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One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet.

“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.

She spoke Friday about how politics and Web 2.0 intersect on a panel with Joe Trippi, a political consultant, and Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign -– which was run by Mr. Trippi –- was groundbreaking in its use of the Internet to raise small amounts of money from hundreds of thousands of people. But by using interactive Web 2.0 tools, Mr. Obama’s campaign changed the way politicians organize supporters, advertise to voters, defend against attacks and communicate with constituents.

Mr. Obama used the Internet to organize his supporters in a way that would have in the past required an army of volunteers and paid organizers on the ground, Mr. Trippi said.

“The tools changed between 2004 and 2008. Barack Obama won every single caucus state that matters, and he did it because of those tools, because he was able to move thousands of people to organize.”

There has also been a sea change in fact-checking, with citizens using the Internet to find past speeches that prove a politician wrong and then using the Web to alert their fellow citizens.

The John McCain campaign, for example, originally said that Governor Sarah Palin opposed the so-called bridge to nowhere in Alaska, Ms. Huffington said. “Online there was an absolutely obsessive campaign to prove that wrong,” she said, and eventually the campaign stopped repeating it.

“In 2004, trust me, they would have gone on repeating it, because the echo chamber would not have been as facile,” Ms. Huffington said.

The Internet also changes the way politicians govern. Mr. Newsom learned that last year when he ran for re-election. He showed up at a rally and didn’t see the usual crowd. His aides told him the audience was made up of his Facebook friends. “I said, ‘What’s Facebook?’” Mr. Newsom recalled.

These days, Mr. Newsom is “obsessed with Facebook.” It strengthens his connection with his constituents and their connection with the causes they care about, he said.

The constant exposure can, of course, turn against politicians.

Ms. Huffington’s “off the bus” team of 10,000 citizen journalists caught candidates saying things that embarrassed them later, such as Mr. Obama’s “guns and religion” remark. Now, she said, “there is no off-the-record fundraiser.”

Mr. Newsom said he is fearful of the constant need to watch his tongue. “I have to watch myself singing, ‘I left my heart in San Francisco’ on YouTube and it can’t go away. I am desperate to get it to go away,” he said dryly.

“There will be a lot of collateral damage coming to grips with the fact that we’re in a reality TV series, ‘Politics 24/7,’” Mr. Newsom said.

That’s a good thing, Mr. Trippi said. “This medium demands authenticity, and television for the most part demanded fake. Authenticity is something politicians haven’t been used to.”

He predicted that this real-time Internet contact with constituents will also change the way the president of the United States governs. He recently proposed that Mr. Obama start a Web site called MyWhiteHouse.gov to talk with citizens. (Mr. Obama just started a different site, Change.gov, on Thursday to keep in touch with people during the transition.)

“When Congress refuses to go with his agenda, it’s not going to be just the president” they oppose, Mr. Trippi said. It will be the president and his huge virtual network of citizens.

“Just like Kennedy brought in the television presidency, I think we’re about to see the first wired, connected, networked presidency,” Mr. Trippi said.

Television has never found an idea it can't exploit. It doesn't matter what it is. Anything that can be made more lively, is more lively. Tweak it, make it more fun, and we will watch. And we will like it. And we will justify it.

Some say we are in the early days of the American version of the fall of the Roman Empire. Therefore, is television the electronic version of the Roman Circus? The events at the Coliseum might be cruel and inhumane, but those leaving the arena sure had a good time. Taste and consequence be damned. "That Christian sure was fast, best I've seen in weeks! Let's go to the baths."

Voters in North Carolina have received calls accusing Mr. Obama of opposing legislation aimed at protecting aborted fetuses that show signs of life, a position the call states is “at odds even with John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.”

“Please vote,” the call continues, “vote for candidates that share our values.”

The 2003 measure in Illinois that Mr. Obama opposed was virtually identical to federal legislation that Mr. Bush signed into law in 2002 after it was overwhelmingly passed by Congress. But Mr. Obama and other opponents of the Illinois bill have said that the state already had a law protecting aborted fetuses born alive. The Illinois State Medical Society, which also opposed the legislation, said the bill would increase civil liability for doctors and interfere with their patient relationships.

In preparation for the presidential election, 15 Florida counties complied with a new edict to abandon their touch-screen voting machines, and switched to optical scan machines, which leave a physical record of each voter's ballot in case of a recount. But this August in Palm Beach County, a close local primary where 3,400 ballots went uncounted - followed by a series of recounts - led officials to worry and re-test the optical scan voting machines.



"We feel pretty good about the machines," said Jennifer Krell Davis, the communications director for the Florida secretary of state, who said most had had a test-run in this year's presidential primaries.



But just in case, "All of the supervisors have been encouraged to plan as if there is definitely going to be a county-wide recount," she said.

Some observers say that the main problem may simply be delays, and depressed turnout, as voters navigate the new machines.



"To me it's the possibility of the long lines that's the issue," said Susan McManus a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

If
I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th
century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels
would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom.
Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things
happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment,
rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who
were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society
forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage
something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched
Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch
Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as
a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might
otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's
only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're
starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a
crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take
advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

Now,
this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street
corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be
careful there after dark." But it's something society knows
without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source
where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're
certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in
starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may
not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to
try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the
authorities who might have it now."

Maybe
this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of
social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't
pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that
this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's
illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone,
with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough
of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough
of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you
couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago

So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath
that question was another thought, this one not a question but an
observation. In this same conversation
with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and
as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers.
Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did
you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get
off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I
saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every
half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at
my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I
had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is
none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel
of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's
not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your
basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal
experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if
Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.