Nothing has charged the under-30 electorate more than the Internet and come July 23rd, the web and politics will reach some kind of milestone when YouTube and CNN jointly host a debate among the eight Democratic presidential candidates. The coolest part of the whole event is the Q and A from the audience, which in this case will be submitted in the form of YouTube videos.
It’s hard to imagine what people are dreaming up for these video questions simply because with video, anything goes. The videos might contain anything, from talking heads to mash-ups to protest mixes. Unlike traditional boring questions from folks standing up in the audience, these “questions” could serve as political statements on their own.
The video format opens the door for originality and spontaneity — elements usually foreign to the controlled environment of presidential image-making. Because visual images can be more powerful than words, the videos have the potential to elicit emotional responses from the candidates and frame the election in new ways.
Moreover, because of YouTube and the Internet, the video questions are bound to have a long afterlife.
[The] videos being aired during this debate will likely magnify the audience because some of them will be picked up, linked to, replayed and commented upon by the mainstream media.
So, come July 23, grab your laptop and sit in front of the TV to watch political history in the making. My only hope is that the networks and YouTube (and the Democratic party) don’t totally weed out the more, ahem, interesting video questions.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:52 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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