From today’s Crikey email:
My first reaction to Howard’s YouTube policy announcement last week was to dismiss it as exemplifying the failure of the Liberals to understand the potential of web 2.0 for political campaigning.
After all, there’s no sign that either the Libs or Labor are utilising the medium in the way that American candidates are – contrast their “address to the nation� style with Hillary and Bill’s Sopranos parody on YouTube.
The best uses of social media in the States have been those which have sought to open a conversation and do so with more than a hint of humility and self parody, allowing the viral potential of the message to come into its own.
Reflection suggests, however, that Howard is actually using social media rather cunningly – but to play the mainstream media rather than appeal directly to the “YouTube generation�.
Howard’s YouTube Devonport Hospital video created some early buzz for his visit later that day to Tasmania, and contributed to shifting media attention from the beleaguered Immigration Minister’s defence of Haneef’s visa cancellation.
More generally, Howard is using YouTube similarly to his manipulation of talkback – announce the policy, avoid the press conference and the hard questions. The youth/new media angle also reinforces his attempt to refocus his image towards that of a strong, decisive leader, and to deflect criticisms that he is aging and out of touch.
Social media is Howard’s 21st century talkback radio. He can both amplify his message and control its reporting.
This strategy enters a new dimension this week with Howard’s offer to take questions and respond with “personalised� video responses via Yahoo!7’s Answers website.
The publicity for this online version of Question Time has been via traditional rather than new media – raising the question of whether it’s really targeted to the Gen Y and Gen X voters who’ve deserted newspapers and TV current affairs en masse.
Given that there’s a broad perception that the Young Liberal and Young Labor junior apparatchiks have moved on from the traditional talkback phone trees to being alerted via email to post comments on MSM “blogs� and vote in online polls, there must be some degree of suspicion about how spontaneous the questions will really be.
There’s a clue to the actual strategy for new media in Howard’s explanation of why he hasn’t entered into a friends competition with Rudd on Myspace. Howard has claimed he “didn’t want to lend his identity to a commercial organisation�. This is bizarre.
What is Yahoo!7 if not a commercial organisation? What is talkback radio? It’s probable that the actual play here is not to prepare the ground for genuine engagement with younger voters, but to keep the online message as tightly controlled and managed as possible to affect its real target audience – the Canberra press gallery.
Many thanks to Daniel Robertson for his heads up via Facebook.
Update: The questions for Howard can be found here.
I fully expect a diverse range of probing questions to be answered. Like this one:
After the election is over it’d be worth doing an analysis (if possible?) of the impact of things like MySpace and Facebook and YouTube. This post suggests to me that these things aren’t having the democratising effect that it’d would’ve been assumed they would have.
oh yes, of course Mark, the JWH on youtube thing is very clearly all about the press coverage of JWH on youtube.
Although I have to admit I’ve enjoyed seeing Howard’s videos exposed to youtube commenters - as Belle Waring said, “reading YouTube comments is like tapping into the mainline of pharmaceutical-grade moron.”
See xkcd on youtube commenters as well…
There are some interesting questions for him on Answers, and some Dorothy Dixers too, Laura.
Update: The questions for Howard can be found here.
youtube’s finest:
I’ve just posted my five questions for Howard at my blog, but was disappointed to find that I can only enter one of them! If any readers with a Yahoo account want to help me post all five questions, I think they should go down very well.
You Tube certainly tapped into the deep and considered well of online discourse at its finest during the recent US presidental debates.
Poor Anderson Cooper….
But back to Howard, I agree, it looks like he is attempting to use the Toobs to reach around (Anderson would like that) the press gallery, in fact they loved his Tubular bells and whistles and of course only they would know how to judge the effectiveness of that….because they own it.
#644: Have you ever apologised for anything?
Democracy isn’t dead, Laura!
I think they’re all going to wind up with a problem with this one.
One of the advantages in dealing with the mainstream media (or your own website) is that it’s not easy to quantify your ducking and weaving, if you do it well enough.
In this kind of forum, it’s going to be pretty easy to quantify how many questions have been asked and directly answered, if someone wants to put in the time and effort.
