ABSTRACT
They have been called “dueling EKGs” (Caro, 2008a), “squigglies” (Davies, 2008), the “crawler,” “real time response,” “surfing the squiggle,” and CNN’s “thingamajig” (Shearer, 2008). In Australia, the term used is “The Worm.” Call it what you will, most people who watched the 2008 presidential debates now have a passing understanding of dial testing. This chapter examines the use of the dials in the 2008 presidential election and explains how the technology affected the way users and viewers processed the debate and the way journalists covered them, returning the people’s voice to a place of prominence in the process of choosing a president.
