By: Stephen P. Anderson The Role of Video in the Election

Goals  Discuss the “Flattening of Politics” How YouTube has helped Democracy  Benefits/ Detriments User Candidates  YouTube Partnerships  CNN  PBS  Future of YouTube and Politics

Barack Obama  10 Video channels  YouTube Member since September 2006 a YouTube campaign channel with over 1800 videos  Up from 1600  over 109,000,000 views Most all- time for a politician  Up from 86,000,000 Over 761,000 videos tagged “Obama”  Up from 591,000 

Barack TV

John McCain  YouTube member since February 2007  329 videos Up from 314 over 25,000,000 views  Up from 23,000,000  2nd most all time for a politician Over 343,000 videos tagged with “McCain”  Up from 323,000 last week 

McCain Videos

Flattening of Politics  “In this new media environment, politics is no longer bound by traditional barriers of time and space. It doesn't matter what time it is, or where someone is located—as long as they have the means to connect through the Web, they can engage in the discussion.”#  “Consider how all this content is being used, with millions of people finding videos that speak to them and forwarding these videos to their friends and acquaintances. Collectively, this is the hum of democracy. If, in the past, Americans mulled over politics by talking with their friends at the local diner or their co-workers at the coffee machine, now those same conversations have expanded exponentially online.”* *Raseij, Andrew, and Micah Sifrey. "YouTube for president?" Politico. 14 Oct Oct # Grove, Steve. "YouTube: The Flattening of Politics." Nieman Reports (Summer 2008):

Flattening Politics  Returning Democracy to politics by giving voice back to the common man

 “As of this past spring, 35 percent of all Americans said they had watched online videos related to the campaign, triple the level of One out of 10 Internet users — people who told Pew that they at least occasionally use the Net or send or receive — said they have either forwarded or posted someone else’s political video.”* - Pew Research Center YouTube Benefits * Raseij, Andrew, and Micah Sifrey. "YouTube for president?" Politico. 14 Oct Oct

YouTube Benefits  Its cheap. All it takes to post unlimited video is a membership  Helped Turn Youth On to Voting  Turnover is great According to a Comscore research study: “In July 2008 in the United States, approximately 91 million viewers looked at nearly 5 billion videos on YouTube. The typical viewer watched 55 videos on the site in that month.”  Content is Quick and easy to obtain  Easy to Share Embed videos to blogs/ personal websites Myspace, facebook, etc.  Enhances user perceptions of their role in the campaign process

CNN/YouTube Presidential Debates

*Zompetti, Joseph P., Alex Laballe, Allen Louden, Joseph Packer, Damien Pfister, Ross Smith, Ron Von Burg, David C. Williams, Kurt Zemlicka, and Gordon Mitchell. "DebateWatch 2.0: Argumentative Engagement in the CNN/YouTube Debate Format." Journal of Public Deliberation (2008): 9. “CNN’s promotional material held that direct citizen access would serve as a corrective to media institutional biases, enabling citizen- generated, non-filtered questions to restore a measure of authenticity to presidential debate question process*.” “Most of the excitement was focused on the idea that the inclusion of YouTube video questions in the debate would make the presidential debate process more democratic and deliberative by bridging the gap between the general public and the candidates for the 2008 presidential election (see Lamballe, 2007)*.”

Teaming up with “Video Your Vote”  Tracking user experiences on election day

Detriments  Incendiary dialogue Users often post false content about candidates  Source Credibility Sources are not required to cite their information  Could be viewed as information overload Almost too much content to sift through

Videos

Future of YouTube and Politics  Are dependent on your contribution!