The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that for the first time a majority (55 percent) of voting-age adults engaged with politics online during the 2008 presidential election.

"In each consecutive, comparable election season since we've started conducting surveys, we've seen that reliance on the Internet and that use of the Internet for political purposes, it never goes down, it always goes up," Pew research specialist Aaron Smith said in a phone interview. "I think the trend is fairly clear."

[...]

"One of the things we clearly saw in the research is this ... growth of a participatory culture or an activist type mentality that really has sort of taken root online," Smith said. "[It] really is based on that unique ability that the Internet offers to not just receive information, but to put something of yourself out there and really interact with the information you find and other people that are out there that are interested in the same topics."

Read More