The best shtick going on CNN this election season is its wall-sized touch-screen interactive map of these United States. Lou Dobbs last night called it a "magic board," about which claim Wolf Blitzer was politely skeptical: "I don't know if it's magic, but it's very, very sophisticated." Let's split the difference and call it nifty. At the board, chief national correspondent John King would call up county-level results in Texas or project what advantage Hillary Clinton could gain in delegates by winning some caucus by such-and-such a margin. The board is an impressive tool, and the only catch is that CNN mostly uses it to demonstrate exactly how impressive the board is.

But in a few years, all these devices will be far more specialized. You might have a special pocket-size electronic map that's just for grabbing maps off the web and displaying them in a simple format. At the same time, every device you own will become computer-network-ready. Instead of having a 50-inch plasma-screen TV and a computer monitor, you will just have a big flat-screen monitor that you can use to tune into Torchwood or read your favorite blogs. Why have two monitors when TV and the web are both streamed over the Internet, anyway?