Americans' accounts of Election Day

Reading about recent attempts at citizen journalism that Colin brought to our attention, I was reminded of the PBS initiative, Video Your Vote, that we talked about briefly the night before the election. I went back to look at some of the coverage they received. I was unable to embed the video but this is the link. There are 66 videos featured there. I did not watch all of them but it seems most of them are reactions to Obama's win and celebrations.

There was a link to a twitter vote report which clearly demonstrates how these different online technologies are being used in conjunction with one another. Unfortunatly, it didn't help to increase my ability to use twitter, I found the page to be quite useless actually. I guess part of its intention was to update on wait times across the country which obvioulsy no longer applies, but it was not easy to glean any useful information from the page.

If you go to the actual youtube page from there, there is a map of where videos were received from, with a total of 2241. This is where there are accounts from people's actual voting experiences. What is interesting is that we knew about this PBS initiative, but I don't think it has come up in class or on anyone's blog since. So why is that? Do we not value what everyday citizens have to say? Do we prefer to hear it from a "credible/qualified" source? I think one drawback about the idea is that we expect everyday people to give us a lot of personal thoughts and reactions that we likely don't trust. We clearly have a distrust of some professional news sources as well but perhaps there is some comfort in the familiarity of the deliverer, their earned right to be there, and some sort of attempt at being neutral. This is all speculation but I have some difficulty believing in it.