Whatever you think of President Obama’s policies, there’s no arguing the degree of technological change he and his administration have embraced. His campaign was the first to embrace social media on a large scale and win with it. Howard Dean’s campaign was first to do Meet-Ups and micro-donation campaigns. Building upon that, Obama’s campaign added Twitter, Facebook, text messaging and more. Given that increasingly this is how people communicate, I’m glad that the person at the top recognizes it. (And I remember Bush the First’s stunned appreciation of a supermarket scanner that seemed to magically code in his prices! That faux pas showed how out of touch he was.)

I just finished reading a New York Times magazine profile of Obama that began with his signing a piece of legislation with eight different pens, so that there were as many as possible to distribute to supporters. The photo above, from Tech Crunch, shows a man named Sylvester Cann IV asking the president to sign his iPad at a campaign event for Washington Senator Patty Murray. Which he did. Which makes me wonder what gifts future supporters will get, because the pen is going the way of the buggy whip. Two weeks ago on “Fringe,” part of the plot line was the obsolescence in the show’s alternate universe of pens. How did the agents know they’d found the right place to find the culprit? They discovered people using pens. As we do with LPs, some day we will be explaining to young people just what a pen was, and how it was used.

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