I’ve been following an interesting thread unpicked from the loud, often shapeless YouTube quilt.

On March 5th a YouTube user called ParkRidge47 uploaded a video called Vote Different.  It is a riff on Apple’s 1984 ad - itself a play - of sorts - on the Orwell book.  The theme is establishment-induced placidity versus enlightened emancipation.  Hillary Clinton plays the familiar voice of the old order - she speaks the platitudes of political conversation and grass roots politics, but is stuck in the scheme of one-to-many broadcasting.  Shattering that banal funk is, it is implied - through the medium, bizarrely, of a hammer-throwing athlete - Barack Obama.



The intrigue emerged over the question of who had made the video.  It’s an explicitly partisan piece of political communication - Hilary bad, Barack good - but no candidate claimed ownership.  The intrigue has helped generate huge interest in the video - with over 3 million views at the time of writing.  Eventually, Phil de Vellis ‘fessed up on the Huffington Post blog.  He suggests that, as there are thousands of people who could have made a similar video, it marked a new era in which ‘the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens’.  To the extent that any democratic country holds that or similar sentiments closely to heart, perhaps the point is that increasingly the tools lie in the hands of ordinary citizens to help realise that ideal.

Just to confuse (clarify?!) matters, de Villers confesses an interest - he worked, until resigning sharpish when his identity as the creator of the video was revealed, for a company that provided technology assistance to many political candidates, including Barack Obama.  Here’s an interview with ParkRidge47, aka Phil de Vellis, done by the YouTube political editor:



This certainly feels like a significant event; technology and the links and connections it open are changing politics and, as important, political communication - both formal and informal - in some significant and profound ways.  Anyone can now ‘do’ political PR, very publicly, with or without direct or formal links to a candidate or party.  The days of the shadow chancellor explaining his policies, sat behind a desk for ten minutes after ‘enders, feels, for better or worse, terribly antiquated. 

The debate in the US seems very different to here in the UK.  In the US, there are fascinating projects like Personal Democracy Forum and its site ‘Techpresident’ which are busy examining just what impact technology is having - how the power to mobilise and self-organise online is placing significant power in the hands of ‘people’.  And there are journalistic experiments like the Reuters-backed ‘NewAssignment.net’.

Whilst we do have many excellent projects and start-ups - many from the MySociety people - it seems like it is a given in the US that blogging and social media are (becoming) significant forces, an acknowledgement we don't really share in the UK at the moment.  The recent collision between gossip-'politics' blogger Guido Fawkes and Newsnight feels relevant here.  In some form perhaps not yet fully realised, blogs and new media could help reinvigorate what is a pretty unhealthy space for political communication in the UK.
 
Incidentally, one other example of this new kind of political communication in the UK comes in the form of one of Demos’ MySpace friends ‘David Miliband’.  A prescient and minutely detailed parody, or a genuine medium of grass roots communication?!  Impossible to tell...

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