The last few decades have seen radical changes in how people communicate. Business and other organizations are often slower to adopt the new technologies that have enabled these transformations, but overtime useful tools get picked up by just about everyone. Email is a good example: it’s basically ubiquitous at this point, not even deserving a second thought. It’s not as though an individual or an office chooses to use email, they just do. It’s standard.

There are bound to be exceptions, but probably none as high profile as the one the New York Times reported on over the weekend: President-elect Obama may be giving up email entirely upon his inauguration:

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

This is particularly interesting given the extent to which Obama is associated with technology. We’ve written (as have many, many others) about the great lengths to which his campaign went to leverage information and communication technology as much as was possible—there’s no question that they set the standard there. Though apparently Obama does intend to have a computer on the desk in the Oval Office for the first time, the fact that he’s going to have to give up email is sort of hard to reconcile with all the talk of his tech-savvy election effort.

An odd point about the Times piece, however, is that the focus is less on Obama’s email account and more on his BlackBerry. In fact, the two sort of become indistinguishable. The discussion of Obama’s use of email on the campaign trail is just as much a discussion of the use of his BlackBerry. This reflects a common experience: the distractions and pressures of constant email connectivity. That factor alone, independent of legal or security concerns, seems like it might be grounds for depriving the President of a BlackBerry, if not email entirely. But the fact that “email” almost automatically can mean “BlackBerry” (or iPhone, or any number of other mobile devices) is a subtle but significant shift. One of the last of the original Web 2.0 prophecies to come true (or to be understood) is “software above the level of a single device.” This was a newspaper story about Obama and email, but it wasn’t about Obama and a computer.

Now, consider all of this for a moment: email in your pocket instead of on your desktop, presidential campaigns run as much on social media as anything else, a candidate funded largely by a new long tail of political contributions, presidential addresses that will be put up on YouTube. And more generally just think about the highest office of the land in the context of the Internet, and then think about this:

Mr. Obama is the second president to grapple with the idea of this self-imposed isolation. Three days before his first inauguration, George W. Bush sent a message to 42 friends and relatives that explained his predicament.

“Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace,” Mr. Bush wrote from his old address, G94B@aol.com. “This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.

G94B@aol.com. This isn’t meant to be a comment on the outgoing Commander-in-chief. Things have changed a lot in the last 8 years, not to mention the last 16. The last new president had a very Web 1.0 email address. The one before that saw the Internet come to life during his administration. Putting technological change on the same historical scale as that of presidents reminds one just how much faster the former is.