Outside the Beltway

Grading Presidential Candidate Videos

James Joyner · Monday, April 2, 2007 · 2 comments

This is further evidence of the Nick Yglesias thesis on vlogging. Jeff does a professional quality job–he is, after all, a professional–but the video adds virtually nothing to the post.

FILED UNDER: Campaign 2008, US Politics, Democratic Party, Jeff Jarvis, libertarian, Republican Party, Ron Paul, YouTube

About James Joyner

James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm vet. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

Dave Schuler says:

Monday, 2 April 2007 at 10:18

Your generation may be gapping, James. The reality of there being a value-added in vlogging may be irrelevant to whether it’s perceived that way, particular by an audience below some particular (unknown) age.

Is television news really better than radio? Is radio really better than newspapers? Are newspapers really better than journals? The real, identifiable benefits may be very slim but one medium succeeded the next because, for some reason or other—maybe only the message of modernity, it was perceived that they were better.
James Joyner says:

Monday, 2 April 2007 at 10:24

Could be. For watching in one’s living room, adding video to audio provided valuable extra information with little downside. Radio is inferior to the newspaper in many ways but adds value in terms of brevity, its ability to be a simultaneous shared experience, and its ability to reach the illiterate (including young children).

Video can certainly enhance blog posts. It’s nice to have a video clip that illustrates something you’re talking about sometimes. If it’s simply jabbering on about something that could have been done just as well with text, though, it strikes me as far less valuable than the text. I can simply read the same dialog more quickly than I can digest the spoken version and, as a bonus, am more easily able to retain it.