- is growing. Steve Jobs at 26 and Bill Gates at 26 were not dealing with the kind of pressure that Mark Zuckerberg is dealing with right now."

We are living in the third era of the consumer Internet.

The first era saw the rise of portals like AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy in the late 1980s and 1990s -- essentially confined spaces where users read the news, joined moderated forums and participated in chat rooms. The second era broadened and deepened our browsing experience; in the past decade, Google and its algorithms have helped us navigate this new world. The third era -- the one we're living in, the one we're trying desperately to understand -- is an Internet that's built on people. Facebook did not invent this; the arrival of the social Web pre-dated Facebook, of course. But it's a cultural and technological shift that Zuckerberg and his team have tapped into and effectively capitalized.

Everything is better with your friends, Zuckerberg likes to say, and he envisions the Web as becoming more and more social, because we, as people, are inherently social. We share. We tell stories. We make friends. To that end, Facebook is creating, and has succeeded in creating, a Web of its own, launching products and applications in which people's relationships are at the core of the user experience.

Some three years ago, at the inaugural event called f8 (rhymes with fate), Zuckerberg declared that Facebook -- then with 24 million members, less than half whom were in college -- was more than a social networking site. Facebook is a platform, he said, a distribution channel similar to iTunes and an operating system like Windows. Offering a set of tools -- application programming interfaces, or APIs -- Zuckerberg opened up Facebook and its members to third-party developers to create applications. To many Facebook users, that meant games such as FarmVille, where Facebook users play with their friends in tending crops and growing a farm, and more serious-minded applications such as Causes. FarmVille is owned by the Zynga, which was created in 2007. The 1,300-person company has a reported revenue upwards of $500 million.

Almost three years later -- when Facebook boasted more than 400 million members -- Zuckerberg upped the ante at his third f8, in April. In addition to being a platform, Facebook introduced the Open Graph, which includes features such as social plug-ins that make the Web a more personalized experience. Users reading articles on HuffPost, for example, can see which articles their Facebook friends have read, shared and "liked." Previously, at the second f8, in July 2008, Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook Connect, allowing users to sign onto third-party sites, gaming systems and mobile devices with their Facebook identity, which serves as a sort of digital passport. This year, Amazon -- the Web's largest retailer -- integrated Facebook Connect, syncing an Amazon shopper's account with his/her Facebook account. Zuckerberg was particularly proud of this integration because he admires Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO.

Taken together, Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect and the Open Graph present a fundamentally different Web in which being social and being public are the norms. There's something really efficient at work here; naturally, I'm more likely to read an article that my friends have read, in the same way that I'm more likely to visit new restaurants or watch movies recommended by friends. As Henry Jenkins, the noted media scholar and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, told me: "We've talked about intelligent agents for years but no program has ever been built that is as useful as a friend who knows what I'm interested in and has contacts or sources I don't know." This is why Google, with its still-dominant algorithms, has reason to worry as Facebook's social graphs expand and the Web grows more and more social. Think of it this way: Google is to e-mail as Facebook is to text messaging. But there's also something potentially sinister and dangerous going on here, entrusting our information -- our names, our photos, our relationships -- to a company that profits (handsomely and increasingly) from our identities.

But whatever the motivation -- Zuckerberg, a budding philanthropist who today pledged to give away at least half of his fortune, insists it's not financial -- the future of Facebook, the way it will continually evolve and rapidly iterate, will be based on how Zuckerberg sees the world: how we express ourselves and how we connect with each other.

On Facebook, everything is a relationship, and our relationship with our first Millennial CEO is just beginning.

No, there's only one "Goracle."

All eyes will be on Al Gore this week, as he attends the last days of the U.N.-sponsored climate change summit in Copenhagen. In recent years, it's been impossible to divorce Gore from the environment, what with the Oscar win for An Inconvenient Truth, the Nobel Peace Prize and the release of another book called Our Choice. "President of the planet," he's been hailed. "Alarmist" and "exaggerator," he's been mocked. But just as lasting and undeniable as his imprint in modern environmental history is Gore's early and sustained prophecy -- there's no other word for it -- for the inevitable impact of the Internet in our everyday lives. Starting with his years in the House of the Representatives and the Senate ("the Gore Bill" being just one of his achievements), and throughout his service in the Clinton administration (in developing what he called an "information superhighway"), the global warming crusader was also the government's biggest Internet advocate. Gore never said he created the Internet, though Vint Cerf, aka the "father of Internet," has said that Gore's "initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet." Cerf added: "So he really does deserve credit."

These days, his two long-time interests are crossing paths. The man (Gore) and the message (our climate crisis) has finally met the medium (the Web) that can effectively help spread the word around, from one social network to another. To hear skeptics such as former vice president candidate Sarah Palin tell it, the global warming debate is far from over. To Gore, however, there is no more debate -- just an opportunity for fact-driven, practical-minded individuals to mobilize around the cause.

"You know, Web 2.0, which may gave way to Web 3.0 -- social networks, basically -- holds the great promise of empowering enough individuals who share that broad public interest in an issue like global warming to organize and express themselves with sufficient intensity and focus to overcome the special interests. We're already seeing that begin to happen, and I'm encouraged by it," Gore told me recently inside the headquarters of Current TV, his Internet-meets-television outfit in San Francisco, located just a few blocks from the offices of Twitter.

It was the beginning of a three-hour interview for Rolling Stone -- the first half in San Francisco, the second half in his solar-paneled, geothermal system-powered home in Nashville. And Gore being Gore, we covered a wide range of topics. (The transcript of the interview is here.) He was more casual than I expected, with a loose face and a relaxed voice. ("Hi, I'm Al, very nice to meet you," he said.") Wooden, he is not. This is more the Gore as seen in his recent appearances on The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live: funny, a tad sarcastic and altogether animated. Twice, he walked over to a white board and, ever the lecturer, drew a diagram, illustrating what transparency in local government might look like. "The computerization of the data, the sharing of the data, and creation of the kinds of 'clicks-and-bricks' hybrid model for absorbing and responding to the implications of the meaning contained in the data -- that's really where self-governance needs to go," he said, blue pen in hand. At one point, he took off his leather two-toned belt to illustrate the changing of a political system -- no joke -- as tied to a ground-breaking study of open systems by Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist. Some people, especially politicians, talk in paragraphs, finding their way through soundbites, the digestible, quotable bits. This is not necessarily Gore. He talks in well thought-out, carefully considered chapters. Here are a few chosen bits, pared down:

Asked if government should fund journalism, as recommended by a recent study commissioned by the Columbia University Journalism School, Gore, a former newspaperman and a frequent critic of the press, said: "I don't think so, I don't think so...I think those who propose government-funding for the support of newspapers are overlooking the essential number of the relationship between the press and the government. And you think about Richard Nixon or George W. Bush. Dick Cheney. The first time some news organization that receives government support decides to be antagonistic toward the government. Whatever source of leverage the person in charge of the government has is a potential danger to the integrity of that news organization."

Asked if Internet access is a fundamental right for Americans and a basic necessity for kids -- just like water and electricity -- in order to be a part of a global, knowledge-based society, Gore said: "I think it should be, yes. But the process by which a new capacity graves into that circle labeled 'necessities,' well, it's not a simple process."

Asked if the Internet will eclipse television as the most influential source of information, following a report by Pew Internet last year which noted that more than 50 percent of Americans got their political news from the Internet, Gore said: "The Internet is on such an impressive upward trajectory that it will certainly play a much more prominent role in the 2012 election than it did in 2008. But that's not to predict that in only three years we will see Internet-based political communication eclipsed what's taking place in television."

That's a constant theme during the interviews: television versus the Internet. This is an issue he's been exploring for decades. In college, his thesis was on television's impact on the American presidency. Years later, while in Congress, he became the Hill's walking encyclopedia on all things Internet, reading up on the latest software and meeting with the earliest thinkers of the medium. Speaking at a Web 2.0 summit days after Obama won, he called the victory the Internet's "collectively intelligent" decision.

Television, Gore has said all along, has had a very negative impact on politics -- not just on the politicians who end up spending most of their time raising money to buy expensive 30-second TV ads (the irony of the Obama campaign was that the money raised online was used to buy TV time), but also on citizens who've tuned out politics and find no room to express their views in the top-down, one-way medium that is TV. "You know the average American now watches TV five hours a day," Gore told me. "The average American in an average American lifetime spends 17 uninterrupted years -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week --- watching TV. Seventeen years!"

And the struggle between the two mediums -- how they feed off each other but still remain independent of one another -- underlines what Gore calls "the transitionary period" that American politics is going through.

As a young "Atari Democrat" who headed the bipartisan Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future -- an in-house think-tank founded in 1976 -- Gore foresaw how a decentralized, more open, bottom-up network of computers (the Internet) will revolutionize the way we live, and participate in democracy. No political figure looms larger in Silicon Valley than Gore, who sits on the board of Apple and serves as senior adviser to Google. And he's such a techno-geek that a 3,000-word, heavily-footnoted article on Wikipedia is titled "Al Gore and information technology." Even young Web-savvy Republicans, taking lessons from Obama's winning online campaign strategy, sang Gore's praises at the Technology Summit hosted by Micheal Steele earlier this year. Andrew Rasiej, founder of the annual Personal Democracy Forum, the largest bipartisan gathering of online political thinkers, calls Gore "a godfather of this emerging movement."

Indeed, Gore is the "godfather" of the online political movement that's revolutionizing Washington -- and countries like Iran, China and Russia, where bloggers and tech-savvy citizens are rebelling against their regimes. "Look at what's happening beneath the surface in both China and Russia. In both countries, the broadcast media of television and radio, and the newspapers, are controlled. But in both countries, the attempt to control the Internet has largely, largely failed, because there are so many hacks that can work around the system -- first the digital elites, then others find ways to get the information," Gore said. "The political consciousness of the people, even in dictatorships, has been awakened by the Internet."

Here in the U.S., politics occurs on two levels. There's politics as framed by the mainstream media, reported (and largely) manipulated by the sometimes myopic, often horse race-driven, who's-up, who's-down, gotcha cable news culture. Then there's the politics that unfolding on the Web in real time, attracting online denizens of all ages, in disparate parts of the country. Save the Tea Party movement -- less a grassroots movement than an orchestrated play that's overwritten by the press -- this is the story of the GOP, as it ponders its future on little-known online hubs such as The Next Right. It's also the story of the Democrats, as the majority party in D.C. tries to re-awaken the online giant that Obama wielded so effectively last year -- 13 million e-mail addresses collected, nearly half a billion dollars raised just through the Web. There's a growing camp that believes that the Internet has greatly contributed to the ever-more partisan nature of politics. Gore, however, doesn't belong in that camp.

"When you went to the conservative blogs, you found the link to the liberal blogs. The common protocol is to embed links whether it's a liberal blog or a conservative blog. And what's happening is, we're still in this transitional phase -- it's a different transition, but it's still a transition era -- I think that the people who become the true believers and armor themselves with orthodoxy get the most attention. But I think beneath that there is a more powerful phenomenon where lots of people will come across a site that has one point of view and it's so easy to say, 'These people on the other side, just look for yourself at how stupid they are.' And you click on the link and a lot of them think, 'Actually, that doesn't sound stupid to me,'" Gore told me. "That takes the dialogue back and forth to the point where it begins to move toward a higher order, and the arguments become more sophisticated. And some of the most respected sites on both sides of the ideological divide find themselves responding to third or fourth counter-arguments and the debates become more sophisticated -- and both sides actually listen to the other and learn from each other."

He continued: "I see the Internet as a great source of hope for re-energizing representative democracy, and making it possible for people to really participate. We are seeing the emergence of a digital democracy, an Internet-powered, self-organizing paradigm. That's the key for this. It's not a Democrat thing, it's a not Republican thing, it affects everyone."

Including Gore.

Jose Antonio Vargas: A year ago, weeks before the election, I visited Blach Middle School in Silicon Valley and spoke to a group of young reporters. In the middle of the talk, Naib Mian raised his hand and asked if I had downloaded Obama's iPhone application -- which showed, in real time, where Obama was campaigning, the number of campaign offices within a few miles of where Naib lives, how much money he had raised...

Al Gore: [Laughs.]

JAV: This kid was 13, and politics was right in his pocket.

AG: Wow.

JAV: What do you say to a kid like Naib?

