The Irony of YouTube: Politicking Cool

Abstract

In an effort to understand how the internet was used to bring the youth voter to the polls on Election Day and why it is not being used to bring that same constituent into the healthcare reform debate, this article examines one of the most intriguing pieces of online political dialogue to circulate YouTube during the last few weeks of the presidential campaign. The widely circulated YouTube video known as “5 Friends†features high-profile celebrities ironically encouraging viewers to see the act of voting as a “trendy,†even “hip†behavior. In this article, I refute the assumption that youth voters lack political stamina beyond the ballot boxes, and I reframe our assumed disengagement with healthcare reform as being, instead, a response to the absence of multimodal political discourse being aimed our way.