Trolling the Internets today in an attempt to make some sense of last night's
perplexing Lost episode, I came across an idea that made me think, naturally, of a new way of understanding the tremendous amount of voter-generated content swirling
around the presidential campaigns right now.
The idea came from an
interview with two of the show's producers. They were quizzed about whether or
not it's safe for Lost fans to draw conclusions about the show's
core narrative from all of the related videos and games and other supra-show
stuff available online. In response, they drew a distinction between what's "in canon,"
as they put it, and what's not. The
mobisodes, short video clips distributed mainly via cell phone, are in canon.
The
Orchid video, a teaser film revealed at Comic-Con 2007, is too. But Find
815, an sort of online gaming experience, is not. (One potentially interesting
side note -- the producers' ideas on what is and isn't canonical differs from
those detailed on the community-created
Lostpedia wiki.)
Now, there's an obvious difference between the giant pile of Lost-related
content and the tremendous amount of content we're seeing generated around the
presidential campaigns -- particularly on the Democratic side and most notably
by the supporters of Barack Obama. In the show's case, a good deal of that content
is created by people working at or for HQ (aka NBC).
But there's something interesting happening on the political front where campaigns
are making decisions on what's "in canon" and what's not. And so we
end up seeing MySpace profiles cultivated by supporters co-opted by a campaign
and videos created by a Black Eyed Pea featured as the centerpiece of a candidate's
official email.
I can't say that I have any particular insights on this front yet. But it seems
to me to be an interesting way to think about a world where the distinction
between "official" and "unofficial" campaign materials doesn't
seem to cut it anymore. Maybe we should start exploring the idea that user-generated
content can be kinda official, "in canon" or not?
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Voter-Generated Content Already Being Tapped
Actually, the idea of officially utilizing voter-generated content is already in use by a new online program called Voter Vision (http://votervision.us). Every campaign that uses Voter Vision gets a public Web 2.0 site that supporters can use to create their own multimedia messages to send out. They just register as a supporter, upload their own videos, mp3 files, and documents (or choose from prestocked file libraries) to create their own messages. The campaign decides whether or not to officially sanction the message by approving the uploaded components before they can actually be emailed out to anyone. It is just this sort of program that fosters useful voter-generated collaborations like the "Yes We Can" video. Campaigns can tap into voter creativity while maintaining a modicum of control over the image projected on the web - thereby creating that interesting new "kinda official" status.