AG: More power to you. More information to you. You know, politics, as we understand the word, is a recreation of the Greek concept which arose in a culture where spoken word was a medium of the community within which individuals could express themselves well, could yield influence and political power with ideas. Before we talk about what's happening now, let's look back to the history of the printing press. The printing press catalyzed the emergence of an information ecosystem with very low entry barriers for individuals and created a marketplace of ideas in which individuals were literate even without wealth, family connections and force of arms -- all important prerequisites for power during the period from the fall of Rome to the emergence of the printing press. Individuals use ideas without any of those prerequisites as a source of power or influence or political authority, then the ecosystem that flowed out of the technology of the printing press was eclipsed by electronic medium -- the antecedent being the telegraph, and then the radio and then the big kahuna, you know television, which has you know the attraction for the brain because it's moving. You know the average American now watches TV five hours a day. The average American in an average American lifetime spends 17 uninterrupted years -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week --- watching TV. Seventeen years! So the reason why all the newspapers are in a nosedive is because -- first, that started with the afternoon newspapers, when television colonized that market niche. And the coup de grace was the Internet, coming in and taking in classified advertising...But now what's happening is, as evidence by that 13-year-old in Silicon Valley, that young kid with an iPhone, is that the Internet is now getting close to the stage where it will be possible for the Internet to eclipse television.

JAV: That's the process we're seeing now?

AG: That's the process we're seeing now. As the great writer [William] Gibson said -- he wrote this phrase: "Television will sink into the digital universe." I think we're beginning to see that happen. But we're not there yet. We're still at a stage where TV is completely dominant in our political culture.

JAV: As we see with Glenn Beck...

AG: Yes, and where candidates and elected officials are concerned, they have to spend more than three-quarters of all the money they raise to purchase 30-second TV ads and the only way they can get that amount of money on a consistent basis is by relying on business lobbyists. During the Enlightenment -- which again flowed out of the printing press -- ideas displaced some of the remarkable amount of the influence that had been placed on money and also power, and led to the blossoming of representative democracy and the modern version of capitalism. As you know, the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations were both published in the same year. And they were both based on the idea that individuals, empowered with information, can make intelligent choices, and then their choices can be aggregated to give the kind of a massively parallel processing of all the data that society has to digest and process to guide the economy, to guide self-government. But when television replaced print, there was kind of a "re-feudalization" of political power -- because those with a lot of money were able to exercise enormous influence in the political system. So what you have now is that the Congress finds it almost impossible to take any action that is opposed by very powerful business lobbyists. They still do sometimes -- if popular sentiment rises above this threshold that causes them to say, "Wait a minute, you know, this is popular with the people." But by and large, the underlying algorithm of governance is, an intensely held minority view can trump a weakly held majority. If a small group that has lot of passion and means to make their views heard has one point of view, and the general public interest is in opposition of their view, but most of the public is not aware of it, then the small group, which is often a special interest group, dominates. Now television has anesthetized the body politic and has made the citizenry an audience, and the dominant political act of participation today is sitting motionless watching ads, and it's one-way meme. But the Internet empowers that 13-year-old kid to connect directly to all the information he can absorb about whatever political topics, or whatever topics, he's interested in. So if he develops passion for Obama's campaign or points of view that Obama is expressing, he can participate in the political process, once again, by using the power of ideas. So I see the Internet as a great source of hope for re-energizing representative democracy, and making it possible for people to really participate.

JAV: So we have a case in which the people are basically ahead of the politics?

AG: Yeah, yeah.

JAV: In 1969, you wrote your 103-page college thesis on the impact of television on the American presidency. Because of the social Web, however, people's expectations of politicians -- how transparent they are, how authentic they seem to be -- are changing. Expectations are different in a Web-based democracy, right?

AG: What I have learned since writing that thesis paper is a greater appreciation for the economics of media, and how the interaction of media and society and the business model for different media also have a powerful influence. The most important aspect of the shift to television -- of course that thesis was focused on governing and the constitutional balance through the lens of the presidency -- is the extraordinary expensive price tags for these television ads that have reshaped the U.S. political system. You know, when I first visited the Senate as a child -- since my father served there, I spent time there watching him -- he would take me to the floor of the Senate. In those days, debates really counted for something. Now, it's rare to have a debate on the Senate floor. And the reason they're not there, usually, the principal reason is, they're in fundraisers all the time. All the time. And the reason they're on fundraisers all the time? Mainly, is to make sure they could stockpile enough cash to overwhelm any potential opponents, by having so many 30-second TV ads that the other candidate doesn't have a chance. And again the only way they can get that money is by going to all these little cocktail parties and receptions that are populated overwhelmingly by business.

JAV: What was going through your mind as you watched how the Obama campaign was using the Web?

AG: I was happy about it. I had tired to do it, when I ran in 2000, but the technology was still at an earlier stage. There weren't enough practitioners for it to really take hold. I was very happy that they were doing it. I do think that there is a way to use this technology for governing that will similarly revolutionize the effectiveness of self-governing. One early example is something called ComStat -- do you know about ComStat? It's short for Computerized Statistic. I have a new book coming out. I only have one copy, I can't give it to you, it just got off the press, I just got this today. [Gore gets up, grabs book, sits down and flips through the pages as he looks for a large graphic that begins a chapter.] Chapter 17 is the power of information. I don't know if you're ever seen that graphic? That's a visualization of the World Wide Web. It's really a beautiful work. It's accurate in its depiction. These are all the e-connections, where the real hubs are, and different colors for different languages. And the reason I'm showing this to you briefly is that, there's an example of ComStat being used in a place called Redlands, California. This shows the incidence of crimes. The police chief down there leads the charge. They map the crimes, and then deconstruct them to find out: why did this crime happen? The data shows your everything. And as a practical matter, in terms of the clicks and bricks model. [Gore gets up again, walks over to a white board in his office, grabs two pens (one blue, the other red) and starts drawing.] They have a horse-shoe table, basically, with a podium. One precinct displays data from that precinct, computerized data, okay? So, look, you've got 18 burglaries. That's a simple diagram. The point is, when the data is visible and understandable because it's visualized and it's held in the consciousness by all the relevant decision-makers in the organization -- they're sharing the consciousness of the problem to be solved, everyone is focused on it -- and the problem is solved. [William] Bratton put it in effect in New York City, and it spread like wildfire in police departments. But the same basic model can be used for immunization, illiteracy, AIDS prevention -- any problem that the society has to cope with. The computerization of the data, the sharing of the data, and creation of the kinds of clicks and bricks hybrid model for absorbing and responding to the implications of the meaning contained in the data -- that's really where self-governance needs to go.

JAV: That's re-inventing government, that's Government 2.0?

AG: Yes, yes. The government has to be more transparent. Technology demands transparency.

JAV: Is Washington prepared for something like this?

AG: Um, well, no. because now, an embarrassing number of the meetings are with lobbyists and special interests. Scheduling is too often driven by that. The great victory in the idea of America was the revolutionary declaration that we the people are the best stewards of our common destiny and that the old model throughout the Middle Ages was information and power were held in a monopoly. You had the medieval church and the feudal lords and they really controlled everything, and 99 percent of the people were illiterate. And their ignorance begat their powerlessness. And when the printing press spread information widely, first the Bible then the classics translated in the popular languages, and then modern authors -- Shakespeare -- the journals, which turned into newspapers, that's when the ancient Greek dream was reborn in its modern guise in the Declaration of Independence. It was never perfect; you can always point to examples of where wealth played a disproportionate influence as it always has. But ideas could change the world through the democratic process. The progressive movement -- you had Upton Sinclair writing about abuses in meat-packing, and so the Congress said we will reform meat-packing. And they did. [He laughs.] Today, the meat packers would have lobbyists and campaign contributions and TV ads, like the insurance industry today.

JAV: When you were campaigning in 2000, one of the most provocative and insightful passages in one of your speeches was when you said, "The world is a system and not a collection of individuals." Let's adapt that to this new ecosystem, this new online political reality. It's made up of individuals using technological tools. But a new system is forming, right? A new political system?

AG: Absolutely.

JAV: How would you describe it?

AG: I want to show you this quote, and I've had it here for seven years. [He stands up again, walks over to his desk and shows me a quote that's taped to his Mac deskstop. He reads it out loud.] "In assembling complexity, the bounty of increasing returns is won by multiple tries over time. As various parts reorganize to a new whole, the system escapes into a higher order." I used to head a group called Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future -- it's one of the places where I started exploring technology.

JAV: Yes, you were an Atari Democrat.

AG: Yes, yes, I was. [He laughs.] The group was in some ways like a glorified Speaker's Bureau, but that was one of the places were brought in computer experts and networking experts. They weren't hearings in Congress. But I brought in people for hearing, too. This was a bipartisan group, a self-selected group, and we brought in Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian Chemist. He died maybe four or five years ago. And I think that eventually his key discovery will be recognized as a law of the universe on par with the relativity theory. I honestly do. He studied open systems. [He gets up, walks over to his board again and draws.] An open system as opposed to a closed system. An open system as opposed to a close system has energies flowing in through and out again, okay? So he found a class of open systems where when the flow of energy was increased above the threshold, two things happen in sequence. Number one, the pattern in the open system broke down because the new flow -- the old pattern couldn't handle it. But then the key discovery was that then, amazingly, and this is a law of nature now -- it's astonishing -- the system reorganizes itself at a higher level of complexity and the flow then continues. So Prigogine wrote that as various parts reorganize to a whole, the system escapes to a higher level.

JAV: It's as if there are two kinds of politics in America today -- the politics in which many people feel connected to because of the Web, and the politics as practiced by the majority of politicians. What is the current state of our political system in your view?

AG: We are in a transition, and we're at an early stage in which the old political model still dominates but energy in the form of money raised online, information available online, number of people participating online -- however you want to measure it -- it has increased dramatically. And the old system, while still dominant, as I said, is showing signs of weakness. Eventually, it will emerge at a higher level of complexity where the individual's role is restored.

JAV: How many more years -- how many more election cycles -- before the political system adapts to this new online-based reality?

AG: The metaphor of the tipping point is powerful because it describes a moment in non-linear systems that's unexpected in a linear-way of thinking. Because when the potential builds up to the point where instability resolves, then it can suddenly flip and it can happen very quickly, and there are multiple examples of that happening. I'm taking off my belt to use an example here. [Indeed, he takes off his belt.] One scientist described this to me once by saying if you have a complex system that's illustrated by this belt loop, it has a basic shape that changes but the basic shape stays the same. If one of the critical boundary conditions changes enough then it can flip to an entirely different order. And so when will it flip, when will it escape to a higher order? Hard to predict. It will take time. The power of the TV medium is such, but the Internet is encroaching it.

JAV: Your father, Albert Sr., was instrumental in creating the legislation that gave us the Interstate Highway System. Decades later, you were instrumental in creating legislation in expanding the reach of the Internet and fostering what you called "an information superhighway." How would you describe the evolution of this "information superhighway"?

AG: When I finally introduced the legislation, it was the 30th anniversary of the Interstate Highway System. When I was a boy, my family and I used to drive back and forth form Carthage, Tennessee to Washington, D.C. -- four, six times a year. They were two lanes on the road. I remember so vividly when i was very young, my father pointing out the old highway 70 between Carthage and Nashville -- Carthage is a little small town east of Nashville. The tail lights were strung out in front, and the headlights were white ribbon coming at us and it was just what we would today call gridlock -- it wasn't called that then -- the proliferation of cars and trucks after World War II just grew at an exponential rate while the two-lane roads did not. He had this idea to have a national network of superhighways. I remember him -- I know the pattern now, having been a father and a grandfather -- he would take me to work with him a lot. I remember sitting in the subcommittee hearings -- he was on the public works committee and chair of the highway subcommittee, and he had these hearings designing the Interstate Highway System. And I remember vividly when they had a short hearing and then a discussion, and one of the questions that they had to vote on was, what colors should the sign be? And for a kid, 6 years old, the difference between green, black, red, whatever -- well, I can understand that! And they had a full discussion and they chose green. They voted on it and they voted for green. And then I saw the green signs go up, "Wow!" I remember one senator from the upper Midwest somewhere -- I can't remember the guy's name now -- but he was complaining that the proposed lanes on the interstate highway was way too wide. We're wasting a lot of asphalt, he said. He measured a car and put it in a lane, and said you could put two cars, side by side in that lane, you don't need that much asphalt. My father and some of the other senators were saying, "Well, when you're going fast, you need to have a little leeway." So they voted to affirm the width of the lanes. And then every year, we'd drive home for Christmas and then drive back for New Year's, we'd drive home as soon as school was out, drive back in the fall, sometimes we'd go for spring vacation, and every trip, the interstate highway would get a little bit longer. And the difference in our trips! It used to be 16 hours. We'd plan to spend the night. Usually at a Howard Johnson's and get up the next morning and finished the trip, and now it's like an 11 hour trip instead of a 16 to 18 hour trip. That really made an impact on me. And the benefits to the nation as a whole of having an Interstate Highway System with limited access so it didn't become just another tool for local commerce but tied the nation together.

