G.R. “Bob” Boynton is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. He has been studying political communication for some time, but this is the first opportunity to look at campaign communication in this detail. He has been working on the candidates' use of YouTube in the 2008 election since the beginning of the campaign and has a collection of all of the videos posted on YouTube by 8 of the candidates during the primaries, through New Hampshire, and a database of the number of views by day for each of videos of the general election campaign beginning July 1. He is collecting the number of views by day of all of the videos barackobamadotcom and the whitehouse.gov are posting to YouTube since the inauguration. Bob teaches new media and politics and global communication. For fun he does research on and teaches a course about governing late medieval England. And as an empiricist pack rat he has have gotten 200 years of one of the principal records of the kings of England online.
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Presentation Date:
4/16/2009
Presentation Time:
8:30 am
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The Dynamics of Attention
Abstract:
A predominant story about YouTube is 'going viral'. 'Going viral' is about dynamics; changes in views of videos through time. The paper begins with a question about how to move the phrase from vernacular to a concept that political scientists might use. By looking at three possible interpetations of the phrase I show that the 2008 campaign videos of McCain and Obama were unlikely to be characterized as 'going viral.' However, viewing the campaign videos does have a very regular dynamics that can be conceptualized straightforwardly and represented in a simple dynamics equation. By examining each of the approximately 800 videos of the campaign the regularity in the dynamics of viewing these videos is demonstrated. After setting out the general pattern I look at interaction between videos in the campaign that seems to preclude going viral. The final point is that an examination of the impact of exogenous factors needs to start with the general pattern to estimate that impact otherwise the standard/expected views is confounded in the treatment of the exogenous factor.
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