In my coverage of the Senator Lieberman's reelection struggle I frequently used the term netroots to describe those bloggers campaigning against Lieberman. I received a number of inquiries from readers asking the meaning of the term.
In his latest On Language column, William Safire explains the term more thoroughly than I did in responding to those readers:
''You can hear the netroots screaming," wrote Michael Barone in his generally conservative opinion blog on the U.S. News Web site, putting into context a portion of a poll hailed by bloggers doubting the wisdom of going into Iraq.
On the other side of the political divide, The Nation's Web site cited the unabashedly liberal Jerome Armstrong's praise of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee "for reading blogs and being ready to work with the netroots."
From these citations and a few of the million and a half others in a Google search, the word netroots has a left-of-center connotation. The earliest use I can find is in a Jan. 15, 1993, message on an e-mail list of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from an "rmcdon" at the University of California at San Diego, apparently complaining about an internal shake-up: "Too bad there's no netroots organization that can demand more than keyboard accountability from those who claim to be acting on behalf of the 'greater good.'" (Lesson: Anything you crank out on a computer can come back to haunt you centuries later.)
Popularizer of the term — unaware of the obscure, earlier citation when he used it — was the aforementioned (great old word) Armstrong on his blog, MyDD, on Dec. 18, 2002, as he went to work on the presidential campaign of Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont. The political activist, whose master's thesis was titled "Applied Linguistics and Conflict Resolution," headlined his entry "Netroots for Dean in 2004" and told Internet readers where to get the first inkling of a groundswell: "O.K., so Dean is still polling 1 to 4 percent nationally, so what. Look at the netroots."
Armstrong explains: "Meetup, the signing-up over the Internet to meet in person with other like-minded activists, epitomized to me the whole netroots to grass roots type of political activism that the Internet enabled. The morpheme grounded the meaning of the word in something that was already political jargon." (He is obviously a student of linguistics; a morpheme is an indivisible, meaningful element of a word, like net in "network," substituting for the first syllable of grass roots, the word in century-old political jargon.)
He insists that the word he helped make famous, and which will soon be in most new dictionaries, does not have a slant: "The term netroots is ideologically and politically neutral." I differ with him on that, but the political meaning of the preceding grass roots, which is now neutral, also had an early political coloration. In July 1912, as former President Theodore Roosevelt broke with the Republican Party to start an independent campaign, McClure's Magazine wrote: "From the Roosevelt standpoint, it was a campaign from the 'grass roots up.' The voter was the thing." At the August 1912 "Bull Moose" convention that nominated Roosevelt, Sen. Albert Beveridge orated: "This party comes from the grass roots. It has grown from the soil of the people's hard necessities."
I agree with Safire. In my usage, netroots refers to the left side of the blogosphere.
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