I’m sure you’ve already voted or you wouldn’t be reading this, so I won’t nudge you about that. Onward, then, to all things digital and how it’s changed presidential campaigns. On Sunday, the New York Times has an interesting piece by Daniel Carr and Brian Stelter, called “Campaigns in a Web 2.0 World,” that explores how the 2008 presidential campaign has blurred the lines between old (broadcast) media and new (Internet) media. The authors remind us just how much has changed in four years:

“Many of the media outlets influencing the 2008 election simply were not around in 2004. YouTube did not exist, and Facebook barely reached beyond the Ivy League. There was no Huffington Post to encourage citizen reporters, so Mr. Obama’s comment about voters clinging to guns or religion may have passed unnoticed. These sites and countless others have redefined how many Americans get their political news.”

The article goes on to note how Obama’s campaign has made savvy use of social networking sites, such as Facebook. Yet, this has not meant usurping the importance of traditional networks in breaking election news, here they site the Katie Couric interview with Sarah Palin.

I’ll be part of this blending of old and new media today, as I take photos of various polling places, share them through Flickr and Twitter, and then attend a party hosted by NPR tonight in Harlem, where lots of other people will be blogging and sharing election-day photos. What about you? How is Web 2.0 changing the way you relate to this campaign?

These articles from June’s Atlantic are a couple months old now, but they’re still interesting reads in the run-up to the election:

• The Amazing Money Machine: How Silicon Valley and the Internet shaped Obama’s campaign. The key argument:
  

  In a sense, Obama represents a triumph of campaign-finance reform. He has not, of course, gotten the money out of politics, as many proponents of reform may have wished, and he will likely forgo public financing if he becomes the nominee. But he has realized the reformers’ other big goal of ending the system whereby a handful of rich donors control the political process. He has done this not by limiting money but by adding much, much more of it—democratizing the system by flooding it with so many new contributors that their combined effect dilutes the old guard to the point that it scarcely poses any threat.

• HisSpace: Previous communications technology revolutions have shaped how Presidents govern. Here’s a look at how the internet is influencing government today and, in particular, how this might matter in an Obama Presidency. The historical angle, in particular, is interesting food for thought:
  

  Improvements to the printing press helped Andrew Jackson form and organize the Democratic Party

  […]

  Abraham Lincoln became a national celebrity, according to the historian Allen Guelzo’s new book, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America, when transcripts of those debates were reprinted nationwide in newspapers, which were just then reaching critical mass in distribution beyond the few Eastern cities where they had previously flourished

  […]

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt used radio to make his case for a dramatic redefinition of government itself, quickly mastering the informal tone best suited to the medium.

  […]

  And of course John F. Kennedy famously rode into the White House thanks in part to the first televised presidential debate in U.S. history, in which his keen sense of the medium’s visual impact, plus a little makeup, enabled him to fashion the look of a winner (especially when compared with a pale and haggard Richard Nixon).

  […]

  The communications revolution under way today involves the Internet, of course, and if Barack Obama eventually wins the presidency, it will be in no small part because he has understood the medium more fully than his opponents do.

Contexts just wrapped up the first phase of an online roundtable titled, “The Social Significance of Barack Obama.” We solicited short statements from six sociologists on the significance of Obama’s candidacy and potential Presidency, published them online & then held a group discussion about the statements in the comments.

The roundtable is now public & open for comments. One of the topics that hasn’t been discussed much so far has been the role of technology & the internet in Obama’s campaign and in modern politics generally. In fact, I might just head over over there and chime in about this myself… Come join us & encourage others to join in as well!

Sarah Lai Stirland writing for Wired magazine calls this Democratic Convention the “techiest” (her term) convention ever.   That’s not hard to believe as lots of people bypass the talking-head-pundits on the broadcast networks and seeking out their own streaming video of the convention (as Jon described yesterday), or looking for outside-the-mainstream commentary from their favorite bloggers at the convention.    All this makes me think about Todd Gitlin’s famous book, The Whole World is Watching (1983), about the role of the mass media in the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  But, the world has changed since 1968…. more...

Last night I watched the DNC live online and I had a very odd thought: the politics of watching this online was getting in the way of my enjoyment…of a political convention? Well, given the fact that conventions focus more on personalities & life stories than political issues, it shouldn’t be surprising that most of my political thoughts had to do with two technology issues surrounding the online broadcast: Microsoft’s Silverlight technology (being used to stream the video online) and high speed internet policies in the US.

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