Bottoms Up!

Disruptive technologies seem to be all over the place these days... especially in the blogosphere, where political bloggers are making their voices heard, and changing the rules of the game. Joe Trippi has an interesting take on what he calls the "bottom-up" phenomenon on MSNBC.com:

We live in a top-down society, where information is power, and where those at the top have most of the information and hold most of the power. This is true within the institutions of government, political parties, the media, corporations, and the military.

But something dramatic is happening: A giant wave of change is gathering more force each day. Power is shifting to the bottom, spawned by advances in technology and the decentralized bottom-up nature of the Internet...

If information is power, then the Internet which distributes information democratically to anyone who has access to it, is no longer distributing just information— it's distributing power. And in a top-down society, it's empowering the bottom. Put more simply—in America, it's empowering the American people...

Today’s "USA Today" includes an interesting story on how technology and the Internet is affecting our knowledge about the war in Iraq: “With cell phones and the Internet, the military’s ability to censor what is reported home (by our troops) has sharply diminished.”