Even leaving aside the Dorothy’s and the obvious cheap shots (”Why don,t you retire and save yourself from a devastating defeat ?”), it’s going to be pretty difficult to judge which questions are the best to answer - and I’d suggest that a “PM ducks the hard questions online” headline is somewhere in his near future.
It would also be interesting to know who’s going to be organising it all for him: these are pretty clearly about the election (check the section the question is listed in), so I wonder whether it’s the PM’s office or the Lib’s campaign office who is doing the work…
I’ve got a feeling that he’s subcontracted all this stuff out to someone who has at least some idea of what they’re doing, Nick, in answer to the last question.
The point about the looming headline re ducking the hard questions is a good one.
But even supposing he actually does answer these questions (and I don’t suppose for a minute that will ever happen) he will of course just do exactly what he does when interviewed on the 7.30 report or whatever, and say whatever he feels like saying rather than actually *answering* what he’s been asked.
The format’s a bit different though. He’s going to have to appear more responsive. Otherwise it’ll be a complete own goal. I suspect that will be facilitated by the selection of the questions.
“Democracy isn’t dead, Laura!”
Mark, i think that world travellers comments are is in praise of ‘marginalocracy’.
Howards stunning new style of government.
Heh!
Either that or employ his other stock response: dig in heels, stick out bottom lip, and say petulantly ‘Well, I reject that.’
My question for him is ‘How do you sleep?’ but I bet someone has already asked that.
Its not really appropriate, but I immediately thought of Rainier Wolfcastle :
” On a pile of money, with many beautiful women.”
If you’d like to ask me a question, leave your answer below and I’ll come back with some responses. I look forward to hearing from you.
So to give a question, you click the “Answer this Question” button, and the “List of Answers” is actually a list of questions.
So Howard doesn’t need to answer the question, because it’s already been answered already by posing the question. Or am I being too cynical?
What a dogsbollocks of a site.
This immediately brought to mind a recent incident in which I accidentally crossed paths with Howard in Tasmania. He was expected at a fundraising dinner next door to our hotel. I had 10 minutes on the footpath to figure out whether to shout at him when he arrived. (There was no one around except police and an ABC camera crew). Of course whatever I said would have no impact on him at all but if I could contribute just a few seconds of momentum to surrounding him with a sense of anger and protest, why not? I considered saying something about Tasmanian forests, then same-sex marriage, then decided to go with: “Get Australian troops out of Iraq”. I managed to shout it twice in the time it took for him to sweep from the passenger seat straight in the door.
An officer said to me, “I don’t think he heard you”. Which probably sums up the You Tube questions site too.
Down and Out, I agree - where are the answers to the questions? maybe the questioner gets a private email in response.
That’s funny su. Funny that the ossifer told you that the little man (being hard of hearing an all) didn’t hear you. I’ve heard it said that the best way to ‘throw’ an evil entity is to say something unexepectedly banal. In Howard’s case. “Gosh. I had no idea you were so short.”
As indicated in the linked SMH story, suz, questions will be selected and he will “answer” them later this week.
Exactly five questions, according to the SMH, out of god knows how many. Since most of them are going to end up ignored, I doubt it’s going to gain Howard many votes. Mark is absolutely right: it’s to impress the press gallery.
If anything you’d think it would piss off people who aren’t political hacks who’ve genuinely gone to the time and effort of posing questions.
Only five questions? Sheesh, I guess there’s no point asking him if he’s worried that one of his
Death EatersMinisters is going to knife him, then.Incidentally, seeing as I’m one of the few people in the cosmos who hasn’t seen The Sopranos, could some kind soul please explain in what way the Bill and Hillary YouTube video is a Soprano’s parody? Thanks.
Greg@4.37: Mine would be “when are you going to stop lying to the Australian people?” (based on the oldie “when did you stop beating your wife”, etc).
Lomandra, I think it’s parodying a part of the sixth series not yet shown here in Oz, so I’m reluctant to go into spoiler land. But really, you should go to the dvd store and rent all five series so far just for your own enjoyment!
Suz, I like your story about shouting at Howard. Could be a whole thread in it!?
