ABSTRACT
The 2008 presidential campaign will be remembered for a number of historic firsts. For media scholars, the most important of these may well be the increased use of social and interactive media. The media landscape changed dramatically in the four years between the 2004 and 2008 presidential election cycles with the introduction of popular social networking sites on the Internet. YouTube, the video-sharing service, Facebook, the popular social networking site, and Twitter, the micro-blogging service, were created during that period. MySpace, which was less than one year old in 2004, emerged four years later as one of the top-rated sites on the Internet in terms of user traffic.
