In grainy footage lit by headlights, hundreds of anxious townspeople move past protesters shouting “We won’t Glow ” to sign petitions and join a tense meeting with suit-clad spokesmen.
Footage from a 60’s march against nuclear power? Not exactly.
Posted on YouTube, the video is the latest salvo in the fight to stop Dominion Power from running a transmission line across a portion of Virginia. Shot in Fauquier County, the clip has earned a five-star top rating for quality and a respectable 2,300 hits over the last two months.
Though barely two years old, the YouTube website is becoming a nexus for the kind of from-the-people political action that web supporters have long hoped the net would enable. Available along with the powerline footage are first-person appeals on net neutrality, some 4,300 videos on climate change and a remarkably clear, concise animation in “ecolanguage” asserting that worries over social security are overblown.
A sort of video dialog is also developing with video responses being posted to video appeals, said Robert Arena, who ran a political Internet consulting firm before becoming interactive director at the marketing firm Carton Donofrio Partners.
Even so there has been no break-through campaign on the site, said Arena. Longer documentary-style pieces are not selected as much, he noted, adding that this makes it harder for complex clips like the ecolanguage video to have impact.
“I see video as much more of a place for story telling,” Arena told The Examiner.
That idea may get a test this year. On Tuesday Public Citizen submitted a petition to the Food and Drug Administration to ban third-generation oral contraceptives containing desogestrel because of the risk of blood clots. The organization posted a YouTube video on the subject and called for women to post videos on their experiences with the drug.
“It’s a matter of getting a record of women who were taking them, who did not know they were taking them,” said Dr. Sydney Wolfe, Director of Pubic Citizens’ Health Research Group. “It is an educational means of getting women to become aware of what the problem is and the need to switch to a safer birth control pill.”
Will it work? Perhaps, said Arena
Though the 2,300 hits on the powerline clip might not sound like a lot there were less than a million hits on the videos of then-Senate candidate George Allen calling a campaign staffer “macaca.” The macaca video helped turn the election, however, because opinion makers saw it, said Arena.
The powerline clip, and others like it, could have impact too, he said.
“It depends on if the right 2,300 people see it.”
This YouTube video posted by Thomas Davenport of Delaplane, Va. is an example of grassroots video lobbying.