In my case, he came to do a radio interview in a building where I worked. I considered a variety of options, including blockading the street with my car just to delay his next appointment. But then, strangely, when I suddenly saw him coming down the corridor, I just stared and said nothing.
What stopped me in my tracks was the crazy look in his eyes: it was kind of pathetic. Shouting at him would have felt like harrassing a mentally ill person. His eyes were fearful and darting, but his body language was desperately trying to convey his sense of self-importance. It was sad, in a deeply disconcerting kind of way.
Afterwards I wondered why I didn’t say anything, and I realised that making a point to Howard himself (again, there was nobody else but some bodyguards) would have been of minimal importance, because Howard himself is not really the problem. It’s the people who put him there, the system which kept him there, the people who voted for him time and again. They are the ones we should be shouting at.
The best punishment for Howard (assuming he is not going to The Hague) would be if everyone just wrote him off as a miserable failure, yesterday’s man, a whiny little shit who took the country nowhere. And just ignored him and forgot about him and moved on to better things.
I see Warwick Capper is now doing his own porno flicks - I wonder what desperate measures a post-PM Howard might not stoop to in order to get attention?
It’s as if Howard is creating his own idealised version of the YouTube Debate - where he picks which questions he answers, doesn’t have Kevin Rudd or anyone else critiquing his responses, and can ignore anyone who raises a legitimate issue. And from the sound of it, the end result is going to be the same as his previous online adventures - a one-way conversation where the stuffy old (dishonest) man spins some bullshit and then sticks it online to show how he’s embracing the future.
But just as the YouTube comments become something out of Howard’s control, I think this Yahoo Answers thing has the potential to get away from him as well. All of the questions he has been asked are available to see - if he chooses simple ones and ignores the insightful questions, he can be called up on it by the media and the bloggers.
In the run-up to the election it’ll be interesting to see whether Howard manages to get his head around the fact that by taking his message online, he is going into an environment where others have an equal voice but with greater numbers to shout down his weasel words.
Gandhi you prompted me to wax lyrical.
A very perceptive analysis, Ken.
That’s a brilliant description of what he looks like all the time.
Although anecdotes of his childhood days do not support it, I cannot help but thinking of Howard as the little runt in the schoolyard who was so scared of the big kids that he set himself up as a bully, with his own gang of minders constantly at his shoulder.
He seems to have been living with fear throughout his life, as his constantly trembling, saliva-soaked bottom lip attests. Whenever someone challenges him, or puts inconvenient facts in his face, his eyes get big behind the bifocals and you really sense that he might burst into tears at any moment if we all don’t just let him have his way.
A sad little man who was never suited to the cameras, and certainly has no future in the online video industry!
Sai Gon, the question you’re answering is “Do you have a question for the Prime Minister?” Yeah, it’s silly to have an answer that’s itself a question.
Re: Link’s above “best way to ‘throw’ an evil entity is to say something unexepectedly banal” …
I once found myself momentarily in Paul Keating’s immediate orbit, during the time of Hewson. I had one shot, I asked him what his first car was.
For a nanosecond he was ever so slightly thrown, enough for me to slip him my spirex notebook open at a blank page, no pen. I suggested a marque that was plausible for a young manager of a rock and roll band of his time, and he said “Yes it was”
Cufflinks twinkled in the sun, exquisite Zegna lining flashed briefly as he reached for the Mont Blanc in the inner breast pocket, and he said:
“What’s your name?” in a tone I can only describe as good-natured contempt, and I told him, and he said “You’d be a celt, wouldn’t ya”, ( pronounced with a hard c, and a pronounced t) and I said “Has Skippy got ticks?” and he laughed, and it was good.
Reminds me: must go and dig out said spirex.
Say what you like about Keating, at least he had a sense of humour. So did Hawke, who I met once at a press club dinner in Canberra - the experience was totally unlike bumping into Howard. Hawke even called me “mate”! (sob)
Hawkie called everyone mate, I think, gandhi. I met him once and the force of his personality combined with his small stature and very large cigar was quite overwhelming.
Well, that explains why he never returned my calls!
