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This article by Polis Summer School student Ida Ebbensgaard asks to what extent citizens are being politically empowered by having access to Twitter. She points out that there are severe limits to Twitter's political power, but she identifies its critical role as a kind of whistleblower to mainstream media.

The importance of social media in politics was made clear by Barack Obama's 2008 presidential run. But there is a new frontier of Web 2.0 technologies that politicians and political groups are slowly starting to embrace: the smartphone app. These apps have the potential to reshape how politicians communicate, raise money and get out the vote.

"The Facebook-sparked protest and 4 February demonstrations in Colombia make an interesting test-case of the burgeoning power of unorthodox media outlets and their potential to rally great numbers of people in a short period of time. The initial spontaneity and synergy are a paradigm example of how technology can spawn transnational political forms; in this the phenomenon both belongs to the past decade of net-based activism and highlights the potential of social networks to make this type of organising even more inventive and sophisticated in the future. At the same time, this particular protest (and this form of mobilisation) exclude the many who do not belong to the technological and transnational elites which they favour. Moreover, by avoiding the classic approaches of civil-society work - including the formation of alliances with NGOs, political parties, human-rights groups, and trade unions - the march organisers disregard traditional forms and institutions of democratic action. In doing so, they privilege a fragmented and highly individualised perspective of reality over one that embodies shared, public action for social improvement. "

Facebook Connect could ultimately give political campaigns more viral exposure for their online efforts. Campaign supporters who join Mr. Bloomberg's social network can easily invite their friends to join them in various online activities; if they sign up to attend a political event, that gets transferred back to Facebook too. Users are presented with options to withhold any and all of this information from Facebook if they wish.

Now that President Obama, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty have all declared their intentions to run for President in 2012 and rolled out their initial campaign websites, and another leading contender, Sarah Palin, has also unveiled a revamped website for her political operation, SarahPac, it's possible to begin sketching the contours of the 2012 election online. And so far, the inside-the-beltway political media is missing the big story. It's not Facebook. It's the data, stupid.

More than a quarter of American adults - 26% - used their cell phones to learn about or participate in the 2010 mid-term election campaign. In a post-election nationwide survey of adults, the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project found that 82% of adults have cell phones. Of those cell owners, 71% use their phone for texting and 39% use the phone for accessing the internet. With that as context, the Pew Internet survey found that:

"because we are looking at "raw" data, we have somehow removed ideology from how we govern ourselves"

Smith's community isn't the only smaller city or town to find itself suffering form a lack of local press. While the New York City mayoral election attracts interest from the New York Times, elsewhere the media landscape has changed drastically, thanks to the shuttering of smaller newspapers that were traditionally the source of local political coverage. In some places, social media is being used to try and replace some of what has been lost in terms of professional reporting.

With the year-long debate over health care reform now entering its denouement (or a new chapter), how do you think the internet affected the course of the political battle?