Role in Changing Media Landscape
Beyond the content of the speech, some media coverage focused on the manner in which it spread through the Internet. Video of the speech "went viral," reaching over 1.3 million views on YouTube within a day of the speech's delivery. By March 27, the speech had been viewed nearly 3.4 million times. In the days after the speech, links to the video and to transcripts of the speech were the most popular items posted on Facebook. The New York Times observed that the transcript of the speech was e-mailed more frequently than their news story on the speech, and suggested that this might be indicative of a new pattern in how young people receive news, avoiding conventional media filters. Maureen Dowd further referenced the phenomenon on March 30, writing in her column that Obama "can ensorcell when he has to, and he has viral appeal. Who else could alchemize a nuanced 40-minute speech on race into must-see YouTube viewing for 20-year-olds?" By May 30, the speech had been viewed on YouTube over 4.5 million times. The Los Angeles Times cited the prominence of the speech and the music video "Yes We Can" as examples of the Obama campaign's success in spreading its message online, in contrast with the campaign of Republican (then) presumptive nominee John McCain.
Read more about this topic: A More Perfect Union (speech)
Famous quotes containing the words role, changing, media and/or landscape:
“Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you’re trying to escape?”
—Marilyn French (b. 1929)
“One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)