Considering how Barack Obama is one of YouTube's biggest stars -- the video of his Philadelphia speech on race is just the latest involving the senator that, by Web metrics, went platinum -- you'd think he would be one of the site's most unalloyed fans. The other day, though, he was vigorously ambivalent.
Those enlessly played clips showing Rev. Jeremiah Wright making controversial racial statements, Sen. Obama told an interviewer, aren't representative of the man. "I don't want to suggest that somehow, the loops you have been seeing typifies the services all the time," Sen. Obama said. "That is the danger of the YouTube era. It doesn't excuse what he said. But it gives it some perspective."
As with Nixon going to China, it might take an Obama, with solid youth-tech cred, to suggest any downside to the online world. Considering the rapidly growing number of Americans who rely on the Web to follow the election and judge its players -- even if mostly via mainstream-media sites -- it's a good time to look at all the Web does very well with politics, and at what it messes up.
Web videos, especially on YouTube, are a good place to start. They have been called the death of the TV sound bite, for the way voters can experience lengthy realities without the filters of a news show constrained by time limits and commercials. The 37 minutes of Sen. Obama's race speech quickly became one of the most widely downloaded.
Less clear is whether YouTube will be just as bad, or worse, at blurring the line between a fair point and a cheap shot than newspapers or TV ever were.
Elected officials, especially those in small communities, have complained since the invention of the camera that one sure way to get their picture into the paper is to fall asleep at some legislative event, even one that has lasted all night. But if a dozing politician thinks being in the day's newspaper or the night's newscast was a problem, wait until the clip gets viewed eternally online.
Montana Republican Sen. Conrad Burns had plenty of other problems when he ran for re-election in 2006, but the campaign wasn't helped when he was caught shutting his eyes for a few seconds at a Senate hearing on a farm bill.
Videos like these may enjoy the popularity they do because they confirm ideas already held about the politicians involved, in which case blaming YouTube confuses cause and effect. But there is a danger that our politics might be shaped by insignificant events that assume an importance merely by having been caught on tape.
It's not just video that is being refashioned in the Internet age, but words, too, through blogs and other widely democratized forms of expression. Blogs are enormously useful, if only because of the way they allow communities with similar politics to follow the ups and down of a campaign as a group.
When Hillary Clinton or John McCain give major policy speeches, commentators feel compelled to have their thoughts online within a few hours -- even those who work for weekly newsmagazines. And, in keeping with the conventions of blog posts, which rarely go on for more than a screenload of type, they were often expressed in just a few hundred words.
Blogs then, make possible an amazing diversity of lucid ideas, but those ideas tend to be quickly considered and briefly expressed before everyone moves on to the next topic du jour.
Discussion such as this one about the Web and politics usually involve the newest and most glamorous parts of the Internet: the participatory, Web 2.0 neighborhoods, like blogs and YouTube.
One of the biggest electoral impacts of the Web involves one of its earliest applications: email. It's an easy and effective way for people to share ideas with friends about what might be going on with the candidates. By operating person-to-person and under the radar, email can have an enormous and injurious influence before anyone even notices.
The Obama camp learned this earlier this year when emails making false statements about the candidate's religion started showing up in millions of in-boxes. Old-fashioned whispering campaigns usually work only in relatively small, cohesive communities. With email, though, they can be national and nearly instantaneous.
Suggesting that there is both good and bad with the Web and politics isn't to say they exist in equal amounts. Say what one will about the shortcomings of blogs, I can't imagine going back in time to a world where a relatively small number of newspapers and magazines -- even though by and large they were very good ones -- had an effective monopoly on what did and didn't get printed about a campaign.
The Web isn't going away, and so its boosters should no longer feel defensive when its inanities are pointed out. The YouTube political debates where voters submitted video questions, from January, for example, were described as a singular chance for citizens to question candidates directly, which sounded good until one of the questioners presented himself as a snowman.
Because it's such a vastly powerful network, the Internet has the ability either to elevate or to debase the political discussion. Both will be occurring between now and November, though with a little luck, not in equal amounts.
By Lee Gomes
Wall Street Journal; March 26, 2008
