•  
  •  
 

Abstract

In an effort to understand how the internet was used to bring the youth voter to the polls on Election Day and why it is not being used to bring that same constituent into the healthcare reform debate, this article examines one of the most intriguing pieces of online political dialogue to circulate YouTube during the last few weeks of the presidential campaign. The widely circulated YouTube video known as "5 Friends" features high-profile celebrities ironically encouraging viewers to see the act of voting as a "trendy," even "hip" behavior. In this article, I refute the assumption that youth voters lack political stamina beyond the ballot boxes, and I reframe our assumed disengagement with healthcare reform as being, instead, a response to the absence of multimodal political discourse being aimed our way.

About the Author(s)

Jessie Blackburn is a doctoral candidate in Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy at the University of Arkansas. Her research is situated at the intersections of feminist composition pedagogy, New Literacy Studies, and the freshman composition classroom.

DOI

10.15760/harlot.2009.3.5

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39399

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Included in

Rhetoric Commons

Share

COinS