JAV: It brought the country together...

AG: The key insight was the rapid growth in the number of cars, and the very slow capacity of local and state governments to build and the willingness of them to build these new roads. Only when it was done at a national level could the highway-building match the disproportionate growth in the number of vehicles. In some ways, what was happening in the physical Interstate Highway System is happening in the virtual Information Highway System. So in the '70s, when I came to the Congress, I had a background by virtue of the work that I did in information theory in order to do that college thesis. [The thesis on was TV's impact on the American presidency.] Marshall McLuhan. I read everything he wrote. I was already 10 years old before our family got our first television set, and boy did that change something! Anyway, by the time I got to Congress by January of 1977, I started being very active on this Congressional Clearinghouse, and in one of our early presentations, the key thing that clicked for me was there was an exponential increase in data flow because Moore's law was already in full swing and the [computer] processes were becoming more powerful -- doubling in power every 18 months or so. And the explosion of the amount of information that could usefully be transmitted from point A to point B was completely overwhelming a communications network that was built out of twisted copper -- two copper wires twisted together. That was our network. I remember meeting in the '70s with the head of Ma Bell -- before the anti-trust case. There used to be one telephone company for the entire country, and it was all one big giant. That was Ma Bell. [Also known as Bell System.] I remember talking to a guy names Charles Brown. I had a one-on-one meeting with him and I laid out this idea. I said, "Look, the information through pits are going like this, your twisted copper pairs, they can't handle it, we need to design and build a nationwide fiber-optic network with the switches and the mathematics that can handle vastly increased data flows." Not only was he not interested...

JAV: What was his response?

AG: He was affirmatively opposed to it. Because, in the classic model of an incumbent protecting his turf, he didn't want that. For God's sake -- the government is going to help build a network that's many thousands times more capable than his? Of course he's opposed to it. The only company that I got a favorable response from was from a company that made fiber optic cable. But the key analogy was between two discrepancies -- the discrepancy between the rapid proliferation of automobiles and the inadequate roads on the one hand, and this incredibly powerful surge of data creation available with the power of computer processing growing, doubling every 18 months, my God! And the discrepancy between that and the information networks that we have. So that led me to discover what was being done in the Defense Department, and you know the original purpose of DARPANET was to provide an alternative communications grid that could survive a nuclear attack. Ironically, my father's bill on the Interstate Highway System was the defense Interstate Highway System because it was sold as a way to serve the national interest in mobilizing material for war, if we had another war.

JAV: So the Interstate Highway System, which is all about connecting towns to towns, people to people, and the information superhighway, which is connecting computers to computers, people to people, were both funded by the federal government?

AG: Well, from the beginning of the computer age in America, the government was very heavily involved -- subsidizing the creation of the new software, the creation of the new machines. It was always a public/private partnership.

JAV: There's a digital divide in this country. Is it possible to be a part of this information superhighway, this Web-based knowledge society, and not have Internet access?

AG: No.

JAV: Is Internet access then a fundamental right -- a basic necessity -- the same way water is, the same way electricity is, for an American kid growing up in this global, knowledge-based society? To be a part of this growing online-based democracy?

AG: I think it should be, yes. But the process by which a new capacity graves into that circle labeled "necessities," well, it's not a simple process. Telephone service started off in limited locations. Again, public/private. Congress passed a bill to run the first telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore. Apparently, some of the senators got stock in the company. I haven't read the history of it, but I've read enough about it -- it's a sorted under-belly. Within, let's see, 40 or 50 years, television service was deemed a necessity. So the national rural telephone co-op program was set up, and there are subsidies to run telephone lines out to little, smaller areas because it became to be regarded a necessity. And I think that Internet access is on the cusp -- whenever you label something a necessity, and then you go further and label it a right, it brings up a new role for government. We are seeing the emergence of a digital democracy, an Internet-powered, self-organizing paradigm. That's the key for this. It's not a Democrat thing, it's a not Republican thing, it affects everyone.

JAV: I tweeted that I'd be interviewing you in about 24 hours and asked people to send in their questions as it relates to the Internet and the future of American politics. Someone tweeted me, "How to go beyond preaching to the choir?" Right now, it seems that American politics is as polarized as it's ever been -- if you watch TV, what Fox News is saying versus MSNBC, and of course we have liberal blogs v. conservative blogs...

AG: But the tools we use, the medium we use, do change our consciousness. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium becomes an extension of our body. There's a certain re-organization of thinking necessary to accommodate the use of a new tool. It happens with everything. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh live in a broadcast world. The Internet commentary on their broadcasts are different from the broadcast itself. There is a common view that the Internet itself is Balkanizing and spreading people into point of view communities. I have a somewhat different point of view of that. When you went to the conservative blogs, you found the link to the liberal blogs. The common protocol is to embed links whether it's a liberal blog or a conservative blog. And what's happening is, we're still in this transitional phase -- it's a different transition, but it's still a transition era -- I think that the people who become the true believers and armor themselves with orthodoxy get the most attention. But I think beneath that there is a more powerful phenomenon where lots of people will come across a site that has one point of view and it's so easy to say, "These people on the other side, just look for yourself at how stupid they are." And you click on the link and a lot of them think, "Actually, that doesn't sound stupid to me." That takes the dialogue back and forth to the point where it begins to move toward a higher order, and the arguments become more sophisticated. And some of the most respected sites on both sides of the ideological divide find themselves responding to third or fourth counter-arguments and the debates become more sophisticated -- and both sides actually listen to the other and learn from each other.

JAV: You mean, it's not like Crossfire.

AG: Correct. It's completely different. As video becomes more common on the Internet, as the capacity of the lines accommodates HD video and we don't have to wait that long for it to download, that's when TV sinks into the digital universe, and that's when the culture and architecture of the Internet redefines the information ecosystem within which our democracy lives.

JAV: Obama wrote the playbook on how to win an election using the "here comes everybody" nature of the Internet. But a year into his presidency, many feel that his administration is governing in the same old Washington way. What happened?

AG: Basically, the whole arm of the campaign that used the Internet was severed from the group that moved into the White House. They used the Internet as a tool for enhancing the effectiveness of their grass-roots organizers, and they did it better than anyone else. They just haven't figured out yet how to move from campaigning to governance. That's a long and difficult transition for any politician to make...Now, there was an announcement -- maybe in December or January, I can't remember when it was, it was during that transition period -- that said that David Plouffe was going to go off and set up something that would be a support base on the Internet. As far as I can tell, that's never happened.

JAV: Actually, yes, it did happen -- Obama for America, the campaign, is now called Organizing for America, and it's housed at the Democratic National Committee.

AG: If it's working now, good, but I have not seen much evidence of it in the first 10 months. That's the first thing. Second, people who are good at campaigning have a certain set of skills, some of which are relevant to governing, but some of which are not particularly relevant to governing. And applying these new possibilities to governance is a task waiting to be completed. It will happen. It will happen. But it's certainly not in evidence yet. There are plenty of ways to do it. . . People feel shut out of the process now -- they don't feel like they have a way into it. This 13 year old you talked about -- I keep pointing like he's living inside your iPhone, and in a way he is -- he knows the way in. And his generation will certainly find a way.

JAV: What do you say to people [Obama supporters] who feel frustrated?

AG: It was inevitable that all these high hopes would collide with the still-impressive forces of resistance entrenched in the legislative branch. I would urge people to hold Obama accountable and keep the pressure on but to give him credit for the many changes he has already brought about. For example, even though he hasn't been able to get the Senate climate bill passed yet, his EPA has enacted tough new CO2 reductions. And just yesterday, he announced that new mercury regulations were going into effect in 2011...And there are so many examples. His FCC chair has just taken the initiative on net neutrality. That's very important. Understandably, there's a focus on some of the high profile issues like health care. And inevitably hopes were so high, and the Internet amplified all of that, because blogs are all writing about them, and it was inevitable that these high hopes would collide with the still impressive forces of resistance that are entrenched in the legislative branch, in other parts of the American system. It was, after all, designed to be difficult to enact legislation. Inevitably, some people were going to be disappointed and frustrated. I would urge them to hold him accountable, keep the pressure on, but to have an understanding of how much he has done, how much is in progress, and then take responsibility yourself.

JAV: Technology and the Internet are not just changing politics here in the U.S., it's also happening aboard. In the Philippines, where I grew up, grassroots organizers used text messaging to help overthrow a president. We saw what happened with reformers in Iran using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube after the election...

AG: And look at what's happening beneath the surface in both China and Russia. Both [Wen] Jiabao and [Dmitry] Medvedev -- Medvedev is technically number one in Russia, but most Russians believe he's number two. Jiabao is number two to Hu Jintao. In both countries, the broadcast media of television and radio, and the newspapers, are controlled. But in both countries, the attempt to control the Internet has largely, largely failed, because there are so many hacks that can work around the system -- first the digital elites, then others find ways to get the information. In both countries, you have Medvedev and Jiabao making the most extraordinary speeches, confessing error, saying our system doesn't work, it's gotta be changed. I don't want to overstate this -- Wen Jiabao has now gone on to blogs and responded directly to bloggers and in both countries -- dictatorships, effectively -- they're out there campaigning. If there's a disaster in China, they're there within hours, doing photo-ops with babies, because the political consciousness of the people, even in dictatorships, has been awakened by the Internet, and they have to respond to it. And they are responding to it. So in China, there is beneath the surface, a growing pressure for democratization. The Internet is inherently a de-moc-ra-ti-zing force -- [he elongates the consonants] -- even more powerful than the printing press was. It will still take some time before it wins out, but it is a democratizing force, and the reason it's democratizing is the same reason that the printing press was democratizing. The architecture of the medium, the basic design of the information infrastructure that's defined by the medium, has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. And individuals -- intelligence is evenly distributed throughout the human population, it has no respect for family pedigree, for inherent wealth, they're sort of negatively correlated, actually -- [he laughs] -- and education is the key empowerment tool. When the printing press first began to grow in prominence, there was a wave of public demand for literacy. The average adult can learn to read and write in two weeks. It's not that hard. It's hard. It's a barrier. But it's not that hard to bridge. Once an individual is literate, then the Internet is there. And there's also digital literacy. My brother-in-law, maybe 10 or 12 years older than me, he never used the computer. He wouldn't dream of it. But after a few moths, you can't get him off it now. When I got him an iPhone, he said, "Ah, I don't want that thing." Now he's all over it. All the time. You look at the number of older people -- 50, 60, 70, 80 -- using the Internet, all the time, it's amazing. But the point is -- it doesn't matter your age, it doesn't matter your nationality. It's an advantage if you speak English, because so much of the science is in English. But it doesn't matter. As long as you have basic literacy skills and a rudimentary understanding of how to get on the Internet, then you can participate in shaping the way people think about common problems, common opportunities -- and that's really what democracy is all about. Of course the founders said that the bedrock of American democracy is a well-informed citizenry.

JAV: So in countries such as China, Russia and Iran, the Internet is not just a communications tool, it's a tool of rebellion?

AG: Well, it's a tool for collective awareness. And collective consciousness. The political consciousness of people is empowered by the Internet. That's been the case with most powerful new technologies -- sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. Remember that the Iranian revolution in 1979 was powered by cassette tapes, basically. You had Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei and his followers smuggling in cassette tapes of his sermons and speeches. The political consciousness of the Iranian Revolution then was empowered by that new technology which was under the radar and escaped the censors. In the same way, but much more powerful, the Internet is allowing the rise of political consciousness in places like Russia and China, where the authorities are intent on stifling dissent and preventing the formation of the political consciousness that are rooted in the people themselves, that they're having a great difficulty stopping.

