The Internet and social networking sites, which Barack Obama exploited to mount a historic takeover of power in Washington in 2008, have become the technological weapons of choice in the 2010 Philippine presidential campaign.

Together with text messaging and television, these powerful communication tools of the digital age are radically transforming the making of the next president.

Facebook, Twitter and avatars will soon be as commonplace as the computerized voting machines being set up for the elections in May.

This does not surprise many Filipinos. A few years ago, after the impeachment of President Joseph Estrada broke down in the Senate, thousands of protestors took to the streets within hours to mount a people power revolt ignited by text messages. Estrada?s government fell within days.

Technology has warped the speed of social and political change. Combined with television and the cell phone, the Internet has geometrically increased the power of the mass media to reshape political and social institutions, permanently altering the way we live, work and govern ourselves.

The ability of the mass media to elevate the level of political discourse?when it chooses to?has inspired political scientists to propose a Philippine version of the rigorous American presidential primary debates for our 2010 elections.

Presidential candidates are now saturating television with commercials. They are becoming masters of the craft. It is just a short step away to luring them to participate in a gruelling series of nationally televised debates to discuss substantive issues?definitely a better alternative to buying expensive commercials.

Kennedy started it

Since the US presidential election of 1960, which John F. Kennedy won with his skillful use of television, the medium has emerged as the dominant political weapon of election campaigns.

No less profoundly, social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter have also begun to empower a cultural and political movement that in 2008 converged in the Internet to sweep Obama to the White House.

The media are now able to compress time and fast-forward us to the future while ostensibly chronicling the past. They report events but they can also influence them. They write the first draft of history but they can also make history. They mirror social revolutions but they can also trigger them.

Technology has become so pervasive it is fueling change all over the world?in radical upheavals, as well as peaceful revolutions.

People power USA

?The world now runs on Internet time,? proclaimed Intel founder Andy Grove. And it will not be long before technology merges with the elections of 2010 to radically alter the way we elect our presidents.

Armed with grassroots grit and the high-tech weapons of the social networking age, millions of young volunteers took the reins of power in Washington in November 2008 in a struggle that rewrote the book on how to win elections in the Internet age.

Obama turbocharged traditional campaign practices by adding the hi-tech tools of the Internet. He showed how technology could be used effectively as a catalyst for change.

To use the language of the computer age, the Obama campaign was ?wired.? Computers connected cell phones, PDAs and laptops into a social networking maze that could exchange information ?at the speed of thought.?

Silicon Valley nerds

The nerve center of this lightning-fast communication network was my.barackobama.com, which Silicon Valley whiz kids had put together as a social networking hub to give volunteers an array of options to participate in the campaign, from registering voters to starting their own ?affinity groups.?

Campaign workers could download news to stay current, scroll through Obama?s bio, or start a phone brigade to demolish negative ads. Users had a choice of 12 Obama ring tones that screamed ?Yes We Can!? when people called.

The result was a highly decentralized organization that operated from the bottom up and kept close to the voters. Staying in touch via text messages and electronic mail, they fashioned a new model of political warfare based on the blinding speed of the Internet.

The campaign masterminds?like the computer technologies they employed?came mostly from Silicon Valley?s young millionaire entrepreneurs who transplanted the tricks they learned in their start-up companies. They came in droves to support Obama.

Obama fed his troops with battlefield intelligence to keep them on their toes. A bank of 48 computer processors in campaign headquarters analyzed and cross-tabulated census demographics, consumer marketing data, and precinct-level voter profiles to create a real-time picture of the emerging American voter.

At the head of this effort was Ken Strasma, the Democrats? demographic genius. Strasma?s computer-driven profiles generated thousands of voter indicators?long strings of data that he called ?demographic DNA??and strands of correlations like what kinds of pets SUV owners preferred.

Banking on interviews done by ground forces knocking on doors, Strasma generated options on which voter clusters were best to target or were most inclined to shift support to Obama.

No political army like it had been built before. Obama?s insurgents were the hi-tech precursors of the social and political changes sweeping the world today, including the Philippines.

An avatar!

One of the more fascinating episodes of CNN?s coverage of the American presidential election happened when anchor Wolf Blitzer ?beamed up? the image of a female correspondent?an avatar!?from the streets of Chicago to CNN studios to deliver her report. The fictional ?Star Trek,? which first brought to television audiences the possibility of transporting people across space, was now reality?well, virtual reality.

The episode was intended to demonstrate how modern technology had changed election coverage. Earlier, CNN had shown an interactive map of the United States?accurate down to the street level?showing how American voters were shifting preferences in ?real time.?

The predictive ability of the opinion polls, powered by the huge processing capabilities of modern computers, has raised ethical questions about how much voter preferences might be swayed by the bandwagon effect.

When CNN declared Obama the president-elect on election night, voting had not yet ended in Alaska. But all of Alaska?s voters would not have affected the results one way or the other, CNN said.

Technology also influenced the results in many significant ways. For the first time in presidential elections, the media were able to ?fact-check? claims made by the candidates in a matter of hours.

Hillary Clinton?s attempt to make her trip to Bosnia bolster her foreign policy expertise backfired when news footage showed her walking at the airport, waving to a welcoming crowd instead of ?ducking bullets,? as she had recounted. She immediately apologized for her bad memory.

The media?s ability to show a candidate?s grasp?or lack of it?of important issues also hobbled Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin?s rising popularity in just three interviews.

The American presidential election of 2008 proved beyond doubt that in order to win, candidates had to be adept in playing not only the political game but also the media and technology game.

So will the presidential candidates in the elections of 2010.

(Tell us what you think. E-mail us at mibc2006@gmail.com. Your opinion counts. The author is chief executive of the Institute for Policy Research and Strategic Studies, a private sector think tank.)