YouTube Politics

In 2007, YouTube launched "YouChoose '08," a centralized digital locale for U.S. presidential hopefuls to post their campaign videos and educate potential voters about each of their platforms. In these videos, each candidate used rhetorical strategies to persuade the American public that he or she was the best candidate to lead the country. Their frequent use of particular leadership utterances, however, suggested that the participatory medium of YouTube had shifted the discourse away from policies and political experience--topics generally addressed in traditional political campaigns--to a discussion centered more on image and the candidates' respective characters. Further, the "buffet-style" structure of YouChoose enabled passive political consumption rather than the active political engagement heretofore argued to be a primary feature of Internet politics. In using mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the leadership rhetoric employed by the candidates in their introduction and farewell videos on YouChoose, Church argues that the fragmented nature of the digital medium is leading to a type of postmodernized political discourse called "YouTube Politics."