YouTube and Politics

"She broke the T.V. But it's okay. They'll fix it."

I made the mistake of letting Ben watch political clips on YouTube with me. I wanted to see some of the ones I'd been reading about, starting with the 1984/Hillary Clinton one. Ben found the fact that the woman destroys a large TV screen interesting and disturbing, and he wanted to watch it again. I tried to explain that it was just a made-up story, and no one really broke a TV, but he brought it up several times over the course of the day. He preferred the Clinton version to the one in which Barack Obama is on TV, and he was bored by the one in which John Edwards fixes his hair to the tune of "I Feel Pretty." Ann Coulter walking off the set of Hannity and Colmes left him cold.

I felt uneasy after watching the clips, and not just because most of them involved Democrats. On one level, the amateur moviemakers are no different than the pamphleteers who have been around since before the birth of our country. On another level, though, the combination of words and images is undeniably powerful, and stayed with me in a way that text does not. I can explain to Ben that the pictures aren't "real," but human brains are wired to respond to them as if they are.

I'm curious what effect sites such as Blogger and YouTube will have on politics. Will they give voice to people who would not otherwise be heard, and thus facilitate the formation of grassroots movements? Will they promote a kind of clever, slick nastiness in which surface is more important that substance? Both?