I think something dramatic is happening to our national zeitgeist (beyond the more obvious changes of political realignment). In particular I think the country is starting to obtain what I would call 'meta-viral awareness,' and I think that the wider implications of this shift need to be addressed and discussed by the netroots.

Benedict Anderson argues that the printing press technology created the nation state by facilitating what he calls "imagined communities" as a new cultural category aligned with the state--a sudden, uncanny, recognition of "us." This awareness is "imagined" in the sense that people do not directly apprehend these new communities as localized wholes, yet the mental projection derived by imagining one's co-consumers of mass produced media creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that it gives birth to the nation state as an operative social construct.

I would argue that what we're seeing emerge suddenly and forcefully out of our cultural landscape is a new twist on Anderson's old notion of the "imagined community." Instead of "imagined communities" we now have "imagined zeitgeists," in other words people suddenly have awareness of their own intimate connection to wider flows--and violent disruptions--of public discourse. People's understanding of community now has a micro-temporal dimension (i.e. 'community' can emerge from sudden viral flashes of action) and we view our own token actions as part of much larger weather patterns which can feedback in certain key moments (a sort of harmonic resonance version of Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point).