{"id":30,"date":"2007-11-29T03:27:40","date_gmt":"2007-11-29T07:27:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/2007\/11\/29\/cnn-youtube-debates\/"},"modified":"2007-11-29T03:28:58","modified_gmt":"2007-11-29T07:28:58","slug":"cnn-youtube-debates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/2007\/11\/29\/cnn-youtube-debates\/","title":{"rendered":"CNN YouTube Debates"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Tonight, CNN and YouTube hosted the republican complement to the successful democratic debate they hosted last June. The premise is the same: allow anyone to submit a question on YouTube, and then pose selected ones to candidates. Many would agree that this is a good step towards a participatory democracy (see John Palfrey\u2019s post about it <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/palfrey\/2007\/07\/23\/bravo-to-youtube-and-cnn\/\">here<\/a>), but some still want more. The New York Times has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/08\/17\/opinion\/17newmediadebate.html?_r=1&amp;oref=slogin\">series of Op Eds<\/a> about what a \u201creal, new-media debate would look like.\u201d The responses range from cynical to creative, with some well planned enough to see possible implementation. Here I\u2019d like to discuss some of the most thought provoking.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Kevin Kelly, an editor at large for Wired magazine, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/08\/17\/opinion\/17kelly.html\">notes<\/a> that \u201cthe truth becomes something you assemble with the help of friends\u201d and on a continuous basis. He suggests having the lives of candidates constantly documented so citizen journalists can fact check and note not only the \u201coops\u201d moments but also the \u201caha\u201d ones.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, the co-founders of <a href=\"http:\/\/TechPresident.com\">TechPresident.com<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/08\/17\/opinion\/17rasiejsifry.html\">offer<\/a> a simple and effective way to better cull the videos submitted by users: let other users vote. I agree that, in theory, this would be more representative of the population, but it allows for viral videos to overtake other ones that may be more important to ask. But who currently decides what is most important to ask? Right now, the answer is still a panel of journalists that review the submissions and try to cover the most salient issues. The panel selects videos in light of viewing all the rest, whereas a voting public likely will not.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Matt Bai, contributing editor for the New York Times magazine, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/08\/17\/opinion\/17bai.html\">proposes<\/a> that the candidates have laptops behind the lecterns and type comments that would be displayed on an overhead monitor while the other candidate answers a question. In his full Op Ed piece he provides some comical examples of its use.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Obviously, the suggestions in the collection of Op Eds were designed as fantasy; an imaginative view of what a super cutting edge debate would be. Who knows how many of the ideas will be implemented, in one way or another, in the future as more DNs become politically active and engaged in elections.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">What are your ideas for making the debates truly participatory?<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">-Tony P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight, CNN and YouTube hosted the republican complement to the successful democratic debate they hosted last June. The premise is the same: allow anyone to submit a question on YouTube, and then pose selected ones to candidates. Many would agree that this is a good step towards a participatory democracy (see John Palfrey\u2019s post about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1637,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1071,1187,879],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creativity","category-information-quality","category-learning"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1637"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}