Tuesday, October 17, 2006
More on politics and YouTube
Does the success of YouTube represent the "triumph of bottom-up culture and another sign that old media businesses, from record companies and TV networks to newspapers like The Times, are going to see more of their audience migrating to the Internet", as claimed this morning by Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times?
As Goldstein wrote:
At this point it is not entirely clear that YouTube itself has altered how candidates are marketed to voters, but it does represent a phenomenon of potential voter empowerment.
There are many things standing in the way of realizing this potential. For one, YouTube is not necessarily easy to use: even over a university Internet connection like I have, downloading even relatively short video clips can take some time, and can try one's patience. Also, searching and navigation of the video clips, for someone who might be interested in only certain races or candidates, is far from straightforward: simple searches for prominent candidates yield a lot of content that has little to do with politics (search for Governor Schwarzenegger, for example --- a lot of the non-political content is funny, but is non-political), and quite frankly, watching much of the content reminds me of those long Saturday evenings when I was a kid watching my neighbor's slide shows of their RV trip to South Dakota.
Finally, it's hard to know the credibility of much of the political material. Some of it is clearly intended to be funny (though even then much of it falls short), but of the other material, it is hard to know whether it is credible and whether it presents the full picture of a candidate or campaign. Here I'm thinking of short clips for candidate press conferences, or other types of short, and heavily edited, political material that might be significantly distorted from the original context and thus not necessarily very informative for the electorate.
Yet, YouTube is a phenomenon. But it is far from an ideal way to empower voters, at least as it currently stands, in terms of technological and content development.
As Goldstein wrote:
YouTube is already having an impact on this year's election cycle. In years past, political candidates were sold essentially in the same way as movie stars — in carefully staged settings and market-tested ads. Now the scripted veneer has been stripped away by young volunteers, armed with video cameras, who stalk opposition candidates, record their gaffes and post them on YouTube, not unlike the way the Smoking Gun displays embarrassing photos of badly behaved celebrities.
The best-known gotcha YouTube post came from an Indian American student tailing U.S. Sen. George Allen (R-Va.). The student recently captured an irritated Allen pointing him out and telling his supporters, "Let's give a welcome to macaca here — welcome to America." The slur prompted a tsunami of media coverage that sent Allen's campaign into a tailspin. Another popular series of clips shows U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) on the campaign trail, joshing about his Guatemalan gardener and struggling to stay awake during a Senate hearing.
At this point it is not entirely clear that YouTube itself has altered how candidates are marketed to voters, but it does represent a phenomenon of potential voter empowerment.
There are many things standing in the way of realizing this potential. For one, YouTube is not necessarily easy to use: even over a university Internet connection like I have, downloading even relatively short video clips can take some time, and can try one's patience. Also, searching and navigation of the video clips, for someone who might be interested in only certain races or candidates, is far from straightforward: simple searches for prominent candidates yield a lot of content that has little to do with politics (search for Governor Schwarzenegger, for example --- a lot of the non-political content is funny, but is non-political), and quite frankly, watching much of the content reminds me of those long Saturday evenings when I was a kid watching my neighbor's slide shows of their RV trip to South Dakota.
Finally, it's hard to know the credibility of much of the political material. Some of it is clearly intended to be funny (though even then much of it falls short), but of the other material, it is hard to know whether it is credible and whether it presents the full picture of a candidate or campaign. Here I'm thinking of short clips for candidate press conferences, or other types of short, and heavily edited, political material that might be significantly distorted from the original context and thus not necessarily very informative for the electorate.
Yet, YouTube is a phenomenon. But it is far from an ideal way to empower voters, at least as it currently stands, in terms of technological and content development.
// posted by Michael Alvarez @ 6:55 AM 
