You can say what you want but yesterday’s CNN/YouTube live debate with the Democrats’ hopefuls marked a break-through moment in the history of media and politics. Sure, political campaigns have recently embraced viral video to connect with mostly younger voters, but the prominence and implicitness with which social media entered the political vernacular last night was unprecedented. The citizen videos that became part of the spectacle made the dividing line between all actors on stage even more visible. It was a colossal yet respectful encounter of traditional (Anderson Cooper) and new media (you!), old (Biden) and new school (Obama) politicians.
I recall a paper I wrote four years ago in grad school titled “A future vision of super-democracy,” in which I laid out a far-fetched, utopian model of political communications, radically altered by new media technologies and the populist forces of attention demand. The paper was half serious, half joke (sorry, Professor Hollihan). Now it’s all serious. Or at least real (on TV). Six serious politicians stared at a large screen, watching everyday Americans sing the “tax blues” or “performing” other entertaining “questions.” Notwithstanding its hipness, the play bore all ingredients of the ancient drama, and teetered on the border between tragic and comic (“Tragedy is the flipside of comedy,” as we know). It was amazing to see how devout the candidates listened to the new kids on the block, trying to mingle with the new power generation c (content) and leverage a seemingly unstoppable crowd of amateurs. Hillary Clinton tried hard to remember the names of all the video-citizens, and I tried hard to remember all the names of the candidates, but the event will remain memorable for a long time.
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