Don’t forget to tune into the You Tube debate tonight, the partnership has been done between You Tube and CNN and is going to be history in the making. Participants from around the country have filmed 30 second questions and posted them on You Tube. In turn, Anderson Cooper of CNN is mediating the questions, which will be posed to the Democratic candidates.
This is partisanship and politics like we’ve never seen it before since the days of Athenian democracy. The top-down model is falling away, and suddenly the average person can broadcast a message from his webcam straight to Hillary Clinton and receive an answer on CNN before a world audience. Hallelujah, the democratization of mass media is underway.
As mentioned this weekend, this trend is extending to wine, as this year for the first time, the World Cup of Wine will coincide with the World Cup Rugby as the wines of Rugby playing nations are pitted against each other in a taste-off between countries. Gary V. may do his bit to answer e-mail individually and factor in viewer requests to his show, but the beginning of a more two way communication medium is yet to emerge in the wine industry. As I’ve been saying, we perhaps need to see more of this in the food world. Jamie Oliver and the rest have done wonders for celebrity cooking, but has it gotten people at home cooking more, or does it just have people watching.
The Taste Vine envisions hosting online cook-offs much like the CNN You Tube debates, where perhaps viewers could submit videos featuring them planning an evening with friends, self-catering the event and then filming the results. All our viewers could perhaps respond to a menu as laid out by a celebrity guest. The key to the success of any movement is to motivate people into action. We’re already seeing this with Is My Blog Burning, but perhaps its times to step it up a little and provide an arena in which such competitions can be seen in multi-media, with more frequency. I figure that if we can get citizens involved in politics, it’d be ludicrous not to motivate people to become actively involved in something perhaps more socially rewarding and enjoyable, like entertaining and fine dining…
On today, the 4th of July 2007, I find myself wondering what it means to be American. Combing the web for some answers I didn’t find too much, everyone seemed to use the word ‘free.’ But a lot of people are free, or have freedom without being American. Being American is not encapsulated in being free because as a society the Dutch are actually far freer. What’s more, the Dutch are free from war; there have been no terrorist attacks against them, and thus they’re free from fear, which is perhaps the greatest freedom of all.
