SAMIZDAT

THE BLOGOSPHERE--Under Soviet domination, a lot of the dissident groups in occupied-countries (and within the Soviet Union) would publish little circulars to pass-on information and ideas. They just got passed, hand-to-hand, being hidden-away from the secret police. If you got caught with them, you could go to the gulags, maybe work in a coal or a uranium-mine. In Cold War Czechoslovakia, this was even done with the plays of Vaclav Havel; people would copy them by-hand and disseminate them to as many other "cells" as-possible. Havel's plays were usually performed in living-rooms! The blogs serve the same function. They create networks of information between concerned citizens, a social-patchwork where many other networks have fallen. Welcome to the American Velvet Revolution, this is bigger than the invention of movable-type in Middle Ages Europe. The blogs are samizdat. And did you hear? South America is considering creating their own-version of a continental-wide union like the EU.