WITHIN minutes of speaking to the Queen, the Prime Minister had sent me a quick email. I wasn’t surprised. It was the fourth time he had been in touch in recent weeks. 

“We’re going to prove it,” said the subject line, sufficiently enigmatic for me to open it and read on. Gordon Brown wanted to explain how this General Election was going to be different from all the others, because politicians are going to “throw open the doors to grassroots activists and the wider public”.

Even before I clicked on the link, Mr Brown assured me: “From the big calls on the economy - securing the recovery and creating future jobs - to tackling climate change, succeeding in Afghanistan, restoring faith in democracy and the other issues that face our country, only Labour has the credible answers. And we’re going to prove it.”

At the same time, more than 22,000 Conservative followers were being urged to show their support for David Cameron by emblazoning their Twitter photographs with a “Vote for Change” ribbon. 

Over on Nick Clegg’s Facebook page, 4,688 “fans” of the Liberal Democrat leader could watch a YouTube video of their idol repeatedly express his excitement that the campaign was finally under way. In an empty press room that had the acoustics of an echo chamber, Vince Cable shared his leader’s enthusiasm in the two-minute clip. By mid-afternoon, it had been viewed 245 times.

That was just Day One of  “the first digital election”. 

Paradoxically, however, it is tonight’s first television debate involving the three main party leaders that could really throw into sharp focus this general election’s digital dimension. 

With up to 15 million viewers and possibly half of them connected to the internet at the same time – some of them in “watch parties” organised in the homes of political activists – the online reaction will be forming even as the words are spoken. It won’t be left only to pundits and party spin doctors to decide who “won” and who “lost” the debate; it could mark the arrival of “social TV” in sitting rooms. 

More than 40 years after the invention of the internet, politicians finally sense there must be more to electioneering than posters, press conferences and party political broadcasts. What took them so long?

In search of answers, it is worth going back briefly to 1995. Even in those exciting early days of what we used to call the world wide web, researchers were identifying the various phases of the “hype cycle” that accompanies the introduction of new technologies.

In the beginning, there’s the whizz-bang breakthrough. Then a frenzy of publicity pushes everyone towards a so-called “peak of inflated expectations”. Inevitably, this over-enthusiasm gives way to a temporary descent into a “trough of disillusionment”. Only then are we all ready to embrace the true benefits of the new technology.

We’ve been here before: starting with the explosion of interest in the internet that coincided with the arrival of Tony Blair as leader of the Labour opposition in the mid-1990s.

The internet changed everything. Quite how much, none of us understood. We still don’t.

But that was last century. For most of the first decade of this millennium, we engaged in what the digerati dub a “plateau of productivity”, the final phase of any hype cycle. In effect, we all just got on with it: we visited websites, we commented on websites, and we blogged. Email became routine, even on mobile phones. 

Many politicians had personal websites; so did all political parties; pundits were colonising the blogosphere; and big media were beginning to migrate online. But nobody seriously tried to characterise the 2001 or 2005 general elections as milestones in digital democracy.

So why the excitement now? It’s all to do with the exponential spread of social media and the second internet revolution.

In 2005, when Blair won an historic third term for Labour, Facebook existed, but had barely spread beyond Harvard Yard. By coincidence, it was also the year that a “skinny kid with a funny name” was named one of “100 Leaders and Revolutionaries” by Time magazine. Barack Obama changed everything, too.

Today, the success of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign – buoyed by the virus-like spread of Facebook – has created another “peak of inflated expectations” among our own political elite. Half a billion dollars from more than six million donors; email addresses for up to 13 million potential supporters. And, best of all, an election victory! If it worked for Obama, surely it could work here.

Twitter, still barely three years old, has raised expectations even higher, following the celebrity-driven media frenzy early last year.

Few commentators, however, have given due credit to the historic contribution made by Howard Dean, an outsider who ran – unsuccessfully, as it turned out – for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. His most passionate supporters used the Meetup website to organise themselves, held house meetings, created a YouTube-like online video site, experimented with text-messaging, and even anticipated Facebook by building their own online social network.

"We fell into this by accident," Dean admitted at the time. "I wish I could tell you we were smart enough to figure this out. But the community taught us. They seized the initiative through Meetup. They built our organisation for us before we had an organisation."

Crucially, the creative energy came from engaged citizens, not from politicians. 

In the minds of British party leaders, the emerging Web 2.0 appears to hold out the promise of a silver-bullet solution: a low-cost platform to “mobilise our people on the ground” and to “get the message across”.

The young apparatchiks who help run the digital election campaigns of the major parties – part of the first generation to grow up with the internet - refer to these as “the ground war” and “the air war”.

