David Weinberger spits into the "Internet is an echo chamber" wind (or echo chamber).

The Internet as a whole presents the broadest range of opinion, belief, feeling and creativity in the history of civilization. If you are not on the Net, you are limited to a diminishing selection of outlets expressing a diminishing range of views...

No, if you want to see a real echo chamber, open up your daily newspaper or turn on your TV. There you'll find a narrow, self-reinforcing set of views.

As I've said before, I agree with him. My diagnosis here is that people are confusing correlation with causation. That is, they are confusing the fact that the Dean campaign was an echo chamber (Dr. Weinberger may disagree with me on that one) and it also used the Internet with a causal relationship between the two.

I think that the Dean campaign was an echo chamber because of propensity of people with those political beliefs to tune out the fact that much of the country disagrees with them. They think, "everyone I know agrees with me. So, if we can get together and overcome the corporate/media/right-wing conspiracy, we will win."

I also think that the Dean campaign made a start at using the Internet in politics, although I think everyone is at the early stage of the learning curve on that. But the Internet does not create an echo chamber. Walter Russell Mead raised the issue of the "neo-elite" being out of touch with the American masses without any reference to the Internet.

I think that the challenge for Internet politics in the long run is that there may be a mismatch between the Internet's decentralized spontaneous order and the mass-market industrial-era party politics that exists today. My reading of Doc Searls' essay, which I linked to here, is that it starts to tease out some of that mismatch. A conversation about that mismatch is what I think is called for at this point.