Obama Boy?

Yesterday Sen. Obama knocked down the so-called Potomac Primary— that is, the combined primaries of Virginia, Maryland and Washington DC. Basically, the man lofted a long three-pointer and swished without even so much as a hand in his face. Voting statistics suggest the victory came as a result of Obama’s widest demographic appeal to date. In addition to his usual coalition of young people, well-educated people and young and well-educated and every other kind of black people, he drew the support of folks across all income brackets. White women as a group reportedly remain the last bloc of Hillary supporters, although that may be changing.

Henry Jenkins is a professor at MIT and co-director of the university’s comparative media studies program. In addition to writing great forward-thinking books on media and popular culture, he is a persuasive public advocate for the rights of digital-era fans, gamers, bloggers. He defended gamers against legislative backlash after the Columbine school shootings, for example, made calls for increased media literacy with the Federal Communications Commission, and has made the case repeatedly in various settings for a more consumer-oriented approach to intellectual property. He is, as Mimi Ito put it this past weekend at the USC 24/7 DIY Video Summit, one of the “superheroes of the internet” whose work in championing the tastes, activities, and intelligence of everyday people is an inspiration.

It came out at the Summit that Jenkins is, in his words, “an Obama boy.” He explained why in a way that reflects his thinking about how society has changed in the network era. “Adult leaders tend to talk about ‘I’ but young people online talk about ‘we’ … The difference between the ‘I’ campaign based on experience, a la Hillary, and the ‘we’ campaign based on bottom-up energy, a la Obama, speaks to two different models of what political change might look like… We don’t want to go back to the centralized mindset… I don’t want a president who feels my pain. I want someone who will get us to work together to solve the problem.”

A link to the video: http://de.sevenload.com/videos/czjS3UW/I-am-an-Obama-Boy