As you know, the CNN / YouTube debates is set to air tommorrow night and give the American public a window into, well, what America's thinking about. I'm a video presenter, having submitted seven clips, including the one that is part of the example video at youtube.com/debates
I thought it would be fun and informative to cull through as many of the submissions as possible and find patterns.
Here's what I've learned.
First, CNN and YouTube have strict guidelines. They are as follows from the debates website:
Be original -- choose your own approach.
Be personal -- your perspective is important.
Choose your focus -- you can address one or all of the candidates.
Keep it quick -- your question should be less than 30 seconds (and, in the language of your choice).
Make it look good -- speak loudly and keep that camera steady.
Provide context -- in your question or video description, include your name & home town.
Please note -- all videos are subject to the YouTube Terms of Use.
The guidelines are rather subjective, save for one: "your question should be less than 30 seconds"
They're pretty serious about that one and to the degree one can pair down a video to get under this, it stands a better chance to be picked for the debate itself. I wondered just how many videos were over 30 seconds in length, so I counted them one by one. I came up with 631 submissions that were over the limit, and some were way over, like 3 to 5 minutes -- ok, just two of them. But that comes to 26.7 percent of the total and dropped the number of eligible videos to 1,649 as of this writing.
I next wondered how many of the submissions were by women, or had women in them as part of a group or couple. The number was about where I thought it would be. There were 551 videos that featured women or had women in them. That comes to 23.7 percent of the total, and that does include the videos that are over the time limit. That means about 1 of every four submissions was female. Ideally, since women are about 50 percent of the population, you'd like to see a video submission spread that reflects the culture. We're 25 percent off here.
Now the other question is how many people of color are represented in the CNN / YouTube Debates? Well if you really stop and think about it, that's a hard question to give a perfect answer to without surveying the people themselves. CNN / YouTube did not do this, so I had to use an "eye count" and that's a hard one because taking away someone like myself who's obviously black, how can you tell if someone's a mix of, say, Latino and Black, or any combination?
Well, you can't.
But it's important to try and gain some handle on this question of racial / ethnic representation, so you know what I did? I counted all of the obviously black and African American faces like mine. I came up with 157 people, or 6.6 percent, or to put it another way, almost 7 percent of the total number of submissions. I was also careful not to include people -- like myself -- who made more than one entry. There's one guy called "antmoe" that must have installed 15 videos -- I think he holds the record number so far.
So the 157 count is a good one -- no double counting.
According to the 2002 U.S. Census update, 13 percent of the U.S population was black -- and that includes children. This is 2007, of course, but we've got to go with the best data, and that's the best the country can do right now. But that comes to just over 1 of every ten people. We're at 7 percent -- almost -- here. But I'm going to give a different take on this, because again, according to the U.S. Census, 79. percent of the population lives in urban areas.
My point is that the real number that is of importance is the one that shows the racial composition of the 80 percent of the population that's in urban areas. It's really hard to get a good number which reports this for the whole country and not city - by - city -- WEIRD -- but I can tell you that the ranks of blacks and other minorities is greater and the city is also the place most likely to contain people who will make and upload videos.
What I'm getting at is there's not enough black and African Americans in the video submissions to really represent the population in my view. But it's getting better and I think it will improve and in a short time. What I do take from this spread of videos is that on the whole the population of them is closer to than the American makeup than I thought they would be. I'm really happy about that. Moreover, as racial and ethnic integration improves -- in other words, more people realize that racism is a mental illness and will not be racist -- the improving condition will be further reflected in the video program.
But that written, if we consider that about 50 percent of the U.S Black Population consists of kids, then the number of adult blacks roughly matches the percentage of participants in the debate - just over 6 percent. That's good, I think.
See, acts like the making and submission of videos for this contest are a cultural development. But if, say, only one part of the culture's doing it, that fact points to segregation of behavior and ideas. That's bad. The CNN / YouTube debates reveal that even though we still have a long way to go, we get better with each passing generation. But I think one short-term solution is in the "team videos" that are present in the contest.
"Team Videos" are where the username -- say DailyYonder is actually a collection of video questions by different people under one YouTube name. These group efforts present different people asking questions and the range is racially, sexually, and age diverse. It's really the one practice that has contributed to what diversity exists in the debate effort.
But what it says more importantly is the desire of a group of Americans to help level the field for everyone else. That's the beauty of this country.
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