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YouTube and Facebook
Online Video ‘Friends’ Social Networking
Abstract
This paper examines the links to YouTube from the Facebook “walls” of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain over two years prior to the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. User-generated linkage patterns show how participants in these politically-related social networking dialogues used online video to make their points. We show a strong integration of the Web 2.0 and new media technologies of social networking and online video. We argue that political discussion in social networking environments can no longer be viewed as primarily textual, and that neither Facebook nor YouTube can be viewed as isolated information environments. Their interlinkage pattern, combined with links to other sites, provides a multidimensional communication environment which participants must navigate in order to gain a full understanding of the issues. Civic life is becoming more sociotechnical, and will therefore involve engagements with ideas as they are constructed by others out of disparate information sources and their interlinkages. (22 votes)
Comments
The approach
I would be willing to work on a team to build the "Facebook/Twittersphere" scanner that adheres to terms of service and conducts analysis during a campaign. This is a complicated problem and requires a lot of planning and work in advance. So starting for 2010 soon is important.
discourse
One challenge here is that the candidate facebook walls are unthreaded and lacking in any form of reputation/rating system. If we look elsewhere on the web, that's generally a recipe for pretty low-quality discourse. Or put another way, it isn't clear to me that these facebook wall-posters are engaging in public sphere discourse as it's usually described.
examples
pp. 169 - 172 the examples are all interesting, very interesting, but as a journal editor, I would perhaps ask you to limit the number of examples and possibly intersperse more analysis.