JAV: In April, at a seminar on the Web's future, the UN's Internet Telecommunication Union said that only 23 percent of the globe's population is actually on the Internet. Twenty-three percent. Let's look ahead, 10 years from now, what's going to happen in China, Russia and Iran, when a new generation of kids, with their video-enabled cell phones, are adults?

AG: The amount of bandwidth will increase dramatically. The connection within nations and across national boundaries will increase exponentially and there is already a global consciousness that is now rising. And most issues are now being dealt with in a global context. Science is completely global. A great deal of the world's GDP is now in the hands of businesses that essentially define their markets in global context. You have many industries that are dealing with transnational and international regulations and guidelines. Now when there's a merger, large businesses in the U.S. often have to pass E.U. anti-trust review. Microsoft, for example, is dealing with regulators in the E.U. as much or more than with those in the U.S. on some issues. Environmental issues are now being dealt with -- haltingly at first, but with increasing competency and force -- at a global level. And human rights is dealt with in a global context. But these are still -- as they say in business world -- early days, and some regimes have been able to insulate themselves.

JAV: Earlier this year, Newt Gingrich attacked a statement made by Obama while visiting Germany. Obama called himself a "citizen of the world." At a GOP fundraiser, Gingrich retorted: "I am not a citizen of the world. I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous!" But hasn't the proliferation of technology -- like cell phones and computers -- connected citizens much closer to each other?

AG: Yes, yes, absolutely. And you especially see this among young people across the world. They share very similar perspectives on the state of the world and their aspirations for the future. Young Europeans, for example, are much more psychologically invested in a European identity. It's interesting that, in some ways, there is among young people in many parts of the world a disinvestment in their primary identity, in their primary political identity as citizens as of the nation-state that they live in, that disinvestment is being reinvested upward and downward -- it's being reinvested in entities like the European Union in Europe, in a pan-African identity. It's very common in Africa now, no matter the nation, no matter the tribe, for people to speak about Africa...

JAV: Instead of just Nigeria or Egypt...

AG: Correct, correct. And yet simultaneously, there's a reinvestment in their identity with the region in which they live, and of course the urban area in which they live. But you find a rising awareness in regions like Catalonia, in Spain, Lombardi in Italy. Scotland is now enjoying a higher degree of Independence form the United Kingdom. The Internet is, inherently, a global medium. It doesn't belong to a country. It doesn't belong to a dictator.

JAV: Since you got your start as a newspaperman, and since the future of news is tied to the future of politics -- how politics is covered -- what do you think is the future of the news business?

A: Well, Marshall McLuhan wrote a long time ago that the content of the new media is the old media. And I'll give you several examples of that. When television news first began, it featured men in coats and ties sitting behind desks reading the news. When variety news began, it was dominated by radio entertainers who made the transition to video format with content that was essentially derivative of what they had done on the radio. In the case of television news, there was the Huntley Brinkley show. You're way too young to remember this, but before Walter Cronkite became dominant, NBC News had Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, the New York Times complained that night after night -- I may not remembering this with absolute precision -- but night after night the 10 stories that they did were the 10 stories on the front page of the New York Times, in the same order, in the same, you know, ranking. Gradually, as more video became available from news events around the world, the pictures started driving the selection of stories. And now it's very common to have some story on the television news that's really driven by the compelling nature of whatever video is available. And I vividly remember a transition period when it became very common for people to say, I read this story in the New York Times this morning and then I saw it on the Walter Cronkite in the evening, and it's the same story, but the feeling I got, the impression I got, was completely different. That's sort of the transition. But your question is more about the future of newspapers...

JAV: Well, the future of news in general -- not just newspapers.

AG: Just as in the early days, the television news was derivative of newspapers until it found its own protocols and news culture began manifesting it. In the same way, most of the news in the Internet today comes from newspapers. And the transition from newspapers to the Internet -- leaving aside the broadcast illness for a moment -- takes place not only culturally but also economically, and the great flaw in these present predictions that Internet-based news organizations will take over from newspapers is that the economic model, the business model for Internet news, does not yet support enough revenue to pay a large team of investigative journalists. So we face the prospect -- and in some ways we're already in this transition -- newspapers are shrinking. Environmental reporters, by the way, are among the first to be let go. The same is true on television. The Weather Channel disbanded its excellent climate team. So you get a shrinking of the primary source of news before the creation of a standard business model for Internet news organizations that will be able to fill that gap. To some extent, that hole is being filled by widely distributed reporting from individuals -- citizen journalists -- but there's a danger in assuming that citizen journalists can play the role that professional journalists who are able to conduct extensive, prolonged research, and apply their professional experience to really uncovering the truth of these issues.

JAV: Should government help fund journalism?

AG: I don't think so, I don't think so.

JAV: There's a report that...

AG: Yes, I heard about the report [written by Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, professor of communication at Columbia University's School of Journalism, calling for increased government funding for news-gathering and newspapers.] I think that's unrealistic. I think those who propose government-funding for the support of newspapers are overlooking the essential number of the relationship between the press and the government. And you think about Richard Nixon or George W. Bush. Dick Cheney. The first time some news organization that receives government support decides to be antagonistic toward the government. Whatever source of leverage -- [he laughs] -- the person in charge of the government has is a potential danger to the integrity of that news organization. I was watching "Meet The Press" this morning, or [George] Stephanopoulos, it was one of them, where they had this clip from John F. Kennedy -- [he laughs] -- and he was in a news conference, and I had forgotten this episode. The International Herald Tribune had been very critical of President Kennedy's administration. And they canceled all 22 subscriptions to the International Herald Tribune in the White House. [More laughter.]

JAV: How are bloggers continually challenging the press?

AG: They're challenging them, in a way, when it comes to not giving equal weight to arguments. Let's take global warming. You know there was a famous study by a father and son. [Maxwell] Boykoff and [Jules] Boykoff. They studied 14 years of newspaper stories on global warming in the Wall Street journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times. And during a period when the scientific community had expressed a consensus, unanimous consensus, the 14 years worth of stories, they took a representative sample of I think 634 stories, and 53 percent said -- maybe a problem, may not be a problem. That's a disservice. The title of their study was "Balance as Bias." And it's a direct result of the lost of revenue and the thinning of the reportorial ranks and the overburdening of the reporters who remain to the point where they feel that they have to take a shortcut by saying, "On the one hand, on the other hand. Some say the earth is round, but here are some people who say the earth is flat. It's up to you, dear reader, to reach your own conclusion." I'm no expert. I only did it for seven years. But I have a news organization now [Current TV], and I have always paid careful attention to [journalism]. And based on my own limited experience, I think reporting is an art as well as a science, but part of the art is determining when the reporter has a responsibility to say, "Okay, I'm gonna give you both sides here, but having immersed myself in reporting this story, I can tell you that the people who seem to have the best judgment on this are pretty clear in saying the earth is definitely round -- [he laughs] -- so don't waste a lot of time on people who say that it's flat." But if they're under time pressure, they have to do it quickly, if their bosses are under some kind of ideological pressure, if advertisers are putting pressure. I know of newspapers who have been bought by chains who now have the advertising people brought into the daily news meeting and make suggestions on what pictures and what stories go on the font page in order to sell more ads. And there's no written newspaper code that this says this is a violation of the newspaper code, but there is a news culture that's been built up that will tell experienced editors and reporters -- "No, no, no, no, no, that's wrong." You have to have integrity in trying to find the best evidence, evaluate it responsibly, test it against alternative views, reach some conclusions and report the damn news. And the good news is that there are still a lot of great reporters who are out there. In fact, you could assemble, you know, several dozen examples of the best reporters working today, and they will stack up against any generation of reporters ever. They're fantastic. Just to pick one example of somebody who was on one of these shows this morning. Jane Mayer. Wow. What a fabulous reporter. Not just because I often find myself agreeing with her point of view -- often I do, sometimes I don't. She just completed this lengthy story in the New Yorker about the use of drones and the larger implications of that. Well, that's not something that you're gonna get, that you're not likely to get, from an Internet news organization -- yet. But I yearn for the day when an Internet-based news organization will throw off enough revenue consistently to hire a Jane Mayer and to hire several dozen reporters who have that kind of experience and time and skill. But we're not there yet. It may be that we'll see the emergence of new models that combine newspapers and Internet outlets and have a source of revenue that maybe supplemented by foundations. There are some examples of that happening now. NPR uses that. The Jim Lehrer Show -- [now called PBS NewsHour] -- uses that.

JAV: Which specific bloggers and Web sites have been important to the rise of the left in the past few years? What do you read?

AG: Oh gosh. Well I have a custom-designed iGoogle page that has lots of different sites on it that I scan all the time. Some of them come and go, but a lot of them stick around...

JAV: Like Daily Kos?

AG: I think it's a great site, and I think it serves a great role. But I read sites that probably I know for a fact people don't. RealClimate.org. I wish more people read it.

JAV: Left-leaning bloggers have had a tremendous impact on the Democratic Party. But one of the biggest stories in Washington right now is how the Republican party is rebuilding itself. What do you think the right should do to rebuild the party and attract a grassroots-based movement online?

AG: Well, they have their own thriving presence on the Internet. But I think the culture of the Internet is democratizing inherently because it really works against ideological conformity. Because the entry barriers are so low, and individuals have ease of access, you are so constantly seeing orthodoxy challenged by a million different perspectives. The architecture of the medium kind of pulls people toward more engagement with new ideas. And I think that's a good thing.

JAV: It's almost there are two conservative movement happening at once. There's the Rush Limbaugh-Glenn Beck-Michelle Malkin kind of movement -- they all have Web sites -- and independent of that are blogs like The Next Right, which are trying to have more substantive discussions about where the GOP should go.

AG: It's so fragmented, the Republican Party. And this congressman from Louisiana? [Joseph] Cao? What an interesting political figure! I think they ought to really you know listen to that guy.

JAV: If bloggers had the same kind of influence in 2000 that they have now, would that have changed the outcome of the election?

AG: Oh, my God. No question, no question. Absolutely.

JAV: Imagine if people in Florida had cell phone cameras and took videos and photos of the hanging chads -- how confused they were by the ballots, how long the lines where in certain precincts, how certain people were being turned away from polls. Would it have changed the outcome, if the social Web where around in 2000?

AG: It might have, it might have.

JAV: During the 2008 election, more than 50 percent of Americans got their news from the Internet. Will the Internet eclipse TV as the most influential source of information?

AG: The Internet is on such an impressive upward trajectory that it will certainly play a much more prominent role in the 2012 election than it did in 2008. But that's not to predict that in only three years we will see Internet-based political communication eclipsed what's taking place in television. In practical terms, the build out of much higher bandwidth connections on a common basis will have something to do with that. I think that will also drive the amount of traffic to Internet video sites as compared to the cable and satellite television.

JAV: Is social media reaching its peak, or will participation in social media only increase?

A: I think it's in its infancy. Have you heard of Xanga? Xanga is on a trajectory that is unbelievable. I mean it exceeds the early years of Google, in terms of how rapidly it's grown. And there will be dozens of new social network sites -- some of them based on gaming. I think that the role of gaming is growing so rapidly.

JAV: Do you think the types of candidates that the next generation of Americans gravitate towards will look and sound different than the candidates we've had in the past? Younger?

AG: Well, in this election, the number of voters 30 or under exceeded the number of voters age 65 and older. Young voters turned out to vote. And and on global warming, the breakdown, on the legislation, is 75 to 16 among 30 and under.

JAV: I don't think there's any other issue out there that young people are more passionate, and more ahead in, than global warming.

AG: That and LGBT issues. I mean, young people, when they hear some of these gay rights opponents, they go -- what? It's ridiculous, it's ridiculous. [Laughter.] I mean, it's just, come on, it's ridiculous.

JAV: But of course there are the skeptics. In a column a few months ago, George Will wrote that "according to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." The Internet is only amplifying what people already believe -- their biases. So how then do you convince people who don't subscribe to your beliefs?

AG: It's about facts. Since you mentioned him, let's take George Will. He wrote a few notorious columns last year that in years past might have attracted little notice. But immediately, when he grossly misstated the science several times, there was a storm on the Internet, and the Washington Post Syndicate was besieged -- [he laughs] -- and the controversy outweighed his ability to make the point he was trying to make because the gross mistakes that he included in his columns were revealed so widely that his column fell of its own weight. No other serious writer after that storm would dream of citing George Will as a source for the particular point that he was trying to make because everybody knew, by then, that they were on notice, that the scientific community had blown the whistle on the information. They provided links -- "Here, go to the original sources and look for yourself" -- and enough people did that his credibility on that particular topic, at least. Now he's a smart man, and often a thoughtful man, I think that he lets his ingrained biases drive him towards these kinds of mistakes.

