YouTube is only three years old, yet it has had a profound impact on so many different aspects of daily life--communicating, sharing, and watching news, music, entertainment, DIY, and other clips on virtually every topic you can imagine. 75 million videos have been uploaded on YouTube so far, while thousands more are added daily. It's a monster.
So where has YouTube made the greatest impact? The obvious answer is with User-Generated Content -- the amateur creations that provide an alternative to professional media.
But there's also an ever increasing importance of YouTube to U.S. politics. In the last election, YouTube's platform helped the Democrats win back Congress -- after a video by a Jim Webb staffer caught Senator George Allen making a racial slur (macaca) against the staffer. That precipitated the downfall of Sen. Allen -- a misstep that even had reverberations for the 2008 presidential election. Allen, a youthful Republican from Virginia, was widely expected to be a strong contender for the Republican nomination. In this election, YouTube has hosted 2 debates already for the candidates, while providing each candidate his or her own channel to post their campaign videos. The candidates have posted thousands of them, and the remaining candidates all continue to do so today.
Perhaps even more importantly, as the Will.i.am videos for Obama show, YouTube has enabled ordinary citizens to express their views on the presidential election in a way never possible before. True, some of the citizen videos have been negative ads. But at least YouTube enables people to respond to those negative ads, if so inclined.
We still have months to go before the 2008 presidential election, but already YouTube has left its mark on U.S. politics. It has forever changed the election.
