Netroots
Term for political activism organized through blogs and other online media
Netroots is a term coined in 2002 by Jerome Armstrong to describe political activism organized through blogs and other online media, including wikis and social network services. The word is a portmanteau of Internet and grassroots, reflecting the technological innovations that set netroots techniques apart from other forms of political participation. In the United States, the term is used mainly in left-leaning circles.
The term necessarily overlaps with the related ideas of e-democracy, open politics, and participatory democracy—all of which are somewhat more specific, better defined, and more widely accepted. Netroots outreach is a campaign-oriented activity that uses the web for complementing more traditional campaign activities, such as collaborating with grassroots activism that involves get out the vote and organizing through interconnecting local and regional efforts, such as Meetup, and the netroots-grassroots coalition that propelled the election of Howard Dean to the DNC Chair in January, 2005.
At times, the term netroots is used interchangeably with the term blogosphere, though the blogosphere is considered a subset of netroots in that blogosphere describes just the online community of blogs, where netroots includes that plus a number of larger (mainly liberal) on-line outposts such as MoveOn, Media Matters for America and Think Progress.
Advocates claim that the essential quality of the netroots is its flatness and inter-linked web connectiveness—that it constitutes communication points that reach out to influence traditional media, but is not directed outward from any one point. Through events like a blogswarm, the netroots displays non-hierarchical and decentralized features.
American origins of term
The first popular use of the term in its modern definition is Netroots for Howard Dean, by Jerome Armstrong in December 2002 on MyDD. Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi credits the short lived success of his then-client Howard Dean to their listening and taking the lead from netroots activity.
The netroots also played a key role in drafting General Wesley Clark into the 2004 Presidential campaign.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Netroots” as term for political activism organized through blogs and other online media. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as term for political activism organized through blogs and other online media. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q8273220. The first chronological checks are 2002, 2005 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Netroots” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.