JAV: Has the Internet helped or hurt the ability to get your argument out, this argument that you've made all these years?

AG: I think it has helped enormously, of course.

JAV: The Internet is changing the way we think of our relationship with government; it has the potential to bring to life what Abraham Lincoln said about the presidency being an instrument of the people. Thinking back, when you headed that Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, did you ever think a day like this would come?

AG: I hoped for it. And in a number of speeches back in that era, expressed the hope that it would bring about the emergence of online democracy. But whatever medium is dominant in society in any given era, it's important to look at how it interacts with human nature, which is essentially unchanging from one generation to the next. Remember, the American constitutional system was designed not as a pure democracy but as a representative democracy, within which individuals were chosen in the election process to represent the interests of different groups. And there's a misconception that the emergence of a fully-connected, broadband Internet with virtually 100 percent participation would empower pure democracy. Because our lives being what they are, the only way to have reflective thought is to have individuals who have enough time to really dig into the substance of issues and make decisions after reflecting on what they've learned and weighing their conclusions against their understanding of the true best interests of their constituents. A pure democracy empowered by the Internet is not the answer to our problems because without reflection, if you have sort of instant voting on everything, without that element of reflective thought...

JAV: Reasoning.

AG: Yes, that's right. And that means time, that means dedication, that means having individuals who are fiduciaries for those they represent devoting the time to doing that. Parenthetically, one of the most debilitating elements of the television-based political culture is that the elected representatives don't have the time to reflect, because they have to spend all their time raising money going to cocktail parties. In any case, back to your main concern, I am excited by the trajectory of the Internet-based political culture. I am thrilled that reform movements around the world are based on the Internet, largely. And I'm extremely hopeful that the continued evolution of Internet-based politics will lead to a political culture that makes much better decision, that's much more respectful of the broad public interest, that empowers individuals with good ideas to have traction and to find support for those ideas, and that we will have a political culture that is less dominated by the power of money and the entrenched special interest group.

On a crisp fall day, Gore sits down with Rolling Stone at his home in Nashville, a few minutes south of downtown. Powered by a geothermal system and 33 solar panels, the house is certified as Gold LEED, one of the highest ratings attainable for green design. "It's been a long process, getting all of this done," Gore says proudly. Dressed in jeans and a faded blue shirt, an iPhone vibrating from his left pocket, he seems leaner and more relaxed than he's been in years. On the eve of the publication of his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, Gore reflects on both the evolution of the Internet and the survival of the planet.

Obama wrote the playbook on how to win an election using the "here comes everybody" nature of the Internet. But a year into his presidency, many feel that his administration is governing in the same old Washington way. What happened?
Basically, the whole arm of the campaign that used the Internet was severed from the group that moved into the White House. They used the Internet as a tool for enhancing the effectiveness of their grass-roots organizers, and they did it better than anyone else. They just haven't figured out yet how to move from campaigning to governance. That's a long and difficult transition for any politician to make.

What do you say to people who feel frustrated by that?
It was inevitable that all these high hopes would collide with the still-impressive forces of resistance entrenched in the legislative branch. I would urge people to hold Obama accountable and keep the pressure on but to give him credit for the many changes he has already brought about. For example, even though he hasn't been able to get the Senate climate bill passed yet, his EPA has enacted tough new CO₂ reductions. And just yesterday, he announced that new mercury regulations were going into effect in 2011.

What do you think of the president winning the Nobel Peace Prize?
I was glad, I was glad. I hope it further encourages him to be bold.

Do you think he should attend the climate summit in Copenhagen after he accepts his Nobel Prize in Oslo?
It's important for him to go. The last four days are when the key decisions are made, and I would certainly like to see President Obama attend.

If bloggers had the same kind of influence in 2000 that they have now, would that have changed the outcome of the election?
Oh, my God. No question, no question. Absolutely.

So we're starting to see the kind of digital democracy you envisioned when you entered Congress as an "Atari Democrat"?
The Internet is now getting close to the stage where it will be possible for it to eclipse television, making it possible for people to really participate in representative democracy. But we're not there yet. We're still at a stage where TV is completely dominant in our political culture, which enables those with a lot of money to exercise enormous influence in the political system.

Is that why online activism hasn't been able to galvanize action on climate change?
It's the quintessential example of how the broad public interest is directly contrary to the passionately held special interest of large carbon polluters. The entire world is waiting for the United States to get its act together and become a champion for the broad public interest in saving the future of civilization. But the system is still so dysfunctional and the influence of these special interests is so obscenely great that they have paralyzed the political system to the point where it's not responding to the most powerful public interest of all: survival for future generations.

But can't the same social-networking tools Obama used to mobilize voters be used by carbon polluters to defend their interests?
I don't think it's an accident that every major progressive reform movement is based on the Internet. The nature of the medium is such that it invites new ideas and a regular challenge to orthodoxy. And that's a good thing for human civilization at this stage of history, where we're confronting this brand-new reality, where the relationship between the species and the planet has been radically altered. We have to quickly find a new pattern, one that doesn't continue the process of destroying the ecosphere on which human life depends. Eventually, as the Internet eclipses television, politics will emerge at a higher level of complexity where the individual's role is restored. But the individual has to fight for it. And the individual has to feel like it's worth fighting for.

But most importantly, the onslaught of new technologies -- cell phones, video games, social networking sites, the Wikipediazation of information, the reach of YouTube and Skype, you name it -- have ushered a seismic shift in education: how our kids learn, how our teachers teach, how curriculum is shaped and presented, how individual students, powered by technology, process and experience what they're learning.

It's this shift, an education earthquake of sorts, that prompted Karl Fisch, formerly a math teacher and now the technology coordinator at Arapahoe High School, just outside Denver, to create the slideshow "Did You Know?" That was in August 2006. What happened next, within three years, illustrates the very nature of what I've called our evolving "Clickocracy": one nation under Google, with video and e-mail for all.

First, Fisch posted original slideshow on his own blog. It quickly fired up the education blogosphere of which Fisch, a long-time teacher, is one of the earliest pioneers. A few months later, he got an e-mail from Scott McLeod, then an instructor at the University of Minnesota and now an associate professor of educational administration at Iowa State University -- if you want to be a principal or superintendent, contact McLeod. McLeod loved the slideshow but also wanted to tweak it a bit, shave off about half a minute, jazz it up with photos and do a video, which he then posted on his own blog.

Then the mash-ups, the remixes, the parodies, the re-uploads on video sharing sites like Glumbert.org and Break.com came pouring in. The design company XPLANE contacted Fisch and McLeod and wanted to create a 2.0 version of the video, complete with animation, for free.

A year later, Sony BMG Music Entertainment got wind of the video and wanted to create their version of it for an annual meeting of their executives in Rome. (This explains, by the way, one of the last frames in the video, highlighting how many songs are illegally downloaded within the 5-minute presentation.)

This fall, The Economist contacted Fisch and McLeod. They, too, created a new version, which they presented at their Media Convergence Forum last month -- "convergence" being one of the biggest and most overused buzz words in media.

Altogether, Fisch and McLeod estimate that the videos -- shown in business and education conferences, still spreading on video sharing sites -- have been viewed about 25 million times. That's probably a conservative estimate. On YouTube alone, there are dozens of "Did You Know"-related videos, with tags such as "shift happens," "education," "workforce," "globalization" and "visual thinking." The versions have changed. From 2006 to 2007, MySpace was the dominant social network. Not so in 2009.

The video series "has become one of the more popular anthems on YouTube for the impact that technological progress is having on society," Steve Grove, YouTube's news and politics editor, told HuffPostTech. "It's makes you simultaneously think, 'Man, how can we keep up with all of this?', and 'Man, I'm excited to be living in a world with this much possibility.' It spurns more versions and more mash-ups and more discussion."

Added David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and co-author of the prescient book The Cluetrain Manifesto, which was published in 2000 and foresaw how the social, networked Web would change human relationships: "In some ways, it's a shock video to tell people who are in denial about all the changes we've been going through. It's using a very tried and true and traditional technique: presenting quantitative facts that are surprising. We are shocked by the quantitative facts, the sheer scale of the changes, that have happened in such a relatively short period of time."

It's been a decade of tremendous technological turmoil -- and for many "turmoil," as defined by Merriam-Webster, has literally meant "confusion," "agitation" and "commotion." But it's also been a decade of creativity and experimentation that will continually define our technological reality. This is the decade that gave us YouTube and Twitter, which is flexing the "me" in "media" in ways that "legacy" organizations (newspapers, magazines, TV networks) are still struggling to understand; the decade that saw the expansion of the Apple and its "i" brand (iMac, iPod, iPhone, soon-to-be iTablet), emphasizing your individual relationship with your gadgets; the decade that saw video games and interactive entertainment ("Grand Theft Auto," "Spore," etc.) push the boundaries of what we deem art; the decade that saw the birth of Friendster (remember that?), the rise and fall and re-branding of MySpace, the staggering growth of Facebook. With more than 300 million users, Facebook is a country of its own. As Mashable reported earlier this month, Facebook grew by 25 million users from Sept. 15 to Nov. 6. If you do the math, as Mashable's Ben Parr did, that's a daily growth rate of 471,698 users. "That's a small city joining Facebook every single day," Parr wrote.

But this is not about Facebook -- only time and the marketplace can dictate how that company moves forward. At bottom, this is about living in what Fisch and McLeod have called "exponential times" and its inevitable impact inside and outside our classrooms. In six of the most striking slides in the video's Version 3.0 -- the one that Sony BMG showed to its executives and ends with the question "So what does it all mean?" -- Fisch and McLeod wrote: "The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010. . . did not exist in 2004. . . We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist. . . using technologies that haven't been invented. . . in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet."

McLeod, a former 8th grade teacher and a father of three, has shown the video (and its different versions) to various groups. In a phone interview, the 41-year-old McLeod told me: "When you show some version of the video to corporate people, like the folks at Sony, they nod their heads and say, 'yeah, this is the challenge we're dealing with.' When you show it to kids, to students, they nod their nods and say, 'yeah, we've been waiting for you to catch up, we've been living through all of this.' When you show it to educators, as often as not, the predominant reaction is withdrawal. They retreat like a turtle to its shell. Not all of them. But a lot of them. It's too much. It's too overwhelming. They don't know what to do with it. This is our challenge."

And it's the challenge that keeps Fisch, the technology coordinator at Arapahoe High School, on his toes. Like McLeod, he, too, is a father -- to 9-year-old Abby, currently in 4th grade. How will Abby learn in 5 years, in 10, when she's in college? As technology coordinator, his is a multifaceted job. He provides technical support for the campus and also curriculum support, helping teachers understand the inevitable pitfalls and great promise of new technologies. "I began to get ideas of how perhaps these technological changes could help us better meet the individual needs of students, and how it might allow them to take more control over their own learning and pursue their passions," Fisch, 45, told me over the phone.

As I listened to Fisch and typed my notes, I instinctively put these phrases in bold: "individual needs of students"; "take control of their own learning"; and "pursue their passions." In my years attending American public schools in Silicon Valley -- first in Crittenden Middle School, down the street from Google's headquarters, then in Mountain View High School, not too far from the offices of Apple and Facebook -- I felt almost threatened by the rigorous standardized testing, which grew more and more constant as years passed. (I had it good then; I graduated from Mountain View High in 2000.) I was so scared of tests -- and how they determined my aptitude (or lack thereof) -- that while I took courses preparing for the SATs, I was too scared to actually take the real SATs. Thankfully, my GPA was high enough that San Francisco State University, where I chose to go to college, didn't need my SAT scores. And I was fortunate that throughout my years in public schools, numerous teachers and school administrators took the time and energy to get to know me (as an individual) and see beyond tests and numbers (and through my passion for writing).

