Politics has been important in civilization since humanity first existed, nearly 200,000 years ago. As we have evolved over time, the dominance of logic and law has become a predominant pillar of our civilization. More recently, our civilization has been influenced and defined through advances in communication, such as the telephone, newspapers, radio, television, and, most recently, the Internet. Therefore, our modern political spectrum has been greatly influenced by these advances. The new frontier, the Internet, has perhaps inspired the greatest change in modern politics. The main problem with sources relating the Internet and its effects on politics is rather paradoxical: the few resources that are not outdated tend to approach the topic from a variety of different angles, and those that are outdated contain much more detailed information . two main questions, the markedly different approaches are very interesting. Just as TV was to radio, the Internet is challenging how media works. Of the eight articles to be reviewed here, the articles by de Waal and Sweetser are the most prevalent in this difference. These two focus on comparing new media, the Internet, and old media, which includes newspapers and television. The introduction to de Waal's article includes a brief discussion of why newspapers are believed to be superior to all other forms of media. As a backdrop to the thesis, de Waal uses studies from 1983 and 1990 to illustrate the theory that this is largely due to the amount of space available in newspapers compared to the narrow time frame of the evening news. Sweetser, by contrast, ignores print media entirely, believing instead that television news is far more influential than...... half the paper ......ect=true&AuthType=ip,cookie,url,uid&db= ufh&AN =31748166&loginpage=Login.asp&site=ehost-live>. Online.Tolbert, Caroline and Ramona McNeal. “Unraveling the Effects of the Internet on Political Participation?” Policy Research Quarterly 56.2 (2003): 175-85. Arts and Sciences 2. JSTOR. Texas Technological University. February 9, 2010. Online.Wu, Jingsi. “Facebook Politics: An Exploratory Study of American Youth Political Engagement During the 2008 Presidential Election.” Conference Proceedings - 2009 Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association 1 (2009): 1-23. Communication and mass media completed. EBSCO. Texas Technological University. February 13, 2010. Online.