The first Presidential debate was watched by millions of Americans, and has already had an impact on the polls.

In the wake of the event, UCLA student Eitan Arom offers his critique of the old-media approach and suggestions that address the dynamics of the new media:

During Wednesday night’s presidential debate, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney inspired the country by bridging the partisan divide to say, “Shut up, Jim Lehrer.”

Lehrer, a former PBS news anchor, was, needless to say, completely ineffectual.

Arom explains that future debates need to incorporate new media networking to be effective, instead of relying on the traditional media platforms:

But the problem was not Lehrer. It was not even the American attention deficit, though that epidemic wreaks its own disasters. The problem is that the American political media frames the race such that only certain issues get any limelight and only certain viewpoints get any credence.

College students, you are the solution.

As Generation Y tweets and tumbles its way into the future, the power of the mainstream media is quickly eroding. Media-literate youth can wrest the communications monopoly away from the people that brought you Jim Lehrer’s political farce.

I’d like to start right now, in the form of a letter:

Dear candidates,

You are hereby invited to attend a live, interactive web debate. From the comfort of your respective offices, you will be joined by thousands of college students tuning in online. There will be no on-screen moderator. Viewers will determine the questions and issues. We ask, you answer.

Jim Lehrer can go back to retirement.

Arom concludes:

A media with the power to pick winners has too much power. New communication technologies such as microblogging and instant polling have the potential to strip from conventional corporate news outlets their monopoly on the nation’s discourse.

As it turns out, political scientists at UC Davis and other universities across the country have been working on just such a technology. For the first time on Wednesday night, nearly 4,000 people reacted to the debate on a real-time polling application co-developed by a Davis professor.

The technology promises to bring the candidates and their audiences ever closer together.

Technologies developed in the last 10 years can turn the media into some semblance of a democracy. You and I, rather than executives at CNN and FOX, can set the terms of the debate, both literally and metaphorically.