Political Party of a Multimedia Kind
With all the live-blogging, tweeting and video chat taking place online during Friday’s presidential debate, who could pay attention to TV?
OK, so most folks don’t sit in front of TV with their laptops and watch other people watching television, but that’s what I did while Barack Obama and John McCain verbally sparred in Mississippi on Friday night. I wanted to see how the Internet’s live political conversation might affect my perception of the televised debate.
So while listening to the candidates talk, I was clicking around the Web, watching citizens and professional journalists use live-blogging services like CoverItLive.com, video blogging services like Seesmic and text-messaging services like Twitter to share their thoughts on what the candidates were saying.
Pictured above is Seesmic
Hardly a satisfying way to experience a big moment in American political theater, I know. But it was strangely compelling, especially the video-blogging by people in their living rooms and home offices. Even some of those annoyingly short text updates from Twitter added a new dimension to my debate experience.
I confess I’m no fan of Twitter, the real-time “micro-blogging” service that lets people write often incomprehensible text messages of up to 140 characters and zap them to anyone who “subscribes” to their updates. And on Friday, most of the political “tweets” (web jargon for Twitter’s text updates) scrolling down the service’s special election page seemed obvious and trite. For example:
stephensays one of the things that scares me about mccain: he whistles when he speaks. a sign that a man is too old: he whistles when he speaks.
SignalToNoise Obama and McCain are very catty tonight.
mimiboo McCain’s tie is giving me a headache.
But as the debate wore on, this stream-of-consciousness reaction of strangers slowly added up to more than the sum of their individual comments. I had been looking for a new view of public opinion. What I found felt more like a multimedia party–where everyone was talking and hardly anyone was listening.
A party feeling also pervaded two social video services I monitored, Seesmic and 12secondsTV. Both have been called visual Twitters because people mostly use them to send short messages, only in video instead of text. To me, they amount tovideo chat services, 21st century versions of AOL’s pioneering chat rooms of fifteen years ago.
In Seesmic, people were holding a debate drinking game and chatting into their Web cams about the rules–everyone take a drink, for example, if McCain mentions his prisoner-of war experience, or if either candidate mentions the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Tasteless rules, to be sure. But this is an online party, remember?
Seesmic’s debate-night videos struck me as an odd new form of conversation, because the videos are asynchronous, meaning each clip is stored online in a fashion similar to e-mails and bulletin board messages, so people can watch when they want and selectively reply. Seesmic’s innovation is the way it lets users “thread” or link their videos to one another’s. Debate commentators were labeling all of their videos “The 2008 Debates Room,” allowing followers like me to click through what amounted to an ad-hoc video sequence or conversation.
Over at 12secondsTV, the folks recording debate commentary struck me as a tad more serious, especially their post-debate analysis. This new service– which only lets people post videos up to 12 seconds long– has fewer users because it’s still in alpha testing and is not open to everyone. But even without many users, 12secondsTV seemed interesting, at least to me from my limited participation in the alpha test. Maybe having only 12 seconds forces folks to get to the point.
Pictured above: 12SecondsTV
Whatever the reason, 12secondsTV is helping me see how entirely new forms of video commentary and communication are struggling to be born on the Web — and on mobile phones, too, because some of these services already accept video recorded and sent from cell phones.
How all of this multimedia commentary ultimately will affect news and public affairs remains a wide open question. That’s why I spent my Friday night ping-ponging around the ‘Net, in search of hints about the answers.
The downside, of course, was that I missed much of the presidential debate. Oh, I heard the candidates’ words, all right, but with what felt like only half my brain– or less. I was too busy trying to multitask.
Now, whether or our capacity to think and learn is being impeded or enhanced by all these new Internet communication forms— that’s another debate entirely.