Democracy through the polarized lens of the camcorder: argumentation and vernacular spectacle on YouTube in the 2008 election.

• Author: Hess, Aaron
• Position: Essay

Whether through its international recognition as a moment of change from the Bush administration, through the selection of Barack Obama as the first African-American president, or through the candidacy of Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket, the 2008 election will long be remembered as an important moment in US history. Alongside such momentous details lies another critical aspect of the 2008 election: its media presence. The Pew Research Center recognized that the 2008 election carried a significant increase in usage of digital outlets, and that 74% of internet users, fully 55% of the entire adult US population, went online to get news, take part in campaigns, and to share information with others through videos, blogs, and email (Smith, 2009). Campaigns were built from the ground up through blogs, iPhone applications, and social networking sites such as Facebook or YouTube. Within the campaigns, Obama supporters were more likely to utilize online sites for political organizing than his rival, John McCain (Smith, 2009), but across the board, online politicking increased.

Alongside the general use of digital media, the 2008 campaign was also recognized as being a particularly negative one, especially the tactics used by the McCain-Palin camp. Critics of the Republican ticket noted as early as September of the election cycle that McCain had taken on a distinctly negative tone (Issenberg, 2008; Pilkington, 2008). Notably, the McCain-Palin campaign was charged with inciting a mob mentality at its rallies. Indeed, in a rather infamous clip, John McCain takes a microphone away from a supporter who calls Barack Obama an "Arab" whom she can't trust. McCain backtracks, receiving boos from his audience by calling Obama a "decent family man, a citizen" (Thomas, 2008), curiously implying that Arabs cannot be either of those things. In other news clips, supporters of the GOP ticket can be heard shouting things such as "Terrorist!" and "Treason!" at political gatherings across the country ("Taking the Low Road," 2008). The coverage of these events was marked with considerable scrutiny of the McCain-Palin campaign, with many claiming that the pair was inciting a mob mentality. Overall, the nasty audiences seemed to operate as a synecdoche of McCain and his temperament in the election.

One notable location for the portrayal of the angry McCain mobs was in the video blogosphere, or vlogosphere. At the vlogging site YouTube, individuals and organizations posted videos and montages of McCain and Obama supporters from across the country. YouTube, while a normal outlet for the circulation of election news clips, campaign humor, and blogger commentary (Topcik, 2008), now contained an on-the-ground glimpse into the frontlines of liberal and conservative activism. In this essay, I examine the posting of angry mob videos on YouTube as vernacular constructions of American politicking. YouTube videographers utilize the site to assemble or visually mobilize the opposition into "idiot opponent montages" using specific rhetorical strategies; however, these constructions, as image events (DeLuca, 1999), contribute to a general political polarization already noted in digital media (Sunstein, 2007). Through a rhetorical analysis of argument as constructed in the videos, their purported ethos of authenticity, and the intertextual references between mainstream and vernacular, I contend that these videos embody a form of vernacular spectacle that contributes to polarization in political argumentation and the social alienation of citizens from each other. The videos are used to argue in ways that sensationalize election year politicking into polarized extremes. To construct the notion of vernacular spectacle, I build upon Howard's (2008) notion of dialectical vernacular in participatory media, drawing from Debord's (1994) notion of spectacle and Kellner's (2003) extension of media spectacle. To create this spectacle, vernacular videographers on YouTube draw from and support mainstream news organizations in a reciprocal relationship that bolsters both types of media and their claims about the election.

