ABSTRACT
Neither the Gavin Newsom campaign announcement, the news item about the creepy Meg Whitman avatar, nor Tim Pawlenty’s crowdsourcing would have made any sense to readers just a few years ago. In the 1990s, the term “new media” was just coming into our vocabulary. Blogging, social networking, RSS feeds, vlogs, Web 2.0, meetups, avatars, crowdsourcing-all of these terms were unknown a decade ago. As late as the 2004 presidential election, new media did not include YouTube, which had not been invented yet, and Facebook and other social media sites, which were still in their infancy and centered around college campuses, not the wider commercial or political world (see Appendix B for a timeline of signifi cant technology milestones in twenty-fi rst century campaigning).
