Historians will note this night, 11/4/08, not only as the night a serious female vice-presidential contender and the first black presidential candidate went head to head--but as the first time "the interwebs", with its series of pipes, became a reality.

By "the interwebs," I mean not only your laptop computer with its wireless connection--but your cellphone, your kindle, your PDA, your satellite radio--all those things that occur as a network instead of as one-to-many communication. The days of one-to-many communication, as opposed to truly and honestly networked communications, ended tonight.

In 1992, a year which was certainly pre-Internet for most of us, a writer named Tom Forester wrote:

"Suggestions by, for example, Toffler, Naisbitt and Williams that the IT revolution would lead to 'push-button voting', to the holding of 'electronic town meetings' and the creation of a 'tele-democracy' have proved to be wide of the mark. Despite increased access to information and communications technologies, electoral turnout in the U.S. and most other Western democracies continues to decline..... 13 major 'teledemocracy' experiments' impact on political participation levels was only marginal because of the powerful forces working against increased involvement - chiefly the fact that people are so bombarded with media messages that they actually absorb less and less. Teledemocracy is unlikely to cure America's severe turnout problem, let alone lead to a transformation of the political system."

Now, I'm the first person to question happy-happy technology predictions. I hate Wired Magazine and always have. But this prediction (from 1992 of all times!) was beyond the pale. After all, I always believed in new media, not only because I worked in it but because all my peers were involved in the Internet before anyone else--and I just couldn't see that the momentum being built by the culture was a mere blip. We were building a new world; only no one else knew it, and it's been ten long years before they caught up. And as far as the really important stuff went? Political campaigns, nonprofit efforts, healthcare? Until Obama, they were all still lagging, and many of them still are, caught in a paradigm of print that they cannot escape.

Boomer pollsters during this election dismissed the cell-phone voters; most of the polling organizations argued that their sampling was still valid, even though they were neglecting huge components of the real population. "Oh, those people don't vote..." They didn't understand the generation behind them, just as the generation ahead of them didn't understand the Boomers. For the Boomers, everything was one-way mass media; now it's a group conversation in which they cannot meaningfully participate, because they cannot control access to the conversation any more.

I've heard before--seriously--"Oh, our poorer audiences don't go online." What a condescending attitude--that people without landlines or dedicated internet connections in-home aren't connected, or able to connect with the network in a meaningful way. Go to the library on Friday night--it's packed, jammed. And not with the privileged--the best things libraries have done in the last ten years, in terms of public service, is to provide internet access. Anyone who believes that huge segments of the American population are not online need only stop by their local library and notice who's using the computers, and how.

In the case of the Republican and McCain failure of imagination, the blame finger is already being pointed at Joe the Plumber and the campaign and changing "demographics" and the culture wars by people who never did--and who still don't--understand the power of the networked Tower of Babel we've unleashed on the world. Everyone talks about "post-civil-rights" or "post-culture wars" or "young voters" but really? Really what's happened is that this technology--this network--has allowed us to transcend our regional and cultural boundaries. The Obama campaign got that; the McCain campaign wrongly assumed (like many advertisers) that their older and more conservative audience doesn't use these technologies. This is demonstrably false.

The very fact that Obama understands the network, understands and listens, in a two-way dialogue, what people need and want and go through--will be central to his presidency if he is to be successful.

The great hope used to be that we were creating a technological utopia that would transform ourselves. That hasn't proven to be true. Technology hasn't changed us in any fundamental way, but it has allowed us to communicate more information to each other, faster, and in new and unprecedented ways. Like all technology, it depends who's using it and for what. The idealistic vision outlined by James Snider in 1994 is part-true and part false:

"New technology ... facilitates previously impractical forms of democratic deliberation. With the electronic town meeting via television, computer, or some synthesis of both, citizens are offered direct contact with public officials, unmediated by journalists. The idea is to force politicians and the media to talk to the public about important issues that might otherwise escape the political agenda."

Back then, all of fifteen years ago, no one could think beyond the television when they thought about electronic communications. What is next, then, in a world in which cell phones rule? To live, communicate, and lead in such a world is to be flexible enough to imagine a world that's beyond imagining; a world in which our technology outpaces our ability to evolve.

The great hope here is not that we're electing a black man (or that we had the possibility of electing a woman of either party)--rather, the great hope is that our prejudices have been defeated by our ability to talk with each other and communicate in wholly new ways, unimagined by the conservative mind. We are talking more often and more clearly to each other, in more and more unmediated ways, every single day. The candidate who understood this--and who didn't attempt to impose on our communication, but insisted on facilitating this conversation--is the one who wins tonight, and who represents the future of America in ways we still cannot imagine.

The future is now.