DAVID CARR ESSAY

In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Face book, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face.
Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear him out. A junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin but impressive resume, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.
He wondered if social networking, with its tremendous communication capabilities and aggressive database development, might help him beat the overwhelming odds facing him.
“It was like a guy in a garage who was thinking of taking on the biggest names in the business,” Mr. Andreessen recalled. “He was clearly super smart and very entrepreneurial, a person who saw the world and the status quo as malleable.”
And as it turned out, President-elect Barack Obama was right.
Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bringing together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, it created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.
As a result, when he takes office, Mr. Obama will have not just a political base, but a database, millions of names of supporters who can be engaged almost instantly. And there’s every reason to believe that he will use that network. His e-mail message to supporters on election night included the line, “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” The incoming administration is already open for business on the Web at Change.gov.
“Other politicians I have met with are always impressed by the Web and surprised by what it could do,” Mr. Andreessen said, “but their interest sort of ended in how much money you could raise.” Mr. Obama, by contrast, “was the first politician I dealt with who understood that the technology was a given and that it could be used in new ways.”
The juxtaposition of a networked, opensource campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications. Specialinterest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without the television networks.
And while many people think President-elect Obama is a gift to the Democratic Party, he could actually hasten its demise. Political parties supply a brand, campaign workers, money and relationships, all things that Mr. Obama already has.
All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama, can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero. And instead of the constant polling that has been a standard tool of presidential governance, the Obama White House can use the Web to measure voter attitudes.
Now Mr. Obama’s 20-month conversation with the electorate enters a new phase. There is a sense of ownership on the part of the people who worked to elect him.
“People will continue to expect a conversation, a two-way relationship that is a give and take,” said Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, which helped conceive and put into effect Obama’s digital outreach.
“Any politician who fails to recognize that we are in a post-party era with a new political ecology in which connecting like minds and forming a movement is so much easier will not be around long,” said Andrew Rasiej, the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference about the intersection of politics and technology. “Yes, we have met Big Brother, the one who is always watching. And Big Brother is us.”