The Future of Political Web Videos

The IPDI report on Online Political Videos in the 2004 election provides a nice overview of the current state of political web videos. While the idea that they are commonly quite partisan and even ethically dishonest at times was no surprise, the point that I had not really considered was just how cheap it has become to make such videos. Given this low barrier to entry, IPDI posits that these videos will increase the level of partisanship in political debate:

We are at the beginning of an era in which disturbing and powerful videos can be produced by anyone with $1000 worth of equipment and software and moderate technical skills. Judging by the current crop of independently- produced political videos, their likely effect will be to further exacerbate the partisanship of an already polarized electorate.

As someone who is an aspiring video maker*, I fully anticipate creating political web videos in the future (hopefully in the context of working on a campaign, though it could be an amateur thing as well). In that hope I am sure I am not alone, and IPDI predicts (rightly, in my opinion) that we will be deluged with such videos over the coming electoral cycles.

But will these videos continue to occupy the outer fringes of the partisan divide in their content? I think the result of an increase in quantity of these videos could in fact be a tempering of the overall extremism that the category "political web video" emits.

There will certainly always be a ton of extreme videos. And I'll be that there will also be a large increase in the number of dishonest and otherwise ethically challenged videos out there.

But there will also likely be an increase of more moderate videos. By moderate, I don't mean some milquetoast version of ostensibly non-partisan opinion, but just not bat-shit crazy. The quality level of many of these videos will increase, and thus the extremism will cease to be the number one selling point--effectiveness will enter the picture as well.

An increase in the quantity of such videos out there will also increase the need for guidance. Certainly Influentials will continue to be a primary catalyst for promoting these videos, but groups that need to protect their reputations will also begin to serve more of a purpose as far as directing visitors to videos they deem worth seeing. As the media attention paid to these videos increase, these reputable groups will need to be more careful in the videos they choose to promote.

There will also be a ton of crazy extreme political web videos out there. In fact, their number will probably increase substantially over the next few years. But as web video rises in both importance and viewership, a market will be created for responsible web videos that can still be quite powerful. MoveOn certainly learned their lesson from the Hitler video mishap, and other organizations will choose carefully when singling out video for their visitors. In the end, I like to think that relatively responsible, high quality, effective web videos will ultimately rise above their more extremism-based brothers and become what we first think about when "online political video" is discussed.

*Some of you may remember my recent query for advice on buying a video camera. I ended up getting the second-to-the-bottom of the line Panasonic, and after buying Final Cut Express for the excellent student price I am capable of creating decent web videos for less than $500. In theory, at least...I still have to work on making them good. But it does go to show just how cheap it can be to "enter the market," so to speak.