The human mind is a complex collection of beliefs, understandings, convictions and predilections. Candidates for office spend huge sums of money trying to sway people's minds. But there's a limit to how much mindshare money can buy. People get tired of slick commercials. At a certain point they tune out the candidates' message and turn to listen to the viewpoints of people they know or admire.
In another age the people you knew or admired all lived near you. Today, geography has no bounds. Anyone connected to the Internet could be within the group of people you know or admire.
Enter YouTube, which makes it simple and free for anyone to share videos with a mass audience. If you're able to produce the video, YouTube will take care of the rest.
And so we see the very creative effort of The Black Eyed Peas musician will.i.am in the Yes We Can video, a flawless and powerful mashup of Barack Obama's New Hampshire speech. The rhythms of the speech become the rhythms of this song, viewed more than 2 million times within a few days of being uploaded to YouTube. The video was directed by Jesse Dylan, son of Bob Dylan, who had a thing or two to say about social justice issues in earlier times.
Let me tell you how much the Barack Obama campaign spent on that video. Nothing. It wasn't made by the campaign, but by supporters of the campaign. Money can't buy you a video like that. It was made by people who had something they wanted to say.
Another kind of YouTube endorsement video is the straight narrative kind, as seen by this video by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig. You might recall Lessig as the inventor of the Creative Commons, a bold step forward for creative expression. Lessig is widely respected in legal circles and far beyond. He is one of those creatures you rarely see out in the wild: a lawyer whose integrity you respect.
So will YouTube have an effect on the U.S. elections? It undoubtedly will. Will the election turn on one or more YouTube videos? It might. Does it make it frivolous for a presidential candidate to be chosen based on some YouTube videos? No. YouTube is just another communications channel. You either tune into it or tune out.
I'm tuning in.
The blogger has been working to bridge the digital divide for 20 years in the Washington DC-area. He loves Macs, adores Linux and likes Windows. Reader responses welcome in the comments below or at philshapiroblogger@gmail.com
I think that the Internet will not be the deciding factor for the election. But it will certainly enable a new epoch of campaign tactics. Look at what Ron Paul has been able to accomplish without must mainstream support. There is an interesting study examining the potential impact the Internet could have on the final outcomes:
http://www.spartaninternet.com/2008
Sure it will affect the outcome. There is a good portion of voters that are mindless slugs. They buy in to the pre-election rhetoric, they refuse to do any kind of research for themselves, they put their vote behind their favorite [celebrity,religion,organization,etc]'s endorsement, in short, they let other people do the thinking for them. It's sad that people are too lazy to take a look at their own beliefs, compare them to the issues at hand and look at the different candidate's voting record when it comes to those issues. Enter Youtube which makes it even easier to brainwash the mindless droves.
I don't consider any media to shade my judgement on elections. Too much is manipulated by the publishers of the drivel seen on TV news, in printed media and on the internet. I will use a cross section of government releases and weigh them against what is published in any other media source.