In the video and photo sharing chapter of my book, I held up George Miller, congressperson from California, as the savviest user of the Web to connect with constituents. His office made a request for questions to the general public via various means and then answered those questions on YouTube - inviting further video/email/blog responses, to which he additionally answered. It was a great use of Web video to break out of the soundbyteization of the media and a way to speak directly to constituent questions.
Now Gavin Newsom has followed suit. But his speech takes 7 hours! As noted in the SFGate, Newsom's virtual speech draws mixed reviews. 7 hours!
Miller's approach was brilliant. Newsom's needs some refining. Now I fully agree that this is where we're going in "post broadcast politics" (as noted in previous posts). But just because the medium is ripe for direct speech, doesn't mean that you don't need editing! Mark Twain said something like "Apologies for the lengthy letter, I didn't have time to write a short one." So, the length is a problem.
But so is the use of supporting materials that you can barely read. The produciton values of Miller's video were crappy and, in the book, I commended him on this approach, because it felt more authentic (when compared with the current fare from Hillary that was professionally produced and seemed very far from the "conversation" that she was pitching it as). But here, the produciton values reduce our ability to understand the material. Now, you could keep the crappy production values and just offer supplementary downloads of the powerpoints. That would work around the problem. But in general, there's got to be a little more thought put into how to use YouTube as a communication tool. Just using it doesn't go far enough.
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