During a wide-ranging discussion on the impact of the internet on the US presidential elections at the AEJMC annual conference, one of the panellists raised a startling point.
Aaron Smith, a research specialist at Pew Internet and American Life Project, make a prediction about how campaigns might be able to reach voters as the moment they are casting their ballots.
He suggested that eventually a smart engineer would figure out how to use the GPS mapping capabilities on mobile phones to know when people enter a polling station and then send them a campaign message.
With mobiles becoming so ubiquituous and offering increasingly complex functions, this prediction might not be so far-fetched.
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