UK Observer: From the web to the White House

[T_i_B]

It's a long article, but it's well worth clicking on the link and reading it.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2121069,00.html

2008 has already been repeatedly referred to as 'the YouTube election', and candidates are all trying to keep up. During the last presidential election, bloggers were the new digital phenomenon to contend with; now YouTube has taken precedence, and it has the potential for much more dramatic effect. The site was founded in February 2005, not long after George Bush had won a second term. (In November last year it was bought by Google.) Because its content is largely unregulated it has, in the course of this first presidential race since its founding, come into its own by giving citizens an outlet and a function. Where blogs offer commentary, video-sharing provides a way for anyone to judge a candidate for themselves, with their own eyes.

Though the site is not a political one, its sublimely rogue influence on national politics was clear before the race began. Last summer, George Allen, the Republican Senator from Virginia, publicly addressed a campaign operative from the opposing side who was videotaping him (as is traditional) in the hope of finding negative material for an ad. He called the campaign worker, who was of Indian descent, 'macaca'. The racist epithet flew onto YouTube in no time - why bother to spend time and money making an ad when you can bring down a politician instantly with his own gun? Allen lost his campaign for re-election.

Is YouTube the ultimate form of democracy, then, a means by which voters can have their say and politicians can really listen? Or is it something to be feared, a kind of anarchic 24-hour surveillance? You can imagine a scenario along the lines of The Manchurian Candidate, in which moving images are inserted into one's brain and reappear, unbidden, at intervals: the entire voting process would be made of up rewind and replay, and the election would unfurl like a bad dream - or a good music video, depending on your YouTube tastes.

Chuck DeFeo, who ran the Bush-Cheney online campaign in 2004 and who describes himself as 'the old man in this field', having been involved in online politics for the past 12 years, remembers a time when 'those of us who were doing this were waiting for the 1960 moment: the moment television became the dominant medium candidates used to communicate to the electorate. We were excited about that, because it was traditionally seen as a positive moment. But the more I look back on that, it was the moment in which broadcast - that one-to-many model - became the dominant way in which campaigns communicated, and that probably wasn't a healthy thing. Because candidates started to look at the electorate as an audience to talk at, rather than to talk with. Prior to that it was really grassroots effort. That's how campaigns were run for centuries. And now with the rise of the internet there is the ability to have a true dialogue with the voter.' Of course, what effect all of this will really have on votes remains to be seen. An example often cited to suggest that the possibilities of the internet may have been overblown is that of Howard Dean, who in the run-up to the last election built an unprecedented community of online supporters, and then failed to win the Democratic nomination when it came to actual votes.