KEY POINTS:
On March 5 this year, an ad appeared on the spectacularly popular video-sharing website YouTube. The person who posted it identified him or herself as ParkRidge47 - the place where Hillary Clinton grew up and her year of birth - but the video did not appear to have originated anywhere near that presidential candidate's camp.
An updated version of Ridley Scott's famous Apple Macintosh ad from 1984, it took the Orwell-inspired original, in which armies of grey-faced workers are lectured to from a vast television screen by a fearsomely Nazi-like dictator, and replaced the face and voice of Big Brother with those of Hillary Clinton.
"One month ago I began a conversation with all of you," she says from the screen, addressing the masses she refers to as "hard-working". A digital subtitle appears across her face - "This is our conversation" - before a colourfully clad sprinter races up to the screen and smashes it with a mallet.
The ad sought to show how little like an actual conversation Hillary's one-way mode of address is, and its brilliance was that the form and the content were beautifully entwined: the anonymous posting was itself a way of smashing the old order of demagoguery and spin by surreptitiously democratic digital means. The ad, entitled Vote Different, ended by transforming the Apple logo into an O, underneath which was written: barackobama.com.
Negative advertising is a popular sport in American politics (in 2000, George Bush did it subliminally, by flashing the word "Rats" over Al Gore's promises). Yet the new "1984" ad, while conceptually ingenious and technically accomplished, hardly seemed in keeping with Barack Obama's gentlemanly modus operandi. Where had it come from? No one seemed to know.
The Obama campaign denied any involvement, and Clinton's claimed to be equally in the dark.
Within days, the Vote Different ad had, as the digitally savvy world likes to say, "gone viral". It was picked up by progressive blogs, by conservative blogs, by advertising blogs - and then by the mainstream media.
The San Francisco Chronicle hailed it as "a watershed moment in 21st-century media and political advertising" and every time the ad received any kind of coverage from then on, it would send viewers to YouTube to look at it.
As of last week, it had been seen by more than 3 million people and discussed ad infinitum, making an ad that was disseminated for free and apparently independently of a political campaign far more effective than any official ad made by the presidential candidates in the 2008 race so far.
ParkRidge47, who remained anonymous, became an instant YouTube celebrity, a poster child for the idea that anyone can have a widely heard voice.
Barack Obama was asked about the ad on Larry King Live.
"In some ways," he said, "it's the democratisation of the campaign process, but it's not something we had anything to do with or were aware of and, frankly, given what it looks like, we don't have the technical capacity to create something like this. It's pretty extraordinary."
As it turned out, that couldn't have been further from the truth. The ad was made by a young political nerd in his living room one Sunday afternoon, using an editing programme called Final Cut Studio on his MacBook.
Phil de Vellis, aka ParkRidge47, was outed by Arianna Huffington, the influential editor of online magazine Huffington Post.
De Vellis, it transpired, was a senior strategist at Blue State Digital, an internet consulting firm that had been involved in Barack Obama's online campaign, and he had composed the ad without their knowledge.
Not wanting to get his employers or his preferred candidate into trouble, he resigned from his job as soon as his identity was revealed.
Despite his sadness over this particular turn of events, de Vellis was keen to encourage others to do the same. No high-end equipment was involved, he said when interviewed: "This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens."
The current campaign has already been repeatedly referred to as the YouTube election, and candidates are all trying to keep up.
During the last presidential election, bloggers were the new digital phenomenon; now YouTube has taken precedence, and it has the potential for much more dramatic effect.
The site was founded in February 2005, not long after George Bush had won a second term. (In November last year it was bought by Google.)
Because its content is largely unregulated it has come into its own by giving citizens an outlet and a function. Where blogs offer commentary, video-sharing provides a way for anyone to judge a candidate for themselves, with their own eyes.
Though the site is not a political one, its rogue influence was clear before the race began.
Last (northern) summer, George Allen, the Republican Senator from Virginia, publicly addressed a campaign operative from the opposing side who was videotaping him (as is traditional) in the hope of finding negative material for an ad.
He called the campaign worker, who was of Indian descent, "macaca".
The racist epithet flew on to YouTube in no time - why bother to spend time and money making an ad when you can bring down a politician instantly with his own gun? Allen lost his campaign for re-election.
Now YouTube has teamed up with CNN to host a debate with all the Democratic presidential candidates on July 23. Instead of the usual format of presidential debates, which involves carefully vetted people in suits asking questions that have been prepared long in advance, the YouTube CNN debate, which will be moderated by CNN's star anchorman Anderson Cooper, is inviting all American citizens to submit questions via video, and to be "creative" in their concoctions.
Among the questions already posted are: "Hey, Hillary, who's going to run the White House? You or Bill?"; "Will you allow congressional hearings into alien landings?"; and "Which is more dangerous, alcohol or marijuana?"
Keen that the debate should not be limited to YouTube aficionados, the website's news and politics editor Steve Grove encouraged viewers to go out with their cameras, seek people who do not have access to the internet (a quarter of Americans don't) and videotape their questions.
Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of TechPresident.com, a new website designed to track the 2008 candidates' use of the internet, feels the organisers of the debate aren't going far enough. Why, he wondered when I spoke to him, do the questions still have to be filtered through CNN?
"You wouldn't have guessed, would you, that so many interesting controversies turn on video," says Michael Kinsley, founding editor of the online magazine Slate.
"You think a quote's a quote, but no: what can be shown has far more impact than what is merely said."
The media research firm PQ Media, which has reported that campaigns spent US$29 million ($37 billion) on web ads and email marketing in 2004, now estimates that the 2008 figure could reach US$80 million. But even that figure is perhaps less relevant than the advent of the random element - the impact of the web activity that candidates don't pay for.
