New Media Crashes the Presidential Debate
In 1960 seventy million people watched Kennedy and Nixon engage in the first Presidential debate ever broadcast live on TV.
And not a single viewer could post a comment.
These days things are different. Tonight, far fewer people probably watched the Current.tv and Twitter collaborative broadcast of Obama v. McCain - but scores of them participated, 140 characters at a time. It worked very well. You can get some idea from the 1 minute of video embedded below.
The commentary from viewers was some times pointless and at other times impressively insightful. It was democratic - or at least for those of us who happened to find out about the Current.tv live stream. I didn't know where to watch the debate until I went looking five minutes before it started. I searched Twitter and found out about this broadcast. I'm glad I did.
Was it on par with the first live televised Presidential debate? It may not have been, but we're less able to be awestruck today than we were in 1960. John McCain, incidentally, was 24 years old and just out of flight school at the time. He must have felt the impact of TV full force. Obama, incidentally, was conceived a month later.
While many websites streamed live video, the Current/Twitter broadcast certainly wasn't watched by as many people as the first televised Presidential debate. But new these new media are expected to ripple out over the world just as far at television has.
Was tonight's live online video plus Twitter coverage of the debates a meaningful game changer? Participate in our poll to share your opinion.
The technology worked well. Tweets were repeated and browsers had to be refreshed (Kulabyte, the most effective live streaming service we've seen yet, apparently was not used) but it was a very engaging experience. It was a debate unlike any other in the history of the world. It was much better than watching it on TV.
It was a little anti-climactic and it was effective. That's a good place for technology to be these days. We won't feel the same watching talking heads banter without viewer commentary ever again.
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I watched it on TV, but I can only imagine how distracting the twitter comments might have been... I bet most of them were silly and pointless anyway.
You either listen to the clowns debating or pay attention to Twitter comments... It was bad enough listening to 2 idiots arguing about non-sense stuff that neither of them had any clue about what's going on...
My head would have exploded if I had to read another 100 idiots talking about the same stuff...
I watched the Current TV / Twitter debate and was skeptical going in... but I was pleasantly surprised. At first I paid a lot of attention to the Twitter feed - perhaps just the novelty and some of the zingers. As the debate went on, I paid less attention to the tweets and more to the candidates and their words - occasionally taking note of well-worded Twitter points and counter-points which often gave me perspective on what each candidate was saying.
It wasn't an earth-shattering advancement, but it certainly didn't detract from the democratic experience - in fact, it made me feel like I was in a room with both McCain and Obama supporters - a room that I probably otherwise wouldn't have been in.
I found it enhanced the debate since I more able to focus on what they were saying since my attention was kept by the Twitter feed while they were talking.
It was too boring with just their talking but the addition of the twitter comments to keep your interest and also the interaction made it much more enjoyable.
I did get a few of my twitter comments shown during the debate and that helped with feeling that I was actively participating in the debate process.