One of the papers that I found particularly interesting at the Media in Transition conference, was The You in YouTube: The Emergence of Collective Identity Formation Through Online Video Sharing. It explorer the role of the community in forming the identity of Ysabella Brave.

Ysabella has 22,745 subscribers, over four times the number that Obama has and nearly ten times that of Edwards so it is particularly interesting to observe how her identity was shaped by the community on YouTube.

The abstract for the paper starts:

YouTube has redefined the basis according to which identities are constructed by supplanting individualism with a process of collective identity formation. On sites such as YouTube, identity creation becomes a process of negotiating authenticity and performance in public by taking into account the commentary of an audience of strangers.

My first thought was about how to use this in the political process. How can we shape the collective identity of candidates? Should we even try?

It seems as if political identities are typically shaped a few different ways. The campaign tries to shape the political identity of the candidate by keeping a tightly controlled message, illustrating the strengths of the candidate. The opposing campaign does the same, trying to illustrate the weaknesses of the candidate, and the traditional media, the Boys on the Bus, as a collective form the media narrative, a third political identity for the candidate.

The campaigns try to shape that media narrative through their interactions with the traditional media. It is all a well-known and carefully choreographed game. People know the rules and what works and what doesn’t.

Enter digital media. Now, everyone can be part of the dialog. The collective identity formation game now has a much larger number of players and takes the shape of the collective identity formation that Lui and Yusef observed on YouTube.

This raises an interesting problem that a second paper during the same panel illustrated. Craig Trachtenberg presented a paper, Producing and Consuming Lonelygirl15: Presence Play in the Multimedia Blogosphere. In his abstract, he describes his paper as follows:

this article examines how interactive storytelling through new media ultimately blurs the line between producer and consumer, between fact and fiction, and between multiple media forms. The results indicate that the converging media landscape demands new conventions for assessing how and when to interact and what to believe.

When the collective identity of candidates was formed by the campaign, the opposition and the traditional media, the rules were clearer. Now, they the rules are being blurred. To what extent can campaigns control the narrative in collaborative digital media sites?

The recent issues about Obama’s Myspace page illustrate this quite well. At techPresident, Micah Sifry writes:

as attention grew to MySpace, they [the Obama Campaign] started to worry about a potential train wreck. A Newsweek story noting that Anthony had some minor facts wrong about Obama’s biography made them nervous. And while he complied with every request they made about content on the site–keeping a prominent disclaimer stating that it was an unofficial page, removing a link to Obama’s Senate podcasts because it might be an FEC violation, culling a “friend” from a Larry Flynt profile page–they chafed nonetheless.

Trying to control the narrative in collaborative digital media sites is different from trying to control the narrative in the traditional media. The response perhaps parallels some of what happened when people found that Lonelygirl15 was carefully orchestrated.

Another data point to keep in mind is the experiences of the U.S. Air Force, when they entered MySpace. They are trying to recruit at dosomethingamazing.com. The site is not interactive, and they set up a MySpace community. Unfortunately, things did not go well with the MySpace community, so they dropped it. With that, a twenty-year old woman from the U.K. now has the Do Something Amazing MySpace page.

What can political campaigns learn from Ysabella, LonelyGirl15, and DoSomethingAmazing? Perhaps they will learn that just as people want their media to be more open and collaborative, people want political campaigns that are more open and collaborative. If campaigns learn this, then we might see real political transformation. If they don’t, we will see more snafus like we’ve seen in this election cycle.

Trackback this Post | Feed on comments to this Post