Sunday's New York Times Week in Review included a front section article on how bloggers are beating up on John McCain for his lack of internet savoir faire. But author Mark Leibwich made the same error I did when I first commented on a blog post a week or so ago--he invoked the image of Bush the Elder staring in amazement at a supermarket price scanner--an image that epitomized the "out of touch" perception Bush failed to overcome. The only problem with that image is that it is a false one.

When I started writing my own opinion piece on this issue, I could not remember the precise year of that supermarket scanner event...so I googled it. I found that in fact the story of Bush being amazed was false. In fact, the original story was written by New York Times columnist Andrew Rosenthal who took another reporter's pool story and added the extra "amazement" language...which was quickly seized upon to confirm the perception of George Bush as an out of touch rich white guy who had never had to shop for his own groceries before.

The nature of online writing--the desire to link to supporting information to better inform the reader, coupled with the ready availability of "the google" to find anything quickly--gives social media the potential for greater accuracy. Of course, it is only potential--there is plenty of wasted verbiage online and writers, myself included, will go off on their own opinion fests without checking facts. But it is a much more dynamic model--a model that can be corrected midstream and which invites participation from others. The online version of the New York Times story does have 200+ comments, but I do not see the text of the article changing and I don't have time to read though all those comments, to see if anyone actually challenges the substance of the original article.

Perhaps it is not an important detail. But it is the kind of detail that gets missed so often in a world dominated by big mainstream media. The image becomes a powerful legend that goes unchallenged to the point that some will argue the facts don't even matter--it is all about perception. But I think that is where a President who truly "gets" social media would make a difference. It's not about whether John McCain knows how to read email--it's whether he or Barack Obama understands how the world is changing and how this technology will fundamentally change how people think and live.