In retrospect, I wasn't just fortunate -- I was really, really lucky. I think of students in classrooms now -- cell phones in their pockets and purses, their Facebook and MySpace pages serving as real-time journals -- and their individual needs and individual passions. Like Fisch, a flood of questions come rushing by, some of which are:

* What does it mean to be literate in the 21st century? In an expanding Web fueled by online videos, how important is it for students to be "viderate" -- video literate? It's a term coined by Andrew Rasiej, one of the leading thinkers in technology culture. Is it time that we require students to pass a Media Literacy course before graduating from high school, like Civics, like P.E.? Maybe even start it at middle school?

* Are we teaching students about their digital footprints? The positive and negative effects of what they post on their Facebook pages, what they forward in e-mail chains, the kind of videos and images they pass around on their phones?

* How is the relationship between teachers and students changing? Fisch noted that "our schools are currently designed for a world where information is scarce, not abundant, where kids come to school to get information, from the teacher and the textbook." In classrooms today, Fisch added: "the teacher is no longer the smartest person in the room if there's an Internet connection." But teaching, for the most part, is a one-way street. Students learn, teachers teach, that's that. Should a classroom be more like a collaborative experience, where a teacher is what Fisch calls a "chief learner" who is learning alongside the students? This can't apply to all subjects, of course.

* Can we encourage students to create what Fisch calls "personal learning networks"? Through the Web, Fisch communicates with teachers on six continents, most of whom he has never met, and learns from them every day. How can we help students do this? Say you're a 10th grader who's really into marine biology or industrial design or the Japanese language. There may not be classes in your school about those topics, but you can be connected to other students and teachers are who interested in those subjects.

* How do we address the still lingering -- and under-reported -- issue of digital divide in our classrooms? Technology is not cheap. Neither is Internet connection.

On Nov. 24, President Obama launched Educate to Innovate, a star-studded campaign drawing the likes of Big Bird, Discovery Communications and Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, focusing on math and science. This is a time for innovation in education, and technology in general and the Internet in particular are central to that. As Obama and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, continues to plan the future of our schools, Fisch and McLeod's videos serve as resources -- and, altogether, a call to action. Shift happens. It's here. Lead.

*** Check out these slides from three Did You Know? video series. For the sake of transparency, Fisch and McLeod created a wiki page for the presentation. This page traces the history of the slideshow. And this page has the source files.

That translates into 2,984 residents per every 100,000 over the age of 12 -- or 15,120 -- according to the 2008 epidemiology report by the District's HIV/AIDS office.

"Our rates are higher than West Africa," said Shannon L. Hader, director of the District's HIV/AIDS Administration, who once led the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's work in Zimbabwe. "They're on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya."

"We have every mode of transmission" -- men having sex with men, heterosexual and injected drug use -- "going up, all on the rise, and we have to deal with them," Hader said.

In addition to the epidemiology report, the city is also releasing a study on heterosexual behavior tomorrow. That report, funded by the CDC, was conducted by the George Washington University School of Health and Health Services.

Among its findings: Almost half of those who had connections to the parts of the city with the highest AIDS prevalence and poverty rates said they had overlapping sexual partners within the past 12 months, three in five said they were aware of their own HIV status, and three in 10 said they had used a condom the last time they had sex.

Together, the reports offer a sobering assessment in a city that for years has stumbled in combating HIV and AIDS and is just beginning to regain its footing. A more accurate accounting of the crisis offers a chance to contain what is largely a preventable disease.

So urgent is the concern that the HIV/AIDS Administration took the relatively rare step of couching the city's infections in a percentage, harkening to 1992, when San Francisco, around the height of its epidemic, announced that 4 percent of its population was HIV positive. But the report also cautions that "we know that the true number of residents currently infected and living with HIV is certainly higher."

The District's report found a 22 percent increase in HIV and AIDS cases from the 12,428 reported at the end of 2006, touching every race and sex across population and neighborhoods, with an epidemic level in all but one of the eight wards. Black men, with an infection rate of nearly 7 percent, carry the weight of the disease, according to the report, which also underscores that the District's HIV and AIDS population is aging. Almost 1 in 10 residents between the ages of 40 and 49 has the virus.

The report notes that "this growing population will have significant implications on the District's health care system" as residents face chronic medical problems associated with aging and fighting a disease that compromises the immune system.

Men having sex with men has remained the disease's leading mode of transmission. Heterosexual transmission and injection drug use closely follow, the report says. Three percent of black women carry the virus, partly a result of the increase in heterosexual transmissions.

"This is very, very depressing news, especially considering HIV's profound impact on minority communities," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health's program on infectious diseases. "And remember: The city's numbers are just based on people who've gotten tested."

Ron Simmons, who is black, gay and HIV positive, said he's not shocked by the study's findings. "You have a high incidence of HIV among African Americans, and a lot of African Americans live in the city," said Simmons, who is a member of a black gay support group. "D.C. also has a high number of gay men, and HIV is high among gay black men."

Charlene Cotton, a D.C. resident who got an HIV positive diagnosis five years ago, said breaking the taboo on discussing HIV is the key to moving forward. "You need to start at home and talk about it," Cotton said. "It's so hush-hush."

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) said he is aware that some advocates have called on elected officials and others to more aggressively and publicly address the crisis. He praised the city's recent efforts, however, and expressed his frustration about the struggle ahead.

"In order to solve an issue as complex as HIV and AIDS, you have to step up," he said. "It's the mayor and certainly other elected officials. But it's also the community. You have this problem affecting us, and you tell people how serious it is and it literally goes in one ear and out the other."

David Catania (I-At Large), chairman of the D.C. Council's health committee, said that although the District's testing and monitoring have improved in the past two years, the AIDS office is still playing catch-up. The city was in the forefront of the crisis when it created the office in 1986, but it fell far behind. Hader took control in 2007. She is its 12th director and the third in five years.

"Frankly, there can be no excuse for the state of the HIV/AIDS Administration that I found in 2005," Catania said. "I cannot speak to why it was not a priority previously. For years prior to 2005, mayors and previous individuals allowed things to exist in an unacceptable way. And I do blame this government for part of the epidemic we're confronting."

Until recently, the District's AIDS office lacked a fully staffed surveillance unit to collect, analyze and distribute data. Inevitably, the office lost credibility, and although it has received millions in federal and local funds -- $95 million this year -- some care providers questioned whether resources were being properly allocated.

Critics also say congressional control over the District had restricted the AIDS office's ability to combat the virus among drug injection users by banning the use of local tax dollars for a needle exchange program. After almost a decade, the ban was lifted last year.

The study is the most precise count to date, according to the authors. The document is an update of a breakthrough 2007 report, which brought into clearer focus a picture of a city in the grip of a complex and "modern epidemic" that had traveled from a mostly gay population to the general one and disproportionately hit blacks.

For years, District HIV/AIDS workers depended on estimates that put the rate at 1 of 20 living with HIV and 1 of 50 living with AIDS.

The current study notes that its tracking occurred as the city made a switch from a code-based counting system to a name-based one. The surveillance unit interviewed medical providers to find unreported cases, pressed providers who did not consistently report to the administration and searched databases for unreported cases.

More than 4 percent of blacks in the city are known to have HIV, along with almost 2 percent of Latinos and 1.4 percent of whites. More than three-quarters -- 76 percent -- of the HIV infected are black, 70 percent are men and 70 percent are age 40 and older.

Heterosexual sex was the principal mode of transmission for blacks with the disease, 33 percent. Men having sex with men was the chief mode of transmission for white residents, 78 percent; and Latinos, 49 percent. Black women represent more than a quarter of HIV cases in the District, and most, about 58 percent, were infected through heterosexual sex. About a quarter of black women were infected through drug use.

The companion study, "Heterosexual Relationships and HIV in Washington, D.C.," is a detailed look at those whose social networks include individuals at high risk of infection and aims to analyze people's choices and actions before they set foot in a clinic or get HIV.

The 750-participant study targeted four areas in wards 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8 with both high rates of AIDS and poverty. Salaries of a majority of participants -- 60 percent -- were under $10,000 yearly; a similar percentage had never been married; and 43 percent were unemployed.

The survey's methodology -- interviewing those with connections to high-risk networks rather than those who exhibit high-risk behavior themselves -- highlights a shift in the direction by the CDC, which developed the survey protocol.

There is good news in the AIDS office's report: More people are getting HIV diagnoses early, while they are still healthy, as a result of a policy of routine testing implemented by the city in mid-2006. Publicly supported HIV testing expanded by 70 percent.

Walter Smith, executive director of the DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, praised the study but also lamented that it did not offer more current data on new infections. The report said that detailed information on new HIV cases is not included because the transition from the code-based tracking system to a name-based one takes five years to be mature, according to the CDC.

"I'm not criticizing them for that," he said. "But we've had more testing, more needle exchange programs. We don't have, at this moment, any understanding about what impact the new programs have had."

"Well, people are still fired up and ready to go," he continues. "What's next?"

Therein lies the challenge for the Obama White House. His online team might have written the playbook on leveraging the Internet to campaign victory, building a grassroots network on My.BarackObama.com, amassing a record amount of online donations and collecting an e-mail list of more than 13 million addresses, by far the biggest in Washington.

Like Johnson, many of those people aren't going away. A survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 51 percent of online Obama supporters expect to get e-mail, text messages or other communications from the new administration.

But how will all that online energy be channeled from campaigning into governing?

With some notable exceptions, federal Washington -- how agencies deal with citizens, the process in which policies and laws are created -- is stuck in the Encyclopaedia Britannica era. A relatively small group of editors and contributors is in charge. A growing portion of the country, however -- the Web-enabled set that swears by MySpace and YouTube (and note the emphasis on "My" and "You") -- lives by the wisdom-of-the-crowd, I-have-something-to-contribute ethos of Wikipedia. In the same way that anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry, not only will Web-acculturated citizens speak their minds, but they also won't ask anyone's permission to do so.

It has been only a decade since an American president first used the Internet. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration created WhiteHouse.gov and ordered all federal agencies to get online. For the first time, the government used the Web to describe what it was doing in its own terms, bypassing media middlemen. George W. Bush's two terms brought podcasting, online chats and videos to the presidency's online presence.

"Clinton was the first Web president. Bush is the first digital president," says David Almacy, who served as Bush's Internet director from 2005 to 2007. "Obama is the first online social networking president."

And online social networking is designed to foster a community. For that approach to be effective, WhiteHouse.gov can't just push information out -- it has to pull content in, too. And once it does so, the administration will have to decide whether, when and how to incorporate those voices into its decision-making process.

* * *

On Change.gov, a transition Web site launched two days after Obama won, a constant stream of information is doled out. You can watch YouTube videos of transition staffers. You can track meetings between the transition team and outside groups, which provide searchable documents online (and allow visitors to leave comments for the team). You can post questions in the "Open for Questions" feature, where submitted questions are voted to the top by other users. In its first week, the feature got 978,868 votes on 10,302 questions from 20,468 people.

The transition team's Internet department -- which include Macon Phillips, a veteran of Obama's online team, and Jesse Lee, who formerly worked for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic National Committee as an online adviser -- won't reveal exactly how many people have signed up on Change.gov. But they've been amazed by the number of people who've used it. More than 290,000 résumés, for example, were sent to the site.

Staff members are responding to the feedback, albeit in a formal, official tone, compared with the conversational vibe of the campaign site. Answering a question on the ban on stem cell research -- one of the most voted-on questions -- Phillips's team wrote: "President-elect Obama is a strong supporter of Federal funding for responsible stem cell research and he has pledged to reverse President Bush's restrictions."

Using Change.gov, Tom Daschle, Obama's nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, is trying to mobilize people in support of health care reform. This month, the former senator invited people to submit their input online. About 3,500 comments poured in. In a video message, he then asked people to host group meetings in the coming weeks -- at their homes, in coffee shops -- and pass along the group's input. "We want people to share with us what ideas they have that might improve the system from their own experiences," Daschle says in the video.

But this being the Internet, not everything on Change.gov goes according to plan. The day after it was announced that the Rev. Rick Warren will deliver the opening prayers at Obama's inauguration, for example, a discussion forum focused on community service was instead filled with pages of comments from people opposing Obama's choice. Warren, a conservative evangelical pastor in Orange County, Calif., backed a successful state initiative banning same-sex marriage.

"Over and over, I've seen the kind of spiritual damage done by religious leaders, like Warren, who use their pulpits to verbally beat up gay people," one commentator wrote. Added another: "I wonder if Obama, who is black, would support someone coming to his inauguration and telling everyone that black and white people should not marry?"

