YouTube and Politics Conference

Michael Xenos

Every year or so, typically in the pages of magazines focused on news and public affairs, one usually finds a journalistic account of the annual Midwest Political Science Association meetings.  As far as the content of those publications goes, it's good copy: useful and interesting insights from some of your professors into key questions of the day (such as post-mortem analyses of the recent elections, or new developments in political science research), mixed in with some mildly snarky sharing of notable or humorous panel titles. You can read a specimen from this year here.

In line with the idea that this blog is tailored more toward "everyday politics" as experienced by students in introductory American Politics courses, in this post I share some of what I learned at a special conference I attended last week on the UMass Amherst campus.  Unlike the Midwest Political Science Association meetings, which cover a range of topics, this conference was specifically organized around the role of YouTube in the 2008 Election Cycle.  In the interest of full disclosure, I'll note at this point that, along with Stu Shulman (UMass Political Science), I served as a co-chair for this event -- which is another way of saying that I'll leave out any show and tell focused on odd paper or panel titles, and focus on interesting insights I gleaned from the two-day conference, which featured research on the role of YouTube in politics from political scientists, as well as presentations by computer scientists, communications scholars, rhetoricians and others.

Many of the papers provided systematic documentation of things that many readers of this blog likely already feel at an intuitive level -- mainly that YouTube has definitely started to change our experience of politics, everyday and otherwise. 

For example, G.R. Boynton of the University of Iowa presented a paper examining the dynamics of viewership for YouTube videos related to the campaigns.  Represented by a "simple dynamics equation," Boynton essentially documents the rapid rate at which once released, campaign videos (like McCain's "Celeb") find their natural or potential audience. In a related paper, Kevin Wallsten of California State Long Beach analyzed views of will.i.am's "Yes We Can" video, showing the role played by campaign communications and blog discussion in driving views of the famous video.  Despite what we might think about how coverage in the mainstream media might explain the rapid diffusion of videos like this, among other things Wallsten's analysis suggests that in this case, the media coverage actually followed rather than led the viewing statistics. 

Still other papers examined things like the YouTube debates (which stood in stark contrast to traditional debates where the "audience" is basically barred from participation), and the ways in which sending someone a link to a video (either through email or by posting it on a Facebook wall) has become a new kind of political conversation.  In all, these papers and others presented at the conference show how digital media like YouTUbe have in some ways taken us into a whole new world of politics that dramatically differs from the "old media" world of broadcast television and more formal ways of engaging with election politics. 

At the same time though, there were also other findings that might surprise you in a different way, or at least dampen any thoughts about YouTube radically changing the conduct of campaigns.  On this side of things, Robert Klotz of the University of Southern Maine shared research documenting the dominance of campaign-related content on YouTube with a decidedly "old media" feel -- such as those all-too-familiar 30-second television advertisements, and clips from cable talk shows.  So much for the motto of "Broadcast Yourself." Similarly, Christine Williams and Jeff Gulati of Bentley College (who also took "best paper" honors at the conference) presented an analysis of candidates' use of the new tool, some of which showed that even though the technology is cheap and relatively available to all kinds of candidates, candidates with more financial resources, those in tight races, and incumbents were more likely than other kinds of candidates to create a channel and post more videos.

In his presentation at the conference, David Karpf of the University of Pennsylvania presented another take on the infamous "Macaca Moment," where 2006 Virginia Senate candidate George Allen in many ways put YouTube on the political map.  Although many have come to view this incident as a key example of how new, participatory media like YouTube can enable 'a lone person with a videocamera' to have a powerful impact on the process, Karpf's research uncovers the sense in which this popular understanding of the event ignores the roles played by activists, bloggers, and political organizations in determining how that event and others like it have played out.

Naturally, as a conference about YouTube, there are associated videos and lots more information freely available online.

Conference information here.
YouTube clips related to the papers are here.
And, there's also another really important finding related to the conference here.

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