President Obama's administration is experimenting with lots of different "new media" communication strategies like a weekly video address, bloggers at press conferences and so on. Here's the latest: a YouTube video solicitation for questions.

At first glance, it's not a bad idea. But, seriously, during the planning meeting, did they really think this all the way through? It's YouTube, for Pete's sake...

We can see that they partially thought the issue through: text comments have been disabled (after 717 replies anyhow), so at least the laziest foulmouthed idiot teenagers have been thwarted from disrupting the proceedings. The only way to reply to the President's video, then, is to reply with a video of your own. Thinking this idea all the way through to the end, who do you think is going to reply? What are those replies going to look like?

Most obviously, you are going to get people who have enough money for a video camera, computer and fast Internet connection. So the minimum entry fee is about $600. That leaves out the poor and uninsured in general and every house adjacent to mine in my neighborhood. For households that do meet all three requirements (cheap webcam on cheap laptop and free wireless broadband at MacDonald's maybe), now you have to factor in the motivation and the chutzpah to shoot yourself asking a question on YouTube. This, of course, now opens yourself up to vulgar slander from every lazy, foulmouthed idiot 12-year old on the Internets, which, quite frankly, seems to be the majority of the population on YouTube. As one single data point, I'm going to go through all the replies so far as of 11AM on Monday June 29th, 2009.

216 responses:

• 60.9% young-middle aged white guys (say, 15-50 years old)
• 13.8% completely irrelevant (music videos, game videos, etc.)
• 11.1% women
•   7.8% completely irrelevant political rants (about 9/11, Bill Clinton, whatever)
•   2.8% cranky old white guys (almost my demographic!)
•   2.2% other (folks that don't fit in any of the "other" categories)
•   1.4% African Americans

Let me just admit: my methodology is completely unscientific, since I mostly just glanced at thumbnails and only watched the beginning of about 10 videos. Oh, and I'll also completely admit that the decimal point is included as a rhetorical device suggesting a false level of precision, but I think we can say that, even looking at just the legitimate questions, the vast majority (70%) are from moderate income, technically savvy white males with the cajones to post a video on YouTube. On the positive side, at least that's more representative of our population than the US Congress.

Call to Action

Right now, nearly all of the videos are of really poor quality and, as President Obama points out in his video, "Inaction is not an option." So get out your camcorder, lights, stock video and produce a 30-second video question (you need to do it TODAY or TOMORROW at the latest). While I'm not confident we here can do much about changing the demographics of the questioners ("we" being mostly moderate income, technically savvy videographers), I know we can ask better questions.

References:

• President Obama - Your Turn: Join the National Online Discussion on Health Care Reform