The comments are still up on the site.

"This is a part of our Internet culture, and it's an emerging part of our political culture -- you, as a citizen, get to talk back to your government," says Google chief Eric Schmidt, who is also an Obama adviser. "I'm a child of the broadcast TV world. Aside from voting and watching TV and maybe joining a letter-writing campaign, what actual impact could I have on a specific policy? But the new set of tools online allow the government to open itself up and post a series of questions to its citizens. What should we do with health care? By asking that question, not only does the government become more porous, there becomes a much more dynamic dialogue between the government and its citizens. Change.gov offers hints as to how this works. We'll see if it transfers to WhiteHouse.gov."

Adds Al Gore, a senior adviser to Google: "This Internet revolution is still in its infancy, and its effects won't all be positive, of course. The fact is, we're all still trying to figure it out."

* * *

Nothing typifies the disconnect between Capitol Hill and the Web more than the franking rules, which were established when lawmakers communicated with their constituents solely through snail mail. Until the archaic rules were revised this fall, legislators using their official congressional sites were prohibited from linking to YouTube and other commercial sites. (But many did it anyway. Even Pelosi, who has a YouTube channel and a blog called The Gavel, was violating the rules.)

Aided by Karina Newton, her director of new media, Pelosi has been telling committee chairmen since the beginning of 2007 that they needed to webcast committee meetings. In the summer of 2007, 11 House committees did. A year later, nine more followed suit. The upgrade isn't limited to Democrats. Republicans such as Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia and Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina have been early Web adapters. Their aim is to talk directly with their constituents.

But Internet-centered groups such as the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation -- which includes Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia on its board -- say legislators can do much more to increase transparency, especially when it comes to disclosing online which lobbying groups they're meeting with and what earmarks they're requesting. At the height of the $700 billion bailout of the U.S. financial system in late September, Sunlight started an online petition calling for all legislation to be posted online for a minimum of 72 hours before a vote. According to Sunlight, some 10,000 signed the petition within a few days.

"Every single day a member gets a printed-out version of his or her schedule. Why can't they put that up online? They know the list of earmarks they've submitted to their committee chairmen. Why can't they put that up online? The answer to 'Why can't they put that up?' is 'It's more information than they need to know.' I've had senior members of Congress use those exact words to me," says Ellen Miller, who co-founded Sunlight in 2006.

Adds Andrew Rasiej, an adviser to Sunlight and the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which chronicles the intersection of technology and politics: "Most members of Congress don't know the difference between a server and a waiter. But they're getting better. They have young staffers who live in the YouTube world. They've seen how Obama used the Web. They're waking up to this new reality."

For Rasiej, Obama can serve as a model in how to use technology for governing. A lot is riding on exactly what kind of power Obama's chief technology officer -- a newly created position -- will have. And where that position fits within the Obama administration. Julius Genachowski, a friend of Obama's since law school and the campaign's chief technology officer, is considered the front-runner for the job.

"For example, if that person is in the White House at a Cabinet level, expect more transparency, a more Web 2.0 WhiteHouse.gov. But if they put that person in the OMB" -- the Office of Management and Budget -- "it will be like putting the chief locomotive engineer in 1860 at a desk at the horse trading association," Rasiej says. "Every issue group is looking for a czar -- an energy czar, a drug czar -- but this is different because technology is not a slice of the pie, it's the pan."

* * *

A month after winning the White House, David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, sent a message to Obama's campaign e-mail list of 13 million.

"Now it's time to start preparing and working for change in our communities," the e-mail read, urging supporters to host house meetings on Dec. 13 and 14. The purpose, Plouffe instructed, was twofold: to reflect on what was accomplished during the campaign, and to plan for the future. Hosts were sent guidelines and DVDs to facilitate the meetings. They also were asked to report back to Plouffe.

About 4,200 house meetings were organized in 2,000 cities and towns. Within 150 miles of Washington, more than 330 were listed, many of them with specific agendas. A meeting at a theater in Oxon Hill focused on getting teenage mothers off drugs and alcohol. A meeting at a home in McLean dealt with Obama's policy toward India.

And a meeting at a community center near Catholic University in Northeast Washington concentrated on D.C.'s lack of voting representation on the Hill. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District's representative in Congress, cannot vote on the House floor.

On this particular Saturday afternoon, one of the 19 people seated at a long, rectangular wooden table is Ernest E. Johnson, the community activist who's anxious about what happens next to Obama's online network. Though he doesn't work for the campaign, his e-mails are signed, "Ernest E. Johnson, Obama for America." He was "born, buttered and bred" in the city, as he likes to say, and the two issues he cares about most are health care reform and D.C.'s voting rights.

"Health care must be affordable to all," says Johnson, shifting in his seat. "Residents in the nation's capital must have a vote."

The meeting's host, Ron Magnus, a 46-year-old lawyer, nods. He stands in the front of the room, jotting notes on a poster with a red marker, listing the issues that matter to everyone in the room.

Marisa Lengor, a 26-year-old grad student at George Mason University, raises her hand.

"How about the state of D.C. public schools?" she asks. "Shouldn't that be near the top of list, too?"

The list keeps getting longer. Voting rights. Health care. Clean energy. Public schools. Homelessness.

"This is what happens when people are fired up," Johnson says later, as he rushes out the door. This is the first of four house meetings he plans to attend today. "No stopping it now."

As it happens, Johnson has organized a health care forum at his church, Mount Rona Missionary Baptist Church in Columbia Heights, on the Saturday before Obama's inauguration. He's started handing out fliers and posted a notice of the meeting online.

As talk turned to their plans for caucus day, it also inevitably turned to the Internet.

It was on Facebook, after all, that the group had been born. Brandon Neil, a 21-year-old junior, had created it on Feb. 12, 2007, the day Obama announced that he was running for president.

It was through news clips posted on YouTube -- and through Obama's YouTube channel, which lists more than 1,800 videos -- that the group learned about the Illinois senator's policies and positions.

And it was mostly on the Internet, in one of those ubiquitous, inescapable Web ads -- the campaign spent $8 million on online advertising -- that they heard about Obama's text-messaging program. "I only get texts from my friends," Andy Green, a 20-year-old sophomore, told me. "Let me correct that: I only get texts from my friends and from Obama."

Looking back, I realize that it was on that Thursday night that a new political reality was cemented in my head. In the past, we've thought of politics as something over there -- isolated, separate from our daily lives, as if on a stage upon which journalists, consultants, pollsters and candidates spun and dictated and acted out the process. Now, because of technology in general and the Internet in particular, politics has become something tangible. Politics is right here. You touch it; it's in your laptop and on your cellphone. You control it, by forwarding an e-mail about a candidate, donating money or creating a group. Politics is personal. Politics is viral. Politics is individual.

And we're just getting started.

Obama's unprecedented online success guarantees that there's not a single campaign in 2012, Democratic or Republican, that won't place the Web at the core of its operation. The floodgates are open. This doesn't mean just hiring Web developers, bloggers, videographers -- the works. It also means using the Internet to invite people into the process, giving them something to work for, offering them a stake in victory or defeat. More than any other medium in our history, the Web is by the people, for the people. Starting with Howard Dean, continuing with Obama and stretching out into the future, this new dynamic will transform the way campaigns are run -- and, beyond that, the way the winning candidate governs. Fundamentally, all of this is redefining our relationship with our politics.

There were so many people on Obama's Internet team -- 90, says deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand -- that they were integrated into every part of the operation: communications and fundraising, yes, but also field work and organizing. The results surprised even Joe Rospars, who headed the team. A million people signed up to get Obama's text messages. More than 13 million are on his e-mail list. He raised a half a billion dollars online from 3 million individual donors, including supporters such as Linnie Frank Bailey, a 52-year-old mother of two from Riverside, Calif. In June 2007, I met Bailey on Eons.com (a sort of Facebook for baby boomers) after she gave $10 online to Obama -- her first-ever political contribution. She gave a total of $120.40, mostly in $10 increments.

But this is about more than just $10 donations or a candidate or a political party.

"In this Internet era, it's not enough to run a campaign; you need to lead a movement," Mindy Finn, a Republican online political operative, told me less than three days after the election. "That's what Obama did." Finn, 27, worked on President Bush's eCampaign team in 2004 and supervised former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's Web strategy. She worries that, unlike its Democratic counterpart, the Republican establishment hasn't fully grasped the ways the Web is revolutionizing politics. "If you look at their site," she said of the Obama campaign, "their online videos, their online ads, everything they did, it wasn't about 'me, myself and I.' It was about 'we' and 'us.' "

It was, in essence, about you.

"So you write about the Internet?"

In the nearly two years I was on the campaign trail, a few seasoned political reporters asked me some version of that question. Usually, the question ended up being a statement, expressed in a careful, almost parental, just-hang-in-there way: "So [pause], you write about the Internet [another pause]." Sometimes, it was asked with a dismissive, get-yourself-a-real-writing-job tone: "So you write about the Internet? What about the Internet?"

Whatever the tone, I often replied, "I don't write about the Internet. I write about people who are using the Internet."

I joined The Post's political team in February 2007, two days before my 26th birthday. I'd watched Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announce that she was running for president via online video, just as former senator John Edwards had done a month earlier. "I'm not just starting a campaign, though, I'm beginning a conversation -- with you, with America," Clinton said. "So let the conversation begin."

Conversation? Online? With people? A week later, I wrote a one-page memo to the paper's top editors proposing a new area of coverage: the marriage of Internet and politics.

Though I majored in political science at San Francisco State University, I'm no political expert. I'd never seen more than 30 minutes, much less a full hour, of "Meet the Press," and I didn't recognize Joe Klein until he sat next to me at an airport terminal. (Klein, a.k.a. Anonymous. "Primary Colors." Travolta as Clinton. Got it.) I've always viewed politics from an outsider's perspective. And what I'd learned from watching and re-watching DVDs of "The West Wing" -- especially the last two seasons, centering around the race between Matt "Obama" Santos and Arnold "McCain" Vinick -- was that politics is about being in control and staying on message. Or at least, that's what the politics of the television age was about.

But the Web is an uncontrollable, freewheeling medium. The Internet is not TV. You don't just sit back and yell at the screen; you sit up and write back at the screen. And you can also sit back -- click, click, click, scroll, scroll, scroll -- and think for yourself.

Indeed, what was so striking about the longest presidential campaign in history was the impact that everyday people had on setting its round-the-clock narrative.

Remember Adam Brickley, the 21-year-old who created PalinForVP.blogspot.com in February 2007, long before anyone had heard of Gov. Sarah Palin?

A recent graduate of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Brickley said that he got the idea for the blog after scanning Facebook. Republicans on Facebook were creating groups imagining an ideal GOP ticket (Rudy Giuliani-Sam Brownback, for example). Predicting that Clinton would get the Democratic nomination, Brickley figured that the party needed a woman on the ticket (Kay Bailey Hutchinson? Olympia Snowe?) and eventually thought of the newly elected governor of Alaska. After reading more about Palin on Wikipedia, he started the blog. "It just kind of took off. In the beginning, it was just a few people reading it," Brickley told me on the phone just a few days after Sen. John McCain tapped the 44-year-old mother of five as his running mate. "But then more and more people read it. And it's not really the number of people who read your blog but the kind of people who read your blog. Word got around."

Or remember Phil de Vellis, the video wiz who created the first viral attack ad of the race, mashing up Apple's famous Ridley Scott-directed "1984" Super Bowl ad and portraying Clinton as an Orwellian Big Sister to Obama's bright new Mac?

That video was viewed about 400,000 times before it made it onto CNN and became an even bigger viral hit. Last spring, at de Vellis's Columbia Heights apartment, where he spent a few hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon editing the mash-up, de Vellis told me: "As an Obama supporter, I just wanted to put something out there. Look, most if not all of the talking heads on cable news didn't think Obama had a chance early on. It was all about Clinton -- how strong her machine was, how inevitable her nomination was. But online, you saw that more people were gravitating toward Obama."

For all the talk about how much the mainstream media were in the tank for Obama, that certainly wasn't the case in the first few months of the campaign. Nothing talks louder in politics than money. It wasn't until Obama started raising millions -- not just from deep-pocketed bundlers but also from low-and middle-class donors giving less than $100 -- that more reporters started paying attention. For most of the campaign, what dominated the political coverage were countless articles and TV segments on incessant polls, inside-baseball strategy and who's-up, who's-down horse-race stories.

