Linking Unit Structures
Posted 6/19/2008 04:49:00 PM |
The last few emails I've received from Barack Obama have been accompanied by a short video. In the videos, Obama appears in front of a dark backdrop, with a tight camera shot - just like Ze, without all the cuts. These videos evoke a personal conversation - Obama often introduces himself simply as "Barack," the dark background offers no distractions or location information, and they're usually kept to a minute or two. They're very reminiscent of a hallway conversation - as if you just bumped into Barack and he wanted to catch up.These strike me as fireside chats for the digital era; Obama's team seems to understand this by only deploying them in "big news" situations. What is most interesting is the personal connections these videos can forge. While Obama is clearly broadcasting, the video retains a personal feel, as if the potential president dropped by for a chat. I wonder how such an approach would transfer to the oval office. Now that the YouTube "Gotcha" clip is passe in digital politics, I'll be very interested to watch how this particular video strategy evolves.
In other news, The awesome adaptation of privacy-encroaching technology award goes to "teenagers" who are now using Google Maps to find backyard swimming pools, and Facebook to organize illicit dips in said pools.
ABC News runs a piece entitled Will GPS Make Us Dumb? Terrible title, but just like we've forgotten phone numbers and CD track titles, what elements of the spatial experience will go away when we've got persistent positional data? With modern transit we've moved to a place-to-place mentality - is GPS the death knell for the pass-through areas? On the other hand, one might argue that positional data stands to create new interest in the areas we used to just pass through - you might have never known great tacos were just two minutes off that random exit on the freeway.
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