Such phrases echo the sort of traditional language that even the most analogue-minded politicians understand. Command the foot-soldiers in the constituencies; control the media agenda.

In other words, business as usual - by new means as well as old.

Nothing, however, could be more antipathetic to the anarchic spirit of the social web. Command and control won’t cut it any longer in a networked world where individuals congregate in their own virtual communities. It’s about real-time conversations - both one-to-one with “friends”, or one-to-many with “followers”.

It is estimated Twitter users have an average of more than 100 followers; the most important “influencers” have many more. Crudely, if I send an update to my followers and each one of them sends it on to each of their followers, and so on, then tens of thousands of people may get the message within seconds. 

Already, individual personalities can be more potent than party machines. Take Sarah Brown, for example. She has 1,117,546 followers on Twitter, far more than those following Labour (12,730), the Conservatives (23,769), or the Liberal Democrats (10,831). And she is not a professional politician. 

There is, of course, the risk that like-minded people communicate largely with like-minded people – and that politicians may be tweeting only to the converted. Either way, doorstep campaigners in Middle England constituencies that will decide this election do not come across many Twitterers.  

In a period of transition, the immediate importance of the internet - particularly email and web-based “back office” software - will be to bolster traditional ways of winning elections, those undertaken either on the phone or on the doorstep by generations of party activists. But the return on investment in these tactics is already diminishing. Mobile phones, for example, have replaced landlines, making it difficult for “phone banks” of volunteers to call voters. More flexible working hours and social lives mean canvassers can’t predict when door-knocking sessions will find voters at home. 

Whether with pen and paper, or iPhone and iPad, these tasks will still have to be done for some time to come. 

In the longer term, though, the more politicians try to micro-manage national election campaigns, the more likely it is that citizens will refuse to be manipulated. They now have the tools and channels of communication to make their displeasure known. Hence the Photoshop spoofs of the David Cameron and Gordon Brown poster campaigns.

What would have previously been just an online joke among a few friends became a phenomenon that signals a profound change in British politics. User-generated content and voter-centred campaigning –  rather than party-centred propaganda and member-centred manifestos - are part of a future in which the political agenda is not controlled. It is created and re-created collectively, 24 hours a day.

Rishi Saha is the Conservative Party’s head of new media and the only party specialist to appear regularly in lists of the most influential people in building the digital future. Leading a nine-member team on the third floor of the Conservative Party’s Millbank HQ, he has been central to the party’s digital strategy for more than three years.

Saha, 27, knows it is only one element in an evolving landscape: “We’ve tried to take a long-term view to digital communications and to get the fundamentals right, which is the main reason for our numerical advantage in this area.” 

He does, however, point out that when it came to Obama spending money raised online, he used a fair chunk of it to pay for the longest TV “infomercial” ever – broadcast simultaneously on seven US networks. 

As politics becomes more decentralised, word-of-mouth endorsements spreading across online networks will increasingly become the currency of politics. The most substantial impact will not be on how parties engage their base support, but how individual candidates engage their local communities. For first time, we know what our local politicians are doing and saying, every day of the campaign. We have voices that they will hear; the question is whether or not they will listen.

Mass membership of political parties will cease to be a goal as the boundaries between members, donors and supporters become increasingly blurred. Talk of “crowd-sourcing” posters and policies may be largely rhetoric now. In the future, it could become reality.

There will, of course, be the equivalent of digital “dirty tricks”. Search-engine marketing, for example, whereby if you search for “Labour” on Google, the top result may well be a sponsored link to a “Labour have failed” video featuring David Cameron.

With a live microphone and video camera in every mobile phone, expect the internet to claim casualties rather than create triumphs. Twitter – or rather offensive tweeting - has already claimed the scalp of Labour candidate Stuart MacLennan. Data-driven marketing, made possible by web technologies, brings risks as well as advantages, hence the furore about Labour’s recent postcode-targeted mailshot about breast-cancer services.

Bloggers such as Guido Fawkes will uncover at least one scandal. Expect “the first digital election” to be dominated - on the surface, at least - by cynicism and satire, by gaffes replayed a million times on YouTube (two months old at the last election), and by 140-character soundbites on Twitter.

This so-called digital election may be only a small beginning. It will take much longer for new technologies to give birth to a new kind of politics. And it won’t be the politicians who “throw open the doors”; it will be active citizens who unlock them. The internet will be the key.

Greg Hadfield, Cogapp’s director of strategic projects, is a former Fleet Street journalist who worked for The Sunday Times and the Daily Mail.