Larry Lessig

For the famously gloomy prophet Larry Lessig, two blessed events in 2003 have forced a smiling reappraisal: the birth of his child and the growth of the blogosphere. In conversation it seemed he could not speak of one procreation without alluding to the other. In politics and in culture, in the Lessig view, after a more than a century of mass media and 50 years of television, we have stumbled on a technology that prompts more, not less, citizen engagement. In the 2004 campaign underway, he observed, "there will be a change that comes from the fact that people are participating in the construction of the political story around them. That in my view will be the most important political event in the last hundred years."