Rasiej thinks it's a mistake to suppose that only viral videos can have an effect. He suggests, rather, that if one person who lives next to a lake whose high-water mark is 6m lower than it was 20 years ago makes a video showing that and saying he'll vote for the candidate with the best environmental policy, all he has to do is send it to 10 friends, who'll then pass it on, to make an impact.
"What the internet has done," says Rasiej, encapsulating the change, "is it's taken the conversations over the backyard fence, or around the water cooler, and put them on steroids."
Now every citizen can be an advertiser. You can see, at the click of a mouse, John McCain's or Mitt Romney's trail of self contradictions or flip-flops.
In fact, YouTube may well put Michael Moore out of business - documented events and their instant dissemination could simply move too fast for him to keep up.
Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Centre at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the country's leading experts on advertising in political campaigns, considers this development and says: "There's a saying in the United States, 'The press is free for anyone who owns one'.
"That's no longer true. You still have to have some income, because you have to have a computer, but the cost of getting access to the public has dropped dramatically.
"When we moved to mass channels of communication, the ability of the individual to affect politics dropped, and to some extent that's been regained now. It changes the rules, and I think it's healthy."
Is YouTube the ultimate form of democracy, then, a means by which voters can have their say and politicians can really listen? Or is it something to be feared, a kind of anarchic 24-hour surveillance?
Last month, just as Hillary Clinton was asking her web followers to vote on which of her preferred tunes should provide her campaign theme song, a mysterious music video appeared on YouTube under the name Obamagirl. By the time Hillary announced that Celine Dion's You and I had won the campaign song vote Obamagirl's contribution had already become the song of the summer.
The people behind the ad had nothing to do with Obama himself (note how he attracts the most talented renegades to his side) but a 21-year-old undergraduate named Leah Kauffman, who sang the song and wrote it with her 32-year-old advertising executive friend Ben Relles and her producer Rick Friedrich.
The video had more than a million hits on YouTube within four days - something of an internet fairy tale.
During the 1956 presidential campaign, the Democratic party hired Dore Schary, the head of MGM studios, to try to mould the image of its candidate, Adlai Stevenson.
Stevenson, a sharp-tongued intellectual who eventually lost to Eisenhower for the second time in a row, found the entire process humiliating.
"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal ... is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process," he complained.
In The Hidden Persuaders, published the next year, Vance Packard sought to show how we were all affected by subliminal advertising, and how politicians also used this to their advantage.
In the YouTube era, though there is less spin, the "hidden persuaders" are arguably even more hidden: anonymous posters on the internet. How can we avoid the sinister implications of negative advertising from indecipherable sources?
Phil de Vellis said he thought the system regulated itself: "If someone put out an ad that was untruthful or underhand, we'd find out who it was," he said "An ad generally only goes viral if there's some truth in it."
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who aside from her academic duties also runs factcheck.org, a non-profit organisation dedicated to checking the accuracy of US campaign ads, suggests that this new surreptitious threat is small because the same risk applies to TV ads anyway.
"There never has been any way of ensuring that the ads that you see are reliable in the United States, because bona fide political candidates have protection against any form of censorship."
The advent of YouTube in the 2008 election is, Jamieson believes, a watershed moment because, as she puts it, "it changes the structure underlying the political discussion".
Chuck DeFeo, who ran the Bush-Cheney online campaign in 2004 and who describes himself as "the old man in this field", having been involved in online politics for the past 12 years, remembers a time when "those of us who were doing this were waiting for the 1960 moment: the moment television became the dominant medium candidates used to communicate to the electorate.
"We were excited about that, because it was traditionally seen as a positive moment. But the more I look back on that, it was the moment in which broadcast - that one-to-many model - became the dominant way in which campaigns communicated, and that probably wasn't a healthy thing.
"Because candidates started to look at the electorate as an audience to talk at, rather than to talk with. Prior to that it was really grassroots effort. That's how campaigns were run for centuries. And now with the rise of the internet there is the ability to have a true dialogue with the voter."
Of course, what effect all of this will really have on votes remains to be seen. An example often cited to suggest that the possibilities of the internet may have been overblown is that of Howard Dean, who in the run-up to the last election built an unprecedented community of online supporters, and then failed to win the Democratic nomination when it came to actual votes.
Dean raised more money than any other Democrat last time around and did so primarily through an entirely novel method that is now being extended by Barack Obama: instead of turning to the wealthy few, as candidates traditionally have, he raised funds online from a collection of ordinary citizens who each gave an average of US$80 (the legal limit for donations is US$2000 a person).
The method itself was inexpensive, and the average donation size so small it meant that Dean built up an email list of donors whom he could continue to tap for money throughout the election season.
So what went wrong? Andrew Rasiej regrets the fact that "everyone's trying to point to the internet as the linchpin for the success or" failure of his campaign.
"The notion that online prowess is automatically going to deliver success offline is a mistake, but it's also a mistake to think that offline traditional politics can ignore the power of the internet.
"Our site exists as a way of keeping track of the pulse or the pace, but we're not saying that just because Barack Obama has three times as many YouTube viewers or Facebook friends as Hillary that means he's going to be elected as the nominee. You need a whole bunch of things to work."
Still, what Obama is doing with the internet is very smart. He has begun with the Howard Dean model - a large number of small-scale donors - but he's asking them to do more than contribute. He's encouraging them to build networks of friends, to meet other supporters, even to date each other.
Obama has hired Chris Hughes, the 23-year-old co-founder of the social networking site Facebook, to run his online campaign. John Edwards has hired a 19-year-old whiz named George Stern.
Chuck DeFeo is highly knowledgeable and delighted by what's going on now. Last election, he said, "we circulated several web videos attacking [Democratic candidate John] Kerry's record or putting out the President's positive message, but there was no site like YouTube for us to be able to distribute a video like that."
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