The Apple mash up didn't introduce me to Obama. It did, however, open me up to him as a candidate. The Washington Post has an interesting piece by their Internet/political reporter in today's paper.
"That video was viewed about 400,000 times before it made it onto CNN and became an even bigger viral hit. Last spring, at [Phil] de Vellis's Columbia Heights apartment, where he spent a few hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon editing the mash-up, de Vellis told me: "As an Obama supporter, I just wanted to put something out there. Look, most if not all of the talking heads on cable news didn't think Obama had a chance early on. It was all about Clinton -- how strong her machine was, how inevitable her nomination was. But online, you saw that more people were gravitating toward Obama."'While this is very true, I think the reporter only glosses over the generational reasons behind the change. Many millennials were sending our parents youtube clips. Both the WaPo and the NY Times had earlier pieces here and here on millennial involvement in the Obama campaign. This participatory democracy allowed in the Internet age is being harnessed by millennials.
We came up with the Internet and AOL in our homes and the outreach by the Obama campaign tapped into a need for "WE Politics" and not "I Politics." Online social networking was not a foreign concept and provided fertile fround for viral politics.
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Now playing: Death From Above 1979 - Romantic Rights (The Phone Lovers Remix)
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