YouTube 2010

By Joel Aldor

We’ve just witnessed one of the greatest, unprecedented moments in history of the world: an African-American man thrown to the greatest power by the American people. It certainly has inspired nations that “real change” can happen. But I’m not just talking about change in governance. The change here is that president-elect Barack Obama’s campaign heavily utilized Web 2.0 to create a new wave of political supporters, eventually making every social application available nowadays: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and of course – YouTube, a viable and powerful political tool.

It was at that special time when YouTube was seen as the fundamental technological platform to advertise to voters, and Barack obama surely had exploited it very well. At a time when people are much more informed of their voting decisions thru fact finding: reading blogs and choosing video internet instead of TV, the Internet population was every political candidate’s Holy Grail. Come November 4th, 2008, Obama’s official YouTube campaign videos were watched for 14.5 million hours. To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV roughly estimates to $47 million. And they never paid a single cent.

YouTube has simply proved to be a very much revered medium because supporters can freely upload their candidate’s video speeches and commercials. It has also enabled a new way to engage in political discourse because it poses greater challenges for the candidates to answer questions that could have otherwise been predictable, as with the past presidential elections. Thru YouTube, voters have been very more vocal on their stand and defiance for a candidate on CNN/YouTube debates by uploading their personal video questions which are then being answered by Obama and McCain during the series of presidential debates, and even participating in video debates by video-responding to voters of the other party. It has proven as well to be a tool that is greatly feared of. Voters can also search videos of past speeches to closely study their agendas, or to prove something wrong. Within hours, videos of fatal bloopers, political blunders or Freudian slips can generate hundreds of thousands of hits among YouTube viewers, instantly marking some influence on their voting decisions.

Ok, you may now be asking…why the heck I called this post YouTube 2010?

Well, turns out that next year will be a big year for us as we take our turn to vote for the next ruler of our country. I’m pretty sure our own presidentiables have witnessed this whole Internet frenzy that turned the cyberspace into a virtual meeting-de-avance. At the moment I’m typing this, I was looking which among the presidentiables have started campaigning on YouTube, and lo and behold I saw Mar Roxas having his own YouTube video stream. I believe though he’s only the first presidentiable yet to start his campaign on YouTube, others will eventually follow suit. Politicians are very much aware of the power of social media that creates stirs and uproars on an information-conscious Filipino society nowadays, so it won’t be a surprise if they will heavily invest more on YouTube campaigning rather than TV airtime. And it won’t be a surprise as well if the money saved from their campaign budget (read: pork barrel) will go down straight to their own pockets. Yeah, call me a pessimist but reality bites.

So, has it crossed the chasm? If it’s in the political arena, definitely – at least in the Western scene. We still have to see it here though. It could be already crossing at this point.

So much for Youtube and politics.

 

References:

How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics
Claire Cain Miller, November 7, 2008. The New York Times.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet-campaign-changed-politics/

YouTube role grows as U.S. election nears
ZDNet News, July 20, 2007. Reuters Ltd.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-152602.html

Mar Roxas for President in 2010 Youtube Stream
http://marroxas2010.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/mar-roxas-for-president-in-2010-youtube-stream/