Net Roots

	Long before Barack Obama won the White House on the shoulders of an unprecedented online grassroots organization, a loose affiliation of bloggers and online organizations known as the progressive "netroots" dismissed by traditional journalists and pundits as naïve and ineffectual was spearheading a revolution in American politics that may well define the coming political era. Netroots tells their story, weaving together a range of evidence and arguments to bust conventional myths about the objectives and accomplishments of what has become an online movement. Netroots explains why the online left is better positioned than the right to take advantage of the decentralized or “open source" nature of the Internet – the key to the new medium – just as others through history succeeded in revolutionizing politics by unleashing the hidden political potential of television, radio, the telegraph and inexpensive printing. Despite how they are often portrayed, the netroots are not particularly ideological; rather they are a self-selected elite engaged in a power struggle with conventional journalists and the Democratic Party establishment, whom they often hold in as much disregard as conservative Republicans. A range of metrics of political effectiveness and the reports of bloggers themselves suggest they are making uneven but real progress toward their objectives: to win elections, drive media narratives about politics, and build virtual and real communities of activists. Netroots documents these achievements and demystifies this emerging political force through an engaging analysis told with an eye on history and in the bloggers own words.