The news over the past few weeks – or, more accurately, over and over and over over the past few weeks – has been all about Barack Obama’s digitally-recorded comments about small-town working-class bitterness over economic insecurity.

I’m torn. On the one hand, I can (with only a little stretch) take a certain satisfaction in being prescient:

But Bittergate does serve as a key reminder of the Macaca Moment’s core communications lesson for 21st century campaigns:

Digital recording devices – video recorders, audio recorders, cell phone recorders — are everywhere. All the time. They are small, discrete, often invisible – even when they are being used. And video and audio can be sent wirelessly from anywhere to anywhere, anytime – so that a comment made in San Francisco (or rural Virginia) may be instantly shown on national TV.

Combine (1) this rule of Digital Omnipresence with (2) the rules of Off-the-Record/On the Record (i.e. – nothing is ever truly, reliably, off-the-record), then you’ve got Bittergate.

Dan Manatt, techPresident.com, April 15, 2008

…and…

[P]oliticians telling people what they want to hear is an old story. But what’s new is the ability to catch them in the act. Video cameras are everywhere; many digital cameras can capture video and audio. But even more significant is the world of cell phones.

Mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous, and a large and growing number of them can record video. Those phones are a lot less intrusive than a camcorder; it would be hard to imagine a better means of capturing unguarded moments.

Like, say, a politician telling a voter something that contradicts something the politician had told a different audience the day before. An outrageous slur against an opponent. A career-ending* display of bigotry.

It’s only a matter of time before a politician does something George Allen-esque in front of the watchful eye of a camera phone. And then the impact on politicians will be profound. Nearly every moment outside of their own homes (and inside, if they’ve done something that morning to tick off one of their kids) could find its way onto YouTube, Revver or any of a dozen other video-sharing sites… and onto the computers of thousands of their voters.

Me on the Social Signal blog, February 25, 2007

On the other hand, the thing that I should have anticipated is the way this magnifies the ability to take any but the blandest of phrases, strip it of context and nuance, and beat a candidate over the head with it.

Gods… is there a technology out there that can’t be used to dumb down politics even further?