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Romancing the youth vote
Posted By katie allison granju
Jack Lail introduces us to MTV’s Tennessee-based citizen reporter, Dustin Ogdin.
Ogdin describes the project:
You asked what I hope to accomplish with the MTV Street team. My goal is to cover the issues that matter to young Tennesseans, especially young people of voting age. I am particularly interested in covering those issues that are currently not receiving much attention within the ‘08 Election Coverage. As a result, the first thing on my agenda is to hit the streets and hit message boards and ask young people what’s on their mind and what matters to them. I hope to be a conduit for their interests, because that’s the purpose of this project - generating youth participation in the electoral and political process.
My larger hope is that this project as whole, including the work being done in all 50 states, can play some small part in encouraging young people to vote and become involved in electoral politics and political issues in general. We’ve already seen the affect that YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and other other citizen-based media have had on electioneering and election coverage, and this media is very much in its infancy. Certainly in my lifetime, never has the media been more democratized than it is today thanks to digital technology. I appreciate that MTV and the Knight Foundation have recognized that potential, and I’m excited to find out what we can do together during the next eleven months. It’s an experiment for everyone involved.
Sounds interesting to me, but irrelevant to MooreThoughts, who says of the MTV initiative:
This sounds, well…useless.
The technology idea is great. I’m all for more of it, especially in covering politics. Unfortunately it’s an MTV product, which means that no one who watches it will be awake in time to vote. I assume there is a hope that the inclusion with the AP sites might offer some sort of journalistic redemption.
One doesn’t have to be an old codger to realize the relative unimportance of the youth vote. The eighteen to twenty-nine demographic, which, mind you, I am barely detached from, is good for many economically important things (such as our nation’s future), but voting in the present is not one of them. In fact, they are pretty darn awful at it.
Remember the “Vote or Die” ad campaign from 2004? I think Paris Hilton was involved, who didn’t vote. Its sponsor, P. Diddy, wasn’t registered either. Serving the logic of the campaign, apparently, tragically, a lot of young people died.
Dec 24th, 2007