DEMOCRACY, ELECTIONS, AND VERNACULAR DIGITAL MEDIA STUDIES

The idea that media have influenced election politics is certainly not news. Indeed, the influence of mediated images and events in politics has been well documented in rhetoric (DeLuca, 1999; DeLuca & Peeples, 2002). DeLuca and Peeples (2002) argued that the contemporary public sphere is dominated by mediated images and spectacles that have "transformed the rules and roles of participatory democracy" (p. 127). In such an environment, individual actors and social movements utilize mass media to their advantage to capture the attention of larger publics. Indeed, in the public screen, "Groups perform image events (DeLuca, 1999) for dissemination via corporate-owned mass media that display an unceasing flow of images and entertainment" (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002, p. 134). These performed image events, such as the WTO protests (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002), environmental protest (DeLuca, 1999), or other playful pranking (Harold, 2004), strategically position their protest to garner attention via large media channels. Political spectacle operates as visual publicity within mediated environments and has an effect on the production of public opinion. As DeLuca and Peeples (2002) put it: "Critique through spectacle, not critique versus spectacle" (13. 134). In other words, the use of image events becomes a type of argument within the public screen (Delicath & DeLuca, 2003). However, in an era of increasing use of participatory digital media, such as social networking sites, the role of image events and spectator politics remains unclear. Social media, while they are corporate-owned and not protected locations of free speech (Hess, 2009), provide far more opportunity for individual citizens to engage in vernacular politicking (Howard, 2008). And, in the modern election, the use of such digital media has become the norm.

The increasing use of digital media for presidential politicking has led to considerable new theorizing about the role of the internet in presidential campaigns (Foot & Schneider, 2006; Williams & Tedesco, 2006), covering a range of topics including web campaign websites (Schneider & Foot, 2006), political advertising online (Banwart, 2006) and the growing use of interactivity in web-based forums (Stromer-Galley & Baker, 2006). For example, Gueorguieva (2008) analyzed both YouTube and MySpace, focusing on how campaigns utilized the websites in 2006, finding that candidates in the midterm election took to social networking sites to increase their visibility. Notably, a bulk of this research has focused on campaigns from a top-down approach, asking questions about how candidates utilize websites or other digital formats to encourage participation and fuel supporters (Foot & Schneider, 2006). As researchers have realized the interactive potential of discourse online, they have turned to how supporters and opponents use the web for political discussion and how media interactivity affects a campaign (Stokes, 2006; Stromer-Galley & Foot, 2002; Warnick, Xenos, Endres, & Gastil, 2005). In short, as campaigns have sought to include the voices of supporters, researchers have also examined individuals' use of websites and blogs for political ends.

The 2008 election saw a drastic increase in the use of digital media by voters who were seeking information about issues and candidates (Smith, 2009). Early in the campaign, media critics had already recognized that mainstream or traditional media coverage had significantly diminished compared to previous years and the "number of reporters traveling with the candidates during this election cycle appeared to be down considerably" (Farhi, 2008/ 2009, p. 29). Indeed, much of the traditional reporting had been taken online, with a massive increase in user-generated websites such as YouTube, MySpace, or Facebook to supplement traditional political campaigning. The competition for user-generated attention online between websites and candidates alike was fierce. From the number of friends on MySpace, to YouTube's "You Choose 2008" Q&A project, to the creation of My.BarackObama.com and McCainSpace.com personalized campaign sites, the Politics 2.0 found online had a profound effect on the newest generation of voters (Palser, 2008). Research into this Millennial generation (Winograd, 2008) has found that while they consistently utilize the web to find information and news, young people are also highly critical of what is found online, believing that many websites offer too much information with too many details (Vahlberg, 2008). Instead, young voters seek information that matches their own political views, arguably as a means of distilling out many of the bloated details of mainstream news and gratifying their own interests (Smith, 2009) which supports other analyses about finding political information online (Kaye & Johnson, 2004; Sunstein, 2007). Sunstein (2007) argued that in an era of personalized media, individual citizens will be increasingly cascaded toward extreme positions. In short, participatory media and user-generated content are gaining prominence, but may be pushing citizens to polar extremes in their positions in political affairs.

YouTube burst on the scene in 2005. Pioneered by Steve Chen and Chad Harley, the social media site was eventually sold to Google in 2006 ("Company History," 2009). Since then, the site had a meteoric rise in web traffic, sits at the top of all video sharing websites, and is looking to break into the realm of internet television (Graham, 2008). As its slogan "Broadcast Yourself" suggests, YouTube is a video website that provides individuals a digital space to post videos, which appear in a variety of forms including video blogs, family videos, and clips from television to name just a few. Scholarship about...