YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States

The 2008 presidential election provides a clear example of how new media, in its support of individual expression, can be used to support and sustain community action among large groups of people. While this election does not owe its outcome entirely to new media, new media provided platforms upon which portions of the election played out, namely through YouTube, cell phone and email networking, facebook, and blogs. Specifically, this cultural studies analysis explores the viral YouTube video “John McCain gets BarackRoll’d” as an example of a text that utilizes the affordances of new media to construct a text from other fragmented texts. While this text is clearly constructed for individual expression and makes visible and tangible the human desire to create and transmit individualized messages, it is also a semiotic construction that utilizes a series of symbols to broadcast to other individuals for whom these symbols are shared and culturally significant. Much like the role print technology plays in Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, this YouTube text, while being fluid and easily appropriated, also represents an effort toward the establishment of commonality between individuals who might otherwise never interact. In other words, YouTube videos are examples of individual uses of technology to establish community and a sense of continuity within that community through the use of shared symbols.