MySpace's Presidential TownHalls: YAOD or Something New?

The ongoing collision of technology and politics opened another chapter today with this morning's announcement by MySpace.com that it will be hosting a presidential "Town Hall" series on college campuses this fall featuring nearly all of the major presidential candidates. Viewers will be able to submit questions by MySpace instant messenger and watch live via a MySpace webcast. Participating candidates include Brownback, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Giuliani, Hunter, McCain, Obama, Paul, Richardson, Romney and Thompson.

“This won’t be the stale debate format with one moderator getting canned answers to the same old questions,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, in a press release (I'll link to it when it's up). “Our users will have the chance to get direct answers to the questions they want to ask – unfiltered.” Tom Anderson, president of MySpace (which is not the same thing as President of the United States), added, "MySpace is remaking the mold for political interaction online."

Indeed, when you add this to the announcement by the giant social networking site of a virtual primary to be held on the site January 1-2, 2008, it does feel like something seismic could be happening. MySpace also announced that it will be launching a series of monthly straw polls to gauge where the candidates stand leading up that primary.

But is YAOD (yet another online debate) really that path-breaking? After all, it's not unusual any more for candidates to take questions live from readers or viewers emailing or calling them in. In my humble opinion, we'll know that the "stale debate format" has really been remade when the host for the discussion creates some real feedback loops that really puts the audience in the driver's seat and helps harness the wisdom of the crowd watching. That means not just submitting questions in the hopes that yours might be picked--a pretty low likelihood, you have to admit.

What I'd like to see is the viewers not just trying to ask questions, but also being able to judge--individually and collectively--the quality of the candidates' answers, and to see each other's cumulative judgment in real time. Did X actually answer the question? How responsive was Y? Let's see a big website offer its users that kind of power, and you'll see a new window open on American politics, because right now "debates" are little more than joint photo opportunities where candidates come to recite prepared talking points regardless of whatever questions they are asked.

Come to think of it, let's also enable the audience to rate the questions too. Was A a good question? Did your concerns get adequately raised by B? Half the time I watch "debates" I am just as pissed off at the questioner for asking inane softballs as I am with the non-answers I hear. Let's help the audience train itself to ask better questions too!

And as far as straw polls go, whoop-de-doo! Surely in this day and age we can do better than just another horse race measure? How about asking MySpace users what issues they'd like to see addressed in the campaign, and then whether they think the candidates are addressing them adequately.

There is a new kind of democracy waiting for us around the corner of Web 2.0, but right now it's hard to say exactly what it should look like because it's hard to describe a product you want that you've never seen. Or, as Henry Ford supposedly said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." If MySpace wants to reinvent debates for the digital age, it's time for them to open up a conversation about how best to do that. If not, it will be tempting to say that all they're doing is chasing a little media buzz for their admittedly already hugely popular site.

I put all these questions to Jeff Berman, is Senior Vice President for Public Affairs and the person overseeing the new presidential Town Halls and he was quite responsive, noting that the whole concept was a work in progress, or as he put it, “We’re leaving the cement a little bit wet on this. What the community wants will help determine how we do these.”

Regarding creating a feedback loop for participants and viewers, he said:

In terms of the participants in the town halls--particularly online--to have some live rating system, we’re trying to figure out a number of different possibilities and to figure what is possible given our scale and what the live audience may be. We are firmly committed to making these Town Halls available to the community to consume and play with as they choose.
We will make the debates available so people can download and manipulate them ourselves. We think that is a different approach than anyone has taken with this stuff. For example, the ability to pair the answer Barack Obama gives to the same question Hillary may get would be really interesting.

And on the new MySpace straw polls he added:

Here’s what we’re doing. There will be a monthly horse race question but there will be a daily poll question that we’re adding as well, and I’m quite confident we’ll be asking people which of the following issues you want to see the candidates address in a town hall or on their MySpace page or who handled an incident that happened that day best…
We’re going to get really creative with this. We’re really well set up with to take inputs from the community on everything we do, including what questions to pose. This is going to live past that night. By cutting stuff into clips and letting you comment and rate the clip, the same way you can rate a video, we’re going to get that. It may not be instantaneous, but you may want to let it evolve over time. If the day after the Giuliani town hall I’ve got 17 clips broken up on the site and we’re taking comments and we’ve got a live forum going around three of them, there may be a raging debate over whether he answered the question and you could have a really robust discussion going.

I think Berman is right, but I think we should also push MySpace to do more than just use these debates as a snazzy way to get themselves into the news. They have a chance to really reinvent not just the format of presidential debates, but the whole form.

While it's true that the people formerly known as the audience are talking back, they still lack the ability to talk to each other in a salient way. Merely letting a thousand flowers bloom may produce a lot of video that people consume on MySpace's advertiser-happy web pages, but it may also just produce more cacophony unless people like Berman, deWolfe and Anderson really think hard about how to make e-democracy a reality. Shall we help them out?