But there are other experts who disagree - and none is a fund raiser for either candidate.
Paul Levinson, a Fordham University professor who specializes in media history and evolution, questions almost every aspect of the Obama-as-first-cybergenic-president argument from premise to conclusion.
"Although it's superficially attractive, that's the kind of statement that glosses over so many different facts that, in the end, it's simply wrong," says Levinson, chair of communications and media studies at Fordham.
"Lincoln was not an expert in the use of the telegraph. He didn't use it to win 1860 or 1864. And with JFK, it was basically more of an accident. He did the TV debate, and everybody saw that he did much better than his opponent, Richard Nixon. Because it was a razor-close election, with the wisdom of hindsight, everybody said Kennedy understood television. But Kennedy was not an expert on TV any more than Obama himself is an expert on the Internet."
Scott Jacobs, editor of The Week Behind Web site and of the book Talk's Cheap, Let's Race!: Posts Along the Campaign Trail, offers a more succinct critique of the cybergenic-president hypothesis: "It's malarky," says the veteran of four decades of campaign coverage.
As media historians like Levinson see it, the cybergenic-president argument is based on a flawed view of media cycles as discreet and separate eras - thinking the radio epoch ends on one day, and the TV era begins the next.
But the role of media in a nation does not work that way - one era bleeds into the next, and the previous cycle hangs on, often never going totally away.
Think of radio, or consider the network newscasts that have been labeled dinosaurs for more than a decade. While they are undoubtedly headed for extinction, they still amass a nightly audience of 25 million viewers while earning tens of millions in profits for ABC, NBC and CBS. The graveyard is still a way off.
While the number of people who say the Internet is their primary source of campaign news has grown to 15 percent of Americans this year (up from 6 percent in 2004), the number who rely first on TV is still four times as large at 60 percent, according to the Pew Research Center for People & the Press. In fact, the media story of this exceptional election year is not one of Internet growth, but rather TV resurgence, with debate and primary-night coverage setting new network and cable TV audience records across the board.
