The following quote from Danah Boyd’s recent article exploring the concept of friendship in online social networks makes me wonder how Youtube, citizen-journalism, blogging, etc will change campaign communication strategy.
When context is defined by whom one Friends, and addressing multiple audiences simultaneously complicates all relationships, people must make hard choices. Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) highlights this problem in reference to television. In the early 1960s, Stokely Carmichael regularly addressed segregated black and white audiences about the values of Black Power. Depending on his audience, he used very different rhetorical styles. As his popularity grew, he began to attract media attention and was invited to speak on TV and radio. Unfortunately, this was more of a curse than a blessing because the audiences he would reach through these mediums included both black and white communities. With no way to reconcile the two different rhetorical styles, he had to choose. In choosing to maintain his roots in front of white listeners, Carmichael permanently alienated white society from the messages of Black Power.
Because a blogger or citizen-journalist has the ability to … record a politician’s message and spread it to untargeted audiences, the politician risks alienating those untargeted audiences. Even in the broadcast era a politician campaigning locally could rely on the fact that his local campaigning would only be covered locally, and the politician could heavily tailor his message without fear of this targeted message reaching untargeted audiences. Nowadays, a blogger or an audience-member with a video camera can post snippets of video to YouTube and a locally-tailored rhetoric can seen and heard by audiences to whom the message was not tailored, with negative or unpredictable results…
Damage control that was possible in the past is not possible today. In the past, relationships with information gate-keepers could be leveraged to rein in a spreading message, either by limiting publication and broadcast, or by introducing or elevating a competing message. The media lanscape today makes these efforts useless.
Anyhow, these are just some thoughts that Dana Boyd’s article sparked in my mind.
