he Conestoga wagon. Clipper ship. Ironclad. Transcontinental passenger train. Ocean liner. Flying boat. Notice a trend here?
All those mainstays of mass transportation - each of them bold technological advances in their day - were in turn displaced by subsequent inventions. Now comes the Internet, and we are all: sick of hearing about it, stunned by the ease and speed of it, fearful of the implications of it, and eager to learn more about what it can do to or for us as individuals.
Everything will be different, Web-heads assure us. Sure. Maybe. There's probably at least some truth in that. Media are certainly changing. The old television networks - like the Life, Look, and Colliers of the glossy photo giant magazine era - seem to be decomposing in the face of competition for eyeballs.
And the mass circulation newspapers are on a grim diet of shrinking readership, elbowing their way self-consciously into the Webbed world. Consumers can click their way to specificity in ways unimaginable five years ago, and it gets harder and harder to amass eyeballs in sufficient numbers to impress advertisers.
But just as the communications business - information, news, entertainment, data, archives - is roiled by innovations comparable to the displacement of steam, horsemeat, and rickshaws by a newer ''new thing,'' so are the craft of politics and the practice of government due for a bone-cracking shakeup. And shakeout.
Fourteen months ago I wrote about how the invisible-but-not-yet-invincible Internet gained a toehold in the political game in the just-concluded off-year election cycle. Use of the Web helped reelect one US senator (Harry Reid of Nevada, by 400-odd votes after 10,000 hits on his Web site). It was a huge tool in the kit of a pro wrestler without a college degree, who ran under the old media's radar screen and became Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota.
It helped dampen the impeachment drive by recruiting hundreds of thousands of real voters with real names and e-mail addresses to MoveOn.org, a massive chain letter demanding that Congress stop trying to impeach Clinton. Still, the World Wide Web did not displace television, both the free and paid varieties, as the dominant means of political communication.
How goes it so far this season? Things are moving. Every presidential candidate has a Web presence. From the day four years ago when Bob Dole croaked out his Web address with a glum smile acknowledging the passing of an era ( his), you could no longer run without an interactive site to play with and off.
The Web creates ''ad-hocracies''; it assembles ''cheap eyeballs'' like nobody's business, as long as you have something that drives them, or pulls them, to your portal. This cycle, the magnetism, is most evident at www.mccain2000.com where the hottest draw on the campaign trail is also packing them in.
Beginning the day after he dope-slapped Texas Governor George W. Bush by clocking him over the noggin in New Hampshire with an 18-percent victory, McCain discovered his Web site had morphed into a volcano of contributions, spewing forth credit-card cash at a rate exceeding $20,000 per hour, 'round the clock.
The way in which McCain took his crusade to clean up politics national in the days after New Hampshire could not have been managed in such a compressed time frame without the Internet. The Web enabled a candidate like McCain to take advantage of the economies of scalability. That is, I'm told by experts, the way in which it is possible to expand a range of contacts from, say, 10 to 1,000 or 10,000, or umpty-nine million, with merely a few handy manipulations of the machinery.
So after spending over 60 days in New Hampshire, conducting 114 town meetings, and riding thousands of miles up and down Interstate 93 in search of flinty New Hampshire voters, McCain was able to take his pitch from retail to wholesale in a remarkably short time. His hit-counter at headquarters in Alexandria, Va., sounds like a Geiger counter dropped down the shaft of a uranium mine. That baby is cooking.
McCain's exponential expansion via the Web, which enabled him to create almost overnight a national organization with far less expenditure of cash and time than the Bush machine, is perhaps the fastest setup on record, save that of the MoveOn.org crowd. Assuming millions of Americans wanted to say '' Enough, already!'' to Kenneth Starr and the GOP impeachment crew, MoveOn signed up 3,000 supporters on line in its first day of operation, 10,000 the second day, to 300,000 strong, identifiable supporters in more than 200 congressional districts - all in just days.
You can do a lot with a little in the Web world. Roy Barnes got elected governor in Georgia with some Web help. His son, Harlan, stitched together a skeleton crew of just six full-time political workers to win the Democratic primary. By the time Barnes Sr. was elected governor, there were only 20 full-time paid staff, remarkably few for a state that size, and made possible only by the communications wizardry of the Web.
By comparison, Bush is spending $3 million a week to rejigger his campaign after the New Hampshire shocker. Bush Junior is burning through a huge load of cash, and his contributors are wondering where all the dough went.
Two weeks ago, Alaska's GOP allowed Internet voting for remote Republicans; only 35 clicked in from across the tundra, but there is a court fight underway in Arizona to block plans for Democrats there to vote on line. California has nixed the idea for now, but the Pentagon will allow military personnel to vote in November at 250 virus-free military base computer stations. New York State, which has a long tradition of denying voting status to any but the most regular of regulars, is also refusing to move to consider Internet voting.
But it is only a matter of time. There are 6 million Americans overseas on any given day, and the easiest way for them to weigh in on Election Day is via the Web. ''Some form of this is going to be something we see at some time in our lives,'' predicts Bruce Sherbert, elections administrator for Dallas County, Texas. He's undoubtedly right.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
