President Barack Obama made an appearance on the computers and phone screens of people across the country on Feb. 12 as star of the BuzzFeed video “Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About.”
In the video, the president psyches himself up in the mirror, pretends to shoot hoops in the Oval Office and even takes pictures using a selfie stick. The point? Raising awareness about the Feb. 15 deadline to sign up for 2015 health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
However, that’s not the point many people chose to take from the video, instead using it as an opportunity to condemn the president. One BuzzFeed commenter said the president is “making himself and the rest of us look weak in the eyes of the world,” and another wishes he would “take this time to do his job and not do foolishness like this.” One even declares, “This man disgusts me. He needs to step up to the plate and be a real president.”
Negative comments say the video and the president is stupid, silly and embarrassing abound. Critics seem to believe the BuzzFeed video somehow proves that Obama isn’t doing his job properly.
While the president’s chosen method of revealing this information may be unconventional, it’s not unprofessional or embarrassing. Rather, it’s colloquial. Obama clearly had a target audience in mind: a younger generation that is known for being politically disengaged. Through this video, Obama is doing his job.
One of the jobs of any politician is to communicate with his or her constituency in order to represent the people and to make sure potential voters have the information they need to make informed decisions during the voting process and in their everyday lives. Participatory democracy doesn’t work if a country’s citizens aren’t consuming the information they need to participate.
As president, Obama needs to be able to make responsible decisions that concern issues of great national importance. However, he also needs to be able to understand and be understood by the citizens of the United States. For a generation that communicates and consumes information almost entirely online, this no longer means communicating solely through televised speeches, press conferences and other more traditional forms of mass communication.
The sentiment that Obama’s choice to use BuzzFeed as a political communication tool automatically makes his message irrelevant or silly is flawed; is any form of media that boasts as wide an audience as BuzzFeed irrelevant? Its videos, articles and quizzes are read and shared on social media daily.
Obama wanted to spread the word about the healthcare deadline, and not only did he choose a form of communication that reaches vast numbers of people, he also chose one most likely to reach an audience traditionally in need of health care: young people.
People in this demographic are no longer familiar with the traditional news media. Most of us don’t watch regularly broadcast evening news or even read newspapers. That’s not to say we don’t consume massive amounts of information. But we consume it all online, and until more politicians begin to disseminate information on online platforms young people are comfortable with, we aren’t likely to begin being politically engaged.
Regardless of one’s personal feelings about BuzzFeed as a news source or whether taking a selfie in the Oval Office is an appropriate act for the president, one has to realize that Obama is making an attempt to reach out to the young people of this country using a medium they consume on a daily basis.
The future of participatory democracy rides on the youth of this country finding a reason and a way to become more politically engaged, and in reaching out to them in new ways, Obama is trying to start that trend.
Lauren Schaffran can be reached at scha7492@stthomas.edu.