Norm, I think you and I are thinking along the same lines. Analysis of political speech (NLP) viral and ambush marketing, virtual flashmobs, etc. I wrote about this four years before Obammy came on the scene.
It blows my mind that people accept the most insane statements and actions at face value today. No thought at all goes into analyzing them. But then again, when the govt changed the curriculum (by design) to exclude things like critical thought/’how’ to think’ and the media abandoned the 5W’s of Journalism in their reporting, the world we live in is the only possible outcome.