- Virginia Heffernan

A New York Times television critic addressed not only the proliferation of online video but also its impact on audiences and other media Wednesday as she closed Presbyterian College's Arnold Symposium on Adolescence and the Media.

Virginia Heffernan, who has been a part of the Times' staff since 2003, focused chiefly on two convergent examples – video of conservative commentator Ann Coulter's controversial comments regarding Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and the very successful website YouTube.

Alerted to the video via e-mail, Heffernan said she immediately went online to the YouTube site, typed in her query, and accessed the video – all facilitated, she noted, by the site's very user-friendly features. She commented on the introductory tags – "Coulter," "politics," and even "homophobia" – and how quickly the video streamed and was ready to view.

Then, she said, she wondered about YouTube itself – how the site is only about 18 months old and already "culturally transformative." In such a short time