YouTube features both candidates on the "You Choose '08" page.
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Just as the phenomenon of political blogging broke through to the mainstream with former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean's groundbreaking bid for the Democratic nomination in 2004, this election cycle marks the first presidential campaign of the YouTube era.
And just as the Internet "invented Howard Dean" by tapping into youthful enthusiasm and creative fund-raising techniques, the current campaigns have taken those building blocks and constructed the next level of functionality.
A recent Pew study contrasted the content of the two candidates' online presences, noting that "as of September 9, Obama had 510,799 MySpace 'friends' (compared to McCain's 87,652) and more than 1.7 million Facebook pals (compared to 309,591 for McCain). The Obama camp also had twice as many videos posted on his official YouTube channel than McCain."
In particular, though, Obama has engaged with potential supporters on a scale Dean could only have imagined. In the process, he has amassed a network of mostly young volunteers, bloggers and small donors, enabling him to raise the most money ever of any presidential candidate, and leading the Republican National Committee (RNC) to cry foul over suspected "illegal and foreign donors".
In an increasingly interconnected world, however, technology allows—indeed encourages—politics to spread beyond geographic borders. Whether domestic rules can keep up is a separate discussion.
In a new book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & The Future of American Politics, Morley Winograd and Michael Hais advance the notion that what we are witnessing with this election is nothing less than a generational realignment, prompted by an explosion in online social networking and technological capability among an emerging generation of citizens—the so-called Millennials—who combine a personal optimism with a lack of faith in the current political system to adequately address society's ills.
In their book, Winograd and Hais talk about the importance for politicians of harnessing (or at least attempting to harness) successive technological waves: "While it is true that each time a new form of communications technology has appeared, the first candidate to figure out how to maximize its impact in campaigns has triumphed, it is also true that the ultimate winner of the campaign technology arms race has not always been the first to use the medium well," they write. "Sometimes the party that has suffered defeat from the initial use of the technology has learned from that experience and gone on to master the technology, using it to help regain power."
There are of course pitfalls. For every viral video sensation that has helped one candidate tap a groove of cool over another, there can also be a disconnected lapse, committed forever to video, or even a simple lack of understanding of how the unblinking eye in the end can even decide who gets to be a candidate and who doesn't. Events believed long consigned to history can be embarrassingly resuscitated years later. And although the campaigns and 527 advocacy groups are using Web-only ads to generate buzz with online audiences and the press, YouTube is sizzling with resurgent political satire that embraces those candidates able to use mainstream shows like NBC's Saturday Night Live or Comedy Central's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as vehicles for communicating political messages to win hearts and minds.
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4 Comments
Add CommentSteve, what about your piece suggests that the new generation of digital natives will "wreck" the vote? From all I can tell, your point is that wired politics empowers a wider, younger, more dispersed voter base, and makes it possible for candidates like Barack Obama (and Dean in 2004, and, let's not forget, McCain in 2000) to be seriously competitive. Unless you're very much on the GOP side and would like to keep the youth vote as hidden as possible, there's nothing here to suggest that millenials are causing any harm at all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, the youth vote in the U.S. had been in steady decline since the seventies, until 2000, when the first generation of digital natives reached voting age. The trend continued upward in 2004, and there's no doubt at all that the youth vote this year will be stronger than ever.
You say at the end of your piece:
"...it seems not unreasonable to speculate that the inevitable end product of the freedom facilitated by open-source politics is that a campaign becomes more than just selling the candidate and a rigid policy platform, rather it is taken out of the direct control of party or strategists and at least in some way returned to the people whose participation and commitment gives it meaning."
Again--this sounds great--so what's the "wreck the vote" part?
The one danger you rightly point out is the "echo chamber" effect, sometimes called the "Daily Me." No question, the blogosphere is polarized when it comes to American politics. But what's your ground for comparison? Are you comparing the blogosphere to an ideal, totally objective news landscape, or are you comparing it to the corporate mass media model we've been struggling with so far? In that light, it's not bad at all, and if you study the blogosphere you'll find that there's an emergent practice of heavy quotation that has great promise for our political awareness (Hargittai, E., J. Gallo and S. Zehnder, "Mapping the Political Blogosphere: An Analysis of LargeScale Online Political Discussions," 2005--also, Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 257).
Not to get too much on your case, Steve, but as a digitally active digital native I can't help but feel that your title is sensational and doesn't have much substance behind it. But--if our generation is, in fact, wrecking the vote, we'd like to know, since we think this election is kind of important!
Joey
http://www.morninj.com
Steve, what about your piece suggests that the new generation of digital natives will "wreck" the vote? From all I can tell, your point is that wired politics empowers a wider, younger, more dispersed voter base, and makes it possible for candidates like Barack Obama (and Dean in 2004, and, let's not forget, McCain in 2000) to be seriously competitive. Unless you're very much on the GOP side and would like to keep the youth vote as hidden as possible, there's nothing here to suggest that millenials are causing any harm at all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, the youth vote in the U.S. had been in steady decline since the seventies, until 2000, when the first generation of digital natives reached voting age. The trend continued upward in 2004, and there's no doubt at all that the youth vote this year will be stronger than ever.
You say at the end of your piece:
"...it seems not unreasonable to speculate that the inevitable end product of the freedom facilitated by open-source politics is that a campaign becomes more than just selling the candidate and a rigid policy platform, rather it is taken out of the direct control of party or strategists and at least in some way returned to the people whose participation and commitment gives it meaning."
Again--this sounds great--so what's the "wreck the vote" part?
The one danger you rightly point out is the "echo chamber" effect, sometimes called the "Daily Me." No question, the blogosphere is polarized when it comes to American politics. But what's your ground for comparison? Are you comparing the blogosphere to an ideal, totally objective news landscape, or are you comparing it to the corporate mass media model we've been struggling with so far? In that light, it's not bad at all, and if you study the blogosphere you'll find that there's an emergent practice of heavy quotation that has great promise for our political awareness (Hargittai, E., J. Gallo and S. Zehnder, "Mapping the Political Blogosphere: An Analysis of LargeScale Online Political Discussions," 2005--also, Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, p. 257).
Not to get too much on your case, Steve, but as a digitally active digital native I can't help but feel that your title is sensational and doesn't have much substance behind it. But--if our generation is, in fact, wrecking the vote, we'd like to know, since we think this election is kind of important!
Joey
http://www.morninj.com
I think that whether you "wreck" the vote would be a subjective thing. The article has just pointed out that political campaining is a rapidly changing arena and digital natives will impact the vote as much as predicted. It will be shown in this election whether or not it pays to be social networking savvy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisObama may reap the rewards of being more virtually visible.
I think that these political ads on YouTube can either be detrimental or beneficial (it depends on who you're voting for), but if people watch these to help them decide who to vote for, I think they should really take a good look at the actual issues instead of just watching them on YouTube.
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