viz.

Obama supporters have been called fanatical and naive but something that we've also noticed is that they are also rather musical. MK noted the Will.I.Am video and McCain parody here and Tim posted the somewhat...let's say cheesy...response from Clinton supporters here. Starting with the "Obama girl"'s song (who, it turned out later, didn't vote), and helped along by the accessibility of web publishing, Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.

Here in Texas we've got two new videos hitting the tubes. The first attempt to argue against the widely held conception that Clinton is the candidate for Latino (and in this case Mexican American) voters:

This post is not about a certain viral video that will remain nameless, even though most people probably know what I'm talking about, and even if they haven't seen it they may have heard about the controversy surrounding it. Instead, this post is about the response to this viral video, a phenomenon documented in a recent slideshow presented on slate.com (created by Michael Agger). The slideshow presents a series of youtube videos in which people film their reactions to the video in question. So, a strong disclaimer: if you watch this slideshow, you will NOT see the video in question, but you will be shown a series of videos in which people react to it. Additionally, the videos are accompanied by a written commentary on what they signify; this commentary does, albeit somewhat obliquely, hint at the contents of the video.

The slideshow is prefaced by a brief discussion of the study of disgust, an argument that is related to some of my earlier posts about the representation of the unrepresentable:

Disgust, it seems, is hard to investigate without being mocked or without becoming disgusting yourself. With those caveats in mind, let's turn to the phenomenon of [redacted]. Immediately we run into trouble: [redacted] is a video that's too disgusting to write about. In order to discuss (and perhaps learn from) [redacted], then, we must study the faces of those who have seen it.

My (long, inscrutable) reaction to this reaction to the reactions after the jump!

Andrew K. Woods has a short piece on Slate titled “The YouTube Defense: Human Rights Go Viral” where he argues that judicial decisions, from Brown v. Board of Education to recent rulings on Guantanamo detainees, have always used public opinion as a bellwether, despite claims of strict fidelity to established law. Realizing this, lawyers for one Gitmo inmate, Adel Hamad—who Mr. Woods identifies as a Sudanese school teacher—have posted a video on YouTube outlining the paucity of evidence supporting to his detainment. After 70,000 viewings, the U.S. government has placed Hamad on a list of detainees to be released.