The politics of the television age still flexed its muscles, no doubt, but not for too long.

While researching the history of the intersection of politics and the Internet, I hit the books. One was Joe Trippi's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything," which came out in 2004, after Trippi had orchestrated Dean's online-fueled campaign. Another was "Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age," a collection of essays by some of the most perceptive thinkers in the online political sphere, including Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum.

But the book that I ended up underlining and highlighting most was called "The Assault on Reason," which came out in the spring of 2007, just as I was digging into my new beat. A critique of TV's influence on politics and a blueprint for the Internet's current and future impact on our civic life, it's written by former vice president Al Gore. "The Internet is perhaps the greatest source for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish," Gore wrote in the last chapter, titled "A Well-Connected Citizenry." "It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge."

In a phone interview last week, Gore said, "I still stand by those words." He laughed and recalled Obama's 37-minute speech on race following the wall-to-wall coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's provocative homilies. While TV coverage consisted mostly of sound bites, replaying and replaying a 20-second or so clip of what Wright had said, "a true dialogue was happening online," Gore said, on YouTube and other social networking sites.

"What we're witnessing," Gore continued, "is the rebirth of our participatory democracy."

I couldn't agree more.

Founded by two young party activists, Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn, the site proposes to start by rebuilding the often marginalized conservative blogosphere. Its mission statement, a 3,200-word, 10-point manifesto, is aimed at Republicans in general -- and more specifically at whoever takes the helm of the Republican National Committee in the next few weeks. It's signed by a Who's Who of the online conservative grass roots -- the "rightroots" -- most of them in their 20s and 30s, many frustrated by the current state of the Grand Old Party that seems just that: old and out of touch.

"2008 made one thing clear: If allowed to go unchecked, the Democrats' structural advantages, including their use of the Internet, their more than 2-to-1 advantage with young voters, their discovery of a better grassroots model -- will be as big a threat to the future of the GOP as the toxic political environment we have faced the last few years," the site proclaims.

Within a week, Ruffini and Finn say, about 4,000 people signed up on the site and endorsed the plan. Many submitted their own ideas and voted for their favorites on the site's open platform, Ideas.RebuildTheParty.com. Any day now, the site will turn into a virtual think tank, bringing together other online activists from inside and outside the Republican Party infrastructure.

Ruffini, 30, is a veteran online political operative who worked for President Bush before heading the RNC's Internet department and advising Rudy Giuliani. "Maybe I'm being too optimistic here," he says, "but I think this period we're going through right now will be seen as a reawakening of not just the rightroots but also the Republican Party."

"The Republican Party cannot reboot if it's viewed only as a party of old, crusty white guys," adds Finn, who started a Washington-based online consulting firm with Ruffini last summer. At 27, she is also a veteran online operative, having served on President Bush's eCampaign team in 2004 and supervised Mitt Romney's Web strategy. "We need to face 21st-century politics with 21st-century tools."

Different Centuries

The right owns talk radio; the left owns the Internet.

For years, that's been the simplest way to explain the online gap between the two parties. "Of course Republicans are behind online," says Newt Gingrich, arguably the Webbiest of the party's elder statesmen. American Solutions for Winning the Future, a group Gingrich founded, uses the Internet to harness grass-roots energy on issues such as oil drilling. "When one of Obama's senior online advisers is the co-founder of Facebook, when Gore sits on the board of Google and Apple -- well, let's just say the Republicans are not in the same century yet, okay?" (Actually, Gore is a senior adviser to Google, but Gingrich's point stands.)

Examples of the gap abound. State-by-state online activism was an integral part of the Democratic National Committee's 50-state strategy, something the Republican National Committee does not have. A handful of congressional districts could have easily gone Republican, Ruffini says, if more conservative bloggers had helped to raise money and to get boots on the ground. "But as it stands, most bloggers in the right see blogging as a communications medium," Ruffini says. "Bloggers in the right need to look at what the bloggers in the left have been doing and learn to be activists, too."

Some of the bloggers Ruffini is targeting write on such sites as RedState.com and TheNextRight.com, which he co-founded. They understand where he's coming from. Many even signed up on Rebuild the Party, including Erick Erickson, RedState's managing editor. Erickson says conservative bloggers are more concerned with debating policies and ideologies than with how close "a particular race is shaping up in this or that congressional district." In the past three years, however -- especially in the six months leading up to the election -- that mindset has started to change. "There's been a real shift to not just focus on national races but local races, too," Erickson says. "But it takes awhile for the ship to turn."

It's a difference in approach.

The GOP is the talk-radio party -- for the most part, it's centralized, top-down. Even though Rush Limbaugh is "perhaps the best exponent of across-the-board conservatism," as Ruffini wrote, "he has no lists and no way to mobilize his audience directly to donate and volunteer." (But it must be noted that Limbaugh urged his Republican listeners to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton in Indiana's open primary to prolong the Democratic duel. And Clinton won.)

The Democrats, meanwhile, are the party of the Web: decentralized, chaotic, bottom-up. The bloggers at DailyKos.com, for example, argue about policy and ideology, too. But all that blogging leads to raising money, which leads to organizing, which leads to having a say in the party. When Howard Dean, whose presidential primary campaign was largely funded by online donors, was elected DNC chairman in 2005, there was no doubt that a new Democratic era had arrived.

But clout didn't come overnight for the Democratic "netroots." In a way, its influence was predicated on being independent of the party. Says Jerome Armstrong, who created the liberal blog MyDD in 2001: "The netroots is not the DNC. The netroots challenges the DNC."

A similar dynamic needs to occur between the rightroots and the RNC, bloggers such as Ruffini and Finn say. The rightroots should push their party's leadership and entrenched consulting class the same way the netroots lashed the Democratic leadership years ago.

Ruffini is happy to start the process. Shortly after the election, some prominent conservative activists -- including Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council -- gathered to talk strategy at a weekend home in rural Virginia. The Old Dominion, once solidly Republican, will soon have two Democratic senators and has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in 44 years. Ruffini dismisses the value of the meeting.

"Whatever happened at that country estate will be irrelevant to the future of the movement. I'll bet not a single person under 40 was even at the table," Ruffini wrote on his blog. "The future will be shaped digitally . . . on blogs like this one, RedState, Save the GOP, the American Scene, and the dozens I have a feeling will be created in the wake of Tuesday's wake-up call."

Saved by Obama?

The netroots' ongoing advantage over the rightroots can be summed up in one word: Bush.

Whatever their differences -- and a quick trip to Firedoglake, Open Left and Jack & Jill Politics, some of the more influential liberal blogs, prove there are differences -- the netroots bloggers have rallied around their opposition to President Bush and the war in Iraq. Their annual blogapalooza, first called YearlyKos and now known as Netroots Nation, is basically one big let's-get-together-help-stop-the-war-and-tell-Bush-to-go-back-to-Crawford rally.

The rightroots bloggers, in contrast, haven't united over a common enemy. They've been too busy arguing among themselves.

On the right, you have blogs that focus on taxes and national security, antiabortion blogs and gun-rights blogs, blogs for social conservatives that rarely overlap with blogs for fiscal conservatives. Some of these blogs didn't know what to make of the Paulites, Ron Paul's fervent online followers. Not everyone was happily blogging about McCain during the general election, though his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as running mate galvanized hubs such as ProLifeBlogs.com. They might all call themselves Republicans, but the GOP comes in many links.

Post-Nov. 4, there's been a lot of internecine soul-searching about the state of the party.

Just visit The Next Right, which was created last May and quickly became a must-read for political junkies and Republican strategists. Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who might run again in 2012, posted his thoughts on election night -- "We will be back in strength," his blog read -- while an estimated 240,000 gathered at Grant Park in Chicago to celebrate Obama's win.

The day after the GOP drubbing, Jon Henke, one of the blog's co-founders, posted a bitter tirade. It was headlined "Republicans deserved to lose."

"You earned the beating you took yesterday. You earned every bit of it. It is your fault." Henke wrote. "Democrats may or may not have deserved to win, but you deserved to lose."

You can almost hear him grinding his teeth as he typed: "Some of you will say 'Republicans need to fight/hold Democrats accountable,' as if it is sufficient to be against Democrats. The pendulum may eventually swing back to you, but you won't know what to do with it."

For many, blogging is more a voyeuristic exercise than an expressive one. They read postings and rarely, if ever, comment. Henke's posting, however, drew 145 comments. A week later, Bob Vander Plaats, the former Iowa gubernatorial candidate who chaired Huckabee's successful operation there, also caused a stir.

"Jesus Christ, whom many Republicans claim to follow, summoned his followers to be either hot or cold toward Him, because a 'lukewarm' commitment makes Him want to vomit. I believe this accurately reflects the mood of voters in the past several elections where Republicans have witnessed consecutive defeats," Vander Plaats wrote. "We have followed the misguided advice of 'experts' to abandon our principles and move to the middle so we can supposedly win. In essence, we have become 'lukewarm' on life, on marriage, on the Second Amendment, on limited government, on balanced budgets."

To which a reader commented: "How do you get the Independents vote with rhetoric like that?"

But there's a likely glue to the ongoing division within the rightroots: Obama. Last week, Ruffini posted an item addressing one of Rebuild the Party's more ambitious goals: recruiting 5 million online activists who will work toward a common purpose. He cites the proposed auto bailout as "the first outrage of the Obama era."

Aided and prompted by the rightroots, "a functioning RNC," he wrote, "would be able to take a hard line against the bailout-of-choice for the auto industry. Or against insert-Obama-outrage-here. It doesn't really matter. We'll have plenty of issues once these guys actually get in."

It's All About a Movement

A week after the election, and five days after Rebuild the Party was introduced, RNC Chairman Mike Duncan unveiled RepublicanForAReason.com, which he describes as "a grassroots site that Republicans can use to tell us what they think of the party." He says the party has lost the trust of its members and the site "is a big part of understanding and communicating with them." He agrees with Finn that the GOP is viewed "as a party of old white guys."

"And I'm saying that as a 57-year-old white guy." He quickly adds: "But I use technology. I've got three BlackBerrys. I've got a Kindle." He promises that the RNC's Internet division -- headed by Cyrus Krohn, formerly of Microsoft and Yahoo -- will get more resources, calling it "a big priority for the RNC." There's speculation that Duncan wants to run for a second term, though he says he hasn't made up his mind.

Chip Saltsman, who served as chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party and managed Huckabee's presidential campaign, is also weighing a run at the RNC chairmanship. At 40, he's the youngest in the group of names that are being tossed around, which include former senator and actor Fred Thompson, 66, and Katon Dawson, 52, current head of the South Carolina GOP. Saltsman, too, agrees with Finn. "We can't afford to be looked at as the party of the rich old white guy," he says. Like Duncan, he wants to place more emphasis on the party's Web strategy. "There's still a big hole in our game plan, and that's the Internet," he says.

But the Internet is not a panacea.

"This is not just about making the Web central to your strategy. This is about ideas. This is about using the Internet to promote your ideas and build a movement," Finn says. In a span of 30 minutes, she says the word "movement" no fewer than 14 times.

"In this Internet era, it's not enough to run a campaign, you need to lead a movement -- that's what Obama did," she continues. "If you look at their site, their online videos, their online ads, everything they did, it wasn't about 'me, myself and I.' It was about 'we' and 'us.' "

From the moment Obama launched his site, Ruffini took screen shots of what he thought were interesting pages and archived them on his Flickr account. "The breadth of Obama's site was extraordinary," Ruffini says. "The Web site highlighted maybe 10 unique programs in every battleground state -- and this differed from state to state." Later, he points to Obama's record online haul during his 21-month campaign: a half-billion dollars raised from 3 million online donors, 13 million e-mail addresses collected. In a blog posting, he argues that Obama's popular-vote win is partly due to his appeal to young voters, whom he won 66 percent to 32 percent over McCain, exit polls showed.

"It was only eight years ago that Bush and Gore were tied with the youth vote," Ruffini says. "Now young voters are the backbone of Obama's grassroots support."

"And we need to win them back," Finn says. "We must. But for a lot of these young voters who grew up during the Bush era, what they've heard and what they've perceived is that the Republican Party is a party of being against things, rather than a party of solutions and inclusion, rather than a party of individual freedom. We need to correct that. We need to rebuild the party and we'll do that online."