Russian President Dmitry Medvedev started video blogging a month ago. His latest post went up yesterday (‘tip FP Passport), describing the work-in-progress on his big, formal state-of-the-nation speech coming up on Wednesday.
Depending on which candidate wins the US election tomorrow ;-) we might see this kind of thing from the US president too — and, who knows, maybe even from Uncle Steve and his successors here in Canada.
Of course, any presidential statement will be highly planned and controlled, but it’s good (especially in anxious times like these) for leaders to engage citizens on a more casual level as well as the very formal settings and official addresses.
The Great Precedent for this is FDR’s series of Fireside Chats in the 30′s and 40′s. Remember that the radio was a relatively new medium back then; having first been used to broadcast election results only a decade before Roosevelt’s first chat. (Some are available online, including here.)
Every medium has its own qualities; each requires a different mindset and style to take advantage of those qualities. The radio required a different approach from stage-speaking. Introducing a collection of FDR’s Fireside Chats, editor Russell D. Buhite noted that:
People listened to the radio in families or in groups of two or three; boring speeches could be ended with a flick of the wrist; and, as Roosevelt clearly realized, when you came into people’s living rooms or joined them at the kitchen table, relaxed and informal conversation, neighbor to neighbor, was infinitely more appropriate and effective.
Or as an editorialist in the New York Times wrote (quoted just after the passage above), ”the radio audiences like to feel that the speaker has dropped into its [sic] parlor for an informal chat.”
That one-to-one radio manner quickly became the norm for executive addresses, even when used by Winston Churchill in his soaringly eloquent way, and as it persisted through the television age in the form of Oval Office broadcasts.
A little more than a decade since the widespread adoption of the internet, we’re still learning what its special characteristics are and how to use them effectively. Interactivity is a big element, so is community, richness of experience, participation and feedback, etc.
I suspect the Medvedev method — which seems to pretend, “Oh hello, I didn’t see you come in…” — isn’t the best use of the new technology and won’t be the dominant paradigm.
What the new medium needs is not just a feeling of personal immediacy and casualness, but a sense that the person speaking is actually listening. I suspect that either McCain or Obama could do this very well — albeit in very different ways.
Radio addresses had to be conceived with the knowledge that people could turn it off with the “flick of a wrist.” Now the problem isn’t just holding attention but getting attention in the first place. These videos will (or will not) be aggregated and circulated around the blogosphere according to relevance — by which I mean specific relevance, as in the kind determined by search engine algorithms.
I don’t mean that presidents will have to fight for attention with crotch-shots on YouTube (which isn’t to say they won’t), I mean that for presidential video blogs to take advantage of the qualities of this new medium they need to point us to specific headlines, stories, proposals, etc.
What exactly is your podcast about? Where does it fit with the dozens (or hundreds) of other podcasts and posts I consume in a single day? What did you think about some of those issues and opinions? Give me an idea of where you’re going to investigate further so that I’ll have some of the same background going into the next ’chat,’ and so I’ll feel like I’ve actually participated in the development of a big speech because I’ll recognize some of the ideas that occurred to me as we ‘chatted’ about their sources.
Through that manner of making statements relevant, even if we’re not actually talking back-and-forth, there is still a sense of dialog and exchange — a sense that a leader is listening.
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