MEDIA MATTERS
Net unleashed
SEVANTI NINAN
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This election will also be remembered for the way Obama democratised the campaign process by leveraging the power of the Web.
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YouTube became a medium whose reach and accessibility redefined the very notion of media access.
Photo: AFP
A people’s President? Obama on the campaign trail...
In the final analysis, what did the media do for Barack Obama? First, it was the myth-making machine that helped him capture the imagination of people across the world. Do you have any recall of what John McCain or his mamma looked like when he was a
little boy, or what his boyhood and later years were all about? How many times did you see the Vietnam related footage of a war hero, other than at the Republican convention? It was the Obama story that the media both in and outside the U.S. fell in love with and replayed a 100 times over. He just had to win the initial charisma contest and the rest was a free ride. Two nights before the election, Star News presenting a biography in Hindi of the man, saw no reason to even mention that anybody else was in the race. And this on the Republican Rupert Murdoch’s channel!
If images can influence, what voters saw in the closing days of the campaign was the constantly repeated TV grab of the candidate in shirt sleeves running up steps. It contrasted every time it was played with the shots of the heavier and slower older man, standing and declaiming. McCain, alas, did not symbolise youthful energy, and purposeful hurry. Small things get imprinted in public memory.
Emerging avenues
But the myth-making was only the most visible part of the media juggernaut that has catapulted Obama into office. While the contest dominated airwaves around the world for at least the last six months, broadcast TV was actually completely bypassed online. This election threw up a paradox that media scholars will wrestle with for some time to come. Did an amazing U.S. election which captured the public imagination eventually turn on technology, or did it turn on money power? Particularly when one actually created the other?
For Obama, technology created money power by enabling his huge network of donors and volunteers. But once it had democratised the campaign process and enabled millions of small donors to power his candidacy, did the flow of money enable him to subvert the elections with its high spend on advertising in the mainstream media? It is an interesting question because certainly adspend created a new record in this election, touching an estimated $1 billion, with Obama believed to have outspent McCain 3 to 1. With the Democrat the winner we will never know for sure, because he capitalised on both. But certainly the extend of the sweep suggests a mobilising that just TV adspend could not have achieved.
The way he ran his election campaign had much to do with leveraging the Internet. Silicon Valley geeks signed on early to back him. He became the foremost digital candidate. His campaign’s social networking skills gave him, early on, three times as many Facebook contacts as Hillary Clinton, and 11 times as many as John McCain. (As of December 2007).
And YouTube, founded in 2005, was the star of this election. It became a medium whose reach and accessibility redefined the very notion of media access. If McCain had, as of October 2008, just over 300 videos, with about 20 million views, Obama, by contrast, had more than 1,500 videos on his site, totalling about 80 million views.
Election 2008 saw the emergence of a website, techPresident.com which tracked the use of technology by the candidates. An analysis on it summarised what YouTube achieved. It made it possible for the presidential campaigns to become full-fledged media operations, delivering their messages directly to voters without any intermediaries such as the mainstream media — and at a fraction of the price of paid TV ads. And then it stole viewer time and attention from older broadcast media. A professor at Kansas State University calculated that the amount of content currently pouring onto YouTube — about 200,000 three-minute videos added every day — was the equivalent of 385 always-on TV channels. In July 2008 in the United States, approximately 91 million viewers looked at nearly five billion videos on YouTube.
Every day, the candidates and their supporters upload snippets of video from an event.
Video on demand
It was the place to search for videos of content you might have missed but wanted to catch up on. Obama’s landmark speeches were all there for recall at will, in this gigantic, free video library. If you were politically inclined, as a U.S. voter in this election, you went to YouTube. Much earlier in this year The Pew Research Center said 35 per cent of all Americans said they had watched online videos related to the campaign, one out of 10 Internet voters told Pew they had either forwarded or posted someone else’s political video.
In a country with 220 million Internet users, a host of other technologies were also accessed by voters. On election day, a blogger on techPresident.com was asking which was the single most influential technology this campaign: Twitter? Facebook? iphones? He thought it was Twitter, a short message social networking site that operated as a sort of online sms service. Others talked of the Obama campaign’s use of sms to get the vote out. If youth mattered in this election, we can assume that technology also mattered, since they are its biggest users.
If the mainstream media anointed Barack Obama as the hopeful to put your money on, online and mobile media delivered him.
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