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The 'Vicious' World Of Political Animation
by Sarah Lai Stirland
Eric Blumrich was disappointed last year when an anti-war demonstration that he attended in New York City did not garner widespread media coverage. Instead, he said, the event prompted an on-air slur about its participants from conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh.
The comment angered Blumrich, so the 33-year-old freelance Web developer from Montclair, N.J., decided to act. He created a three-minute animation featuring photographs of the anti-war protest, a well as the cyberspace equivalent of an activist pamphlet with images of deformed and injured children and the caption, "Your tax dollars at work." He later posted more animations and links to online games, cartoons and sites that offer downloads of political documentaries.
As of late last week, the site had recorded just less than 8,000 unique visitors a day, Blumrich said. And Technorati, a service that tracks the influence of online content by counting the number of links to online journals known as Web logs, or blogs, shows at least 635 links to Blumrich's content from 395 other sites.
His is one political voice in a growing multimedia cacophony that has taken independent campaigning high-tech and online. The Institute for Politics, Democracy and The Internet recently documented the phenomenon in a report that explores the use of Web videos in the 2004 presidential campaigns.
The institute found that the angry and polarized electorate's sentiments have manifested themselves through online creations that Carol Darr, director of the institute, said often are "beyond the pale." "Spurred by the advent of inexpensive digital film equipment and widely available broadband, amateur videographers have discovered a new and particularly effective vehicle for venting their political spleens," the authors of the report wrote. "These activists have produced fiery and sometimes downright vicious political commentary."
Bipolar America
Although two-thirds of the videos collected by the institute criticized Bush, such sites are not limited to any particular political view. Anti-Kerry efforts include the parody site Kerrycore.com and Crushkerry.com. The organizers of those sites did not respond to requests for interviews by press time.
Blumrich uses a suite of standard desktop publishing tools to compose the short animations. The commercial value of the software he uses amounts to about $855. He pulls photographs for his animations off the Yahoo and Google news and image search engines. The music in the animations mostly come from his personal collection of compact discs.
He does not apologize for the nature of the site and added that his push to stir political passions is constructive. "What's wrong with polarizing people?" he asked. "If people get polarized enough, maybe they'll get incensed enough to vote. People need to be polarized."
But Darr worries about how such content may both incite the electorate and widely spread misleading information that further pushes people apart. The distinguishing feature about successful Web video and animation campaigns is their viral nature, or the rate at which the information spreads around the Web.
"When you get videos that are clever and entertaining, people forward them on, so whatever viral messaging a campaign has, these [animations] increase that effect and spreads the message like wildfire," said Alan Rosenblatt of e-advocates, a Washington-based Internet and grassroots advocacy consulting firm.
But the research at Darr's institute shows that online videos gain traction by being mean: the nastier a video, the more traction it has. Darr also notes in the institute's report that a previous survey shows that the majority of people who find and forward material on the Internet are opinion makers with more influence because of who they are and the size of their social networks.
"Things have become increasingly partisan, and these videos are an expression of this partisanship and frustration -- but they also fuel it," she said.
No Appreciation For Parody
One of Blumrich's animations illustrates the point. The "Equal Time" video shares some of the critical e-mail that his work has provoked. One e-mail says he sounds like a "commie." Another calls him a traitor and calls for him to be "deported to Iraq."
Darr worries that once the online animators and Web video creators hone their techniques and find that they have a large audience for their handiwork, the next step will be to sell their work and skills to political operatives in both major political parties.
"These operatives will buy these videos and micro-target us and fragment our parties even further," she predicted. "They'll hit my hot buttons, and they'll hit your hot buttons."
Some people downplay that sort of prediction, arguing that it would hard for the United States to become any more divided than it is now.
John Wooden, a satirist in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the proprietor of GeorgeWBush.org, a popular site that parodies the Bush campaign, notes that emotions already are running pretty high among his readers He receives nasty e-mails, and the level of emotion powering them is "off the charts," he said. He calls the emotion fueling the mail "Internet rage" that is akin in intensity to road rage.
Wooden said another indicator of the level of partisanship right now is the fact that so many people do not get the joke of his site when they visit. "The campaign ads on our site were written to be preposterously over the top, but we still get mail from people who say: 'I can't believe the campaign condones this sort of thing. You've just lost a vote," he said. "It reflects how nasty and over the top the current campaign is."
In Search Of The Young Voter
Political communications and outreach professionals say Web videos and animation have become an important tool to galvanize action and to communicate with potential voters they might not otherwise be able to reach.
Jeff Hauser, political director at the National Jewish Democratic Council said his organization's online animation campaign has been successful in publicizing viewpoints. He said 5,000 people have joined the council's mailing list as a result of the campaign. The council launched the campaign initially to reach voters younger than 30 that Hauser said are more difficult to reach offline because they move regularly, rely on cellular telephones and do not watch television commercials.
The key to developing successful Web animation or video campaigns is to keep the pieces short and entertaining enough to provoke people to forward them to friends, said a staffer at the issues-oriented graphics design firm Free Range Graphics. It also helps to use cultural references that the intended recipients grasp, she said. Free Range has produced online campaigns for Democratic presidential candidates Howard Dean and Kerry, the Democratic National Committee, and for California gubernatorial candidate Arianna Huffington.
For his part, Blumrich believes his online campaign has been so effective that he has relinquished -- for now, at least -- the paper-based pamphleteering that he usually did for the Green Party around election time. Given a choice between reaching a few thousand people online and a few individuals in person by going from door to door, he has opted for the former.
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