Youtube and the Age of Reason?
I started this blog-site as an experiment. My friend Mike Seyfang kept telling me that the new technologies emerging in blogging, podcasting, you-tube and other forms of social networking were going to turn the world upside down. My experiment has been a very modest exercise, but it has definitely demonstrated the power of this new medium of social networking.
I was therefore very interested in the recent blog on the Breakthrough blog, which summarised an article by Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry from the Personal Democracy Forum, an online magazine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics.
http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2008/03/youtubes_political_revolution.shtml
The article argues that the internet is changing the possibility of political debate. The dominance of television has reduced political debate largely to sound bites. To quote the article: “In the 1968 presidential election, the average amount of time given to a sound bite from presidential candidate on the network news shows was 43 seconds…. By 2004 … 10.3 seconds”.
Barack Obama has embraced new media technologies and is turning this model upside down. He is giving lengthy, substantive speeches, and putting them all on YouTube and then encouraging his supporters to spread them around. The following figures are direct quotes from the Breakthrough blog:
So far, Obama’s videos have been viewed more than 33 million times on YouTube.com — and that’s not counting partial views, since YouTube only reports a full viewing as a “view.” His campaign has uploaded more than 800 video clips, and adds several more a day.
The average number of views for these top ten is currently more than 1.1 million (nearly double the average from a month ago!)
The average length of these ten videos is 13.3 minutes.
There have been nearly 3.9 million views of the longest of Obama’s most popular videos, his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race in America.
Alan Milburn (former British health secretary) was quoted in the Weekend Australian (22nd March 2008) that those political parties in the UK who hand over power to the people will be successful in the 21st Century. He argues that in the 19th Century state power quite rightly grew to “guarantee clean water, safe streets and legal rights”, but in the second half of the 20th Century, state power began to wind back and power was handed to corporations and non-government or semi-autonomous institutions. Alan argues that we will evolve this process further in the 21st Century. New technologies such as the internet and universal education means that representative democracy from the past can evolve into a more participatory democracy. Modern challenges such as the environment, he argues, cannot be solved by government alone, and I would add, perhaps not by markets alone. Alan writes, “the modern state should not just enable. It should empower people…”. I would argue that Barrack Obama has read this mood change and by using social networks (including on the internet) is creating the huge support base he has in the US.
When I’m talking to my neighbours, colleagues and family, they all want to be part of the solution to the current water crisis. They
despise water restrictions with a gutteral hatred, because it disempowers them. They have all sorts of crazy, weird schemes for
saving the Murray and are furious “the government” hasn’t done more to provide water for the environment. They want to be informed and be
able to think through what the best solutions might be. They fill halls and lecture theatres to listen to Peter Cullen and Mike Young and
download postcasts and read blogs of David Paton and Minister Maywald.
Yesterday I got a call from a friend of a friend. He heard that the Minister for Water Security in South Australia and Professor Mike Young, a leading spokesman of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, were giving a talk at the University of Adelaide. They had actually given the speech the night before (in a display of great generosity to a small group of passionate students), so he had missed out. I was able to direct the gentleman to a couple of podcasts of speeches given by the Minister and Mike Young on this blog, which he was quite excited about. These podcasts gave him access to ideas who would otherwise not get so easily.
- Minister Karlene Maywald on the Future of the River Murray
- Mike Young and Jim McColl: Speeding up the Water Reform Process
- Mike Young: Pricing your Water
- Mike Young: A Water-Proofed Basin
The podcasts of speeches on my blog don’t get Obama-levels of downloads, but they are popular, and continue to be downloaded long after the event. Perhaps these new forms of media offer the exciting possibility of more substantial political debate on important, but complex matters like water management, climate change and environmental management. Perhaps this could lead to greater interest and engagement by the public in political debates. And perhaps those politicians, academics and government agencies that encourage people to participate in discussions and put their ideas and messages out through growing social networks as well as television, radio and newspaper, will garner the greatest influence.
Written by Paul Dalby, 28 March 2008
Good to see you mention your ‘friend of friend’ (longtail) example alongside the staggeringly popular (short-head) American politicians on YouTube. While it is easy to see the value of ‘New Media’ as an adjunct to western politics, a more subtle and profound shift is happening beneath the surface of the read/write web.
Imagine what might happen to ‘the government’ if your colleagues (and thousands of others) voiced their ‘crazy weird schemes for saving the murray’ as podcasts, blogs and videos. Sprouting these wild ideas as bits of text, image, audio and video on the internet might look about as intelligent as a bunch of ants wandering around – but could also produce something as effective for survival as a termite mound! This type of stigmergic interaction might just turn a few things upside down.
Fang – Mike Seyfang