The largest community response ever generated by a YouTube video occurred this week, and it happened in an instant. In less than three days, more than two million people viewed one particular video, and immediately hundreds of people created and posted video responses. As of the date of this posting, with 2500 people posting text responses at the time of this blog posting on March 5, 2008.
It's not really important that the video is a political ad for Hillary Clinton using JAck Nicholson as a pitchman, although we'll look at what's being attempted with this kind of messaging.
What's more interesting to note is the way in which video is becoming an integral component of online (mediated) social community participation. We ought to ask what kind of purposes this communication can support.
Let's look at what's going on in this video. Here's the thread:
The visual contents of the video consist of clips of Jack Nicholson's performances from Hollywood films---images and dialog which reside in the very peculiarly valuable space of the collective cultural memory. This public commons is an imaginary each of us shares with one another, and at the same time each of us also has our private share of our own personal felt experience in it. We construct our image of ourselves in this space---it is where we literally learn our lines.
In this intersection of public and private reality, Nicholson remains inseparable from the character he plays in Easy Rider: an imprisoned ACLU lawyer who breaks out of his social
conditioning to become the archetypal participant in the counterculture, a cultural revolutionary. No matter what other roles we see Nicholson perform, he will always already represent the 60s social and political turn that his signature performance embodies.
It is clear from the massive response to Nicholson's return appearance in this week's video that this archetype hits hard enough to generate substantial creative participation by members of the YouTube social network.
The message content of the video is a standard one during this primary season: Vote for Hillary. Clinton's campaign takes the basic evergreen advertising formula ("if you like X, you'll like us") and slaves our identification with the values of social change to it, like so: If you like Jack, have ever wanted to go On The Road, would enjoy partying across the country, and wish to be part of a new and great change, vote for me. The great omission putting the lie to the ad is only apparent to film buffs: what happened to Nicholson's character in the movie? In fact, what happens to all the main characters?
Everybody we identify with in the film is murdered. Nicholson's character George is killed early on by conservative 'rednecks'---his road trip ends almost before it begins, and he never discovers the America he's looking for. The search for freedom ends in spiritual disaster.
Video and text response to the Clinton video wasn't, however, an outbreak of moral outrage at the pillaging and misrepresentation of the cultural archive. There is as yet no posted communication of an enraged loss caused when our most treasured memories---the ones we project on the screen of our own eyelids late at night, or perhaps in line as we wait to confront the voting machine, the images we access to remember who we thought we might have become---are wired up to the political-industrial-military-media borg.
However, there is evidence today on YouTube that such attempts to coerce us and persuade us to betray ourselves with the self-image we've pieced together from Hollywood storylines may be entirely inconsequential. The point seems to be that we're all learning to work with these memories and images too, in a vast visual and aural conversation in which just about anything is possible to be said.
What conversation do we want to be in?
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