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News from the Future of Public Media
Online Political Forums – MySpace, or Theirs?
email discuss Posted by Bree Bowman on Nov 28, 2007 at 6:08 PM
As the nation awaits tonight’s online CNN/YouTube Republican debate, Center Research Director Jessica Clark reflects on the changing nature of electoral engagement in a digital age. Her cover piece for In These Times explores the implications, both good and bad, of the online offerings of digital participatory platforms like YouTube and MySpace that are used to interact with voters and help candidates to vie for public approval. These digital forums and debates bring the promise of democracy, but as Clark’s article demonstrates, there are also pitfalls to these new models.
Clark provides a concise overview of how the public has traditionally received information in the past about political candidates and elections, and how, with the recent surge of online tools, this exchange is changing. As members of the public continue to feel disillusioned with mainstream media and the administration, blogs and social media networks like MySpace have become important hubs for political activity, allowing citizens to connect directly to both one another and with presidential candidates. As Clark explains, these sites appear to have removed the ‘information middleman,’ allowing the public to ask for themselves the questions that they want answered. YouTube’s partnership with CNN (as well as MTV and Myspace), have provided further opportunities for individuals to speak freely via ”big name” news sources.
Despite the opportunities that these forums promise, Clark warns that:
While these experiments open the floor for new voices and new questions, it’s not as though citizen journalists have suddenly gained a mass audience, or that voters have traded broadcast consumption for face-to-face access to candidates. Instead, a fresh set of corporate powerbrokers is now mediating the relationship between audience and politician.
Although citizen journalists are producing original political content out of concern for the future of our country, the most commonly used platforms like MySpace and YouTube have ties to major corporations (Rupert Murdoch and Google, respectively), whose interests in this content go beyond the election.
It is also questionable how representative these online forums truly are of the public at large. Questions submitted to online forums run by mainstream outlets are hand-selected by producers, leaving many to wonder how “open” political debate really is. Furthermore, submitting questions to these online forums requires access to equipment and knowledge of how to use internet tools – two factors that may eliminate already marginalized cohorts.
Clark rightly acknowledges the impact that technology has made in equipping the public with a space and the tools to make its voice heard in the political game. But she notes the persistence of systematic barriers to true public access to the political process, and calls for more than online, corporate-owned forums.
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