Continuing today’s video theme, an article about YouTube video clips of the war in Lebanon in today’s Washington Post got me thinking: how soon before an online video changes American (or world) opinion in some fundamental way?
Think about the televising of the 1960 presidential debate, which quite likely shifted the election to Kennedy, or news coverage of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which turned American opinion against the war for the first time. When will online video have similarly transformative moment? Not yet, but maybe sooner than we think.
I’d argue that now-ubiquitous digital cameras have had such a singular instance already — the Abu Ghraib scandal had the visceral effect it did because soldiers’ digital photos of their mistreatment of prisoners, which they spread amongst themselves via cd and (I believe) email, made the issue searingly real in a way that a dry text description could not. Video’s next?
– cpd