But I do like your sentence “But the true essence of open government is adopting a workplace culture that accepts the changed environment of media and adapts to it” precisely because you mention “culture” and not just technology.

PS – people who use New Media to lie are just as culpable as people who use Old Media to lie.

Can you explain the process by which you came up with this insight? One minute I’m reading about Microsoft parties and the next I see this thoughtful blog entry. A rather startling interconnectiveness. Does Microsoft add some special pixie dust during celebrations?

It is becoming increasingly clear that Marshall McLuhan was on to something so many years ago. The notion of society moving from passive re-tribalization to active is something that many are now grappling with. Government, the media, business. It’s as if a third dimension has been opened in a 2-dimensional world. Some deny that the Web 2.0 dimension exists. Others think that it is dangerous (rock and roll dangerous).

You’ve hit the nail on the head because dealing with social networking is so no command and control And, whereas many complain about the seeming lack of substance in the twitterverse and on Facebook, social networking is beginning to break the truthiness of the narrative approach of the legacy broadcast approach. We can break through the stereotypes and sound bytes.

And, I have to say that journalism is faced with an interesting phenomenon. Standards have degraded to cable news shout fests. Yet, as the accuracy of news reports dimish, the press are quick to dismiss social network content as substandard. Or overly sensational. So, they’ve lost that franchise.