YouTube and Discourse
YouTube is a fantastic rhetorical challenge. For the June 28th CNN Debate I did a live stream, which hit my normal numbers for viewers and interaction.
Rhetorical Analysis of the Trump Biden 2024 Debate LIVE - YouTube
This was a stream I did analyzing the Debate on June 27th.
After the next day, I became annoyed with the media coverage of the debate. It wasn't related at all to the discourse we call "Debate." It was a repetition of the same discourses of the national media about issues that have nothing to do with debate. Of course, an election can be sliced and observed from many different points of view. But to fold debate into an extant way of talking about the election seems like a waste.
Debate is valuable because it is an opportunity to lay bare the way we connect observations, evidence, facts, stories, and events to our beliefs about what should be and what exists. We prove through explaining ourselves to others what the quality of our thinking is like. Debate teaches us how the speaker thinks and makes connections but also it teaches us about our own connections to what we believe. Debates are an amazing moment to blow the dust off our own thoughts and re-evaluate how we make connections between the observable world and how we feel about it.
This video blew up and I'm really not sure why. Friends gave me a few explanations, but it's YouTube - who knows. You aim for one audience; you get another. The video I made was aimed at an audience I thought I would get, the one that showed up was not who that speech was prepared for. The comments are incredible, and show how tough the rhetor's job is on YouTube.
I decided to offer a corrective and a lesson based on my own failure to miss the audience who turned up for the video. It seems to be happening again! This video is my response to the commentary and uptake of the first video.
I think YouTube video creation is the ultimate rhetorical challenge because you can never be sure who will see your video and you can never be sure how they will see it.
Not sure how to apply some of my favorite rhetorical theories to what is going on, but the first thing to figure out I think would be whether YouTube is best understood as the realm of rhetoric.
I think I'll take this on in a series of posts. There's a lot to cover here. Making videos about it seems too meta, even for me.