2,761,832 - is this a totally different game?

More evidence from the front line of the world of online politics that tests our views about whether we are witnessing the birth of a genuine, disruptive transformation of the way we play the game of politics and government, or whether we are witnessing nothing of the sort.This is how PoliticsOnline reported the phenomenon of Barack Obama's 'Wright' speech which was posted on YouTube:

"Barack Obama's 37 minute-long speech has skyrocketed to the 51st most viewed video of all time on YouTube. Only three days after addressing the Nation in what is now a historical speech on race in America, Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech has already been viewed 2,761,832 times, with 5,640 comments and favorited 9,889 times. These statistics do not take into account the number of times the video has been duplicated and watched on other sites, including Obama's website.

Viral Video Chart reports that Sen. Obama's speech has been the number 1 most viewed viral video on the Net for the past three days. Keep in mind that YouTube only counts a video as 'viewed' if it is watched in its entirety. The fact that Sen. Obama was able to keep the interest of online viewers for 37 minutes is historical in its own right. Not only are people watching the video, they are blogging about it. Sen. Obama has 54% of the Internet's 'political buzz', and has been mentioned in 976 blogposts in the past 24 hours." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLU

Surely this is adding up to more than just ‘enabling' an otherwise unchanged political and democratic process? Isn't it something more than ‘enabling' when almost 3 million people are watching a half hour political speech and then tagging it, blogging it, discussing it (nearly 6000 comments alone). There is an intensity and a level of interaction and dialogue, surely, that simply isn't possible in the world of Politics 1.0.

The YouTube piece is a feed from CNN. Is the nature of the experience of watching the speech on CNN and watching it on YouTube qualitatively different? Is this just the battle of the channels or the beginning of a whole new way to engage with politics in the first place? Does the community dialogue that the YouTube experience spawned make this a different type of experience, a more intense and involved process? What does it mean that almost 3million people watch a political speech? Does it mean anything? Does it portend something new, powerful and full of promise in the renewal of the democratic conversation, or does it not? Are the cynics and hard heads right to discount the numbers and the clever technology and see in this nothing more than an amplification of certain aspects of a fundamentally unchanged endeavour? Are we witnessing a phenomenon in which something that looks and feels so astonishing adds up in the end to nothing much at all?If it is truly different, we need to be able to define exactly how. What features of the political process are being disrupted and, more importantly, what is the hard evidence to suggest not just that lots of people are watching a YouTube clip but that their engagement with this content is part of a qualitatively different way of 'doing' politics. I suspect the cynics and doubters are still waiting to see what that evidence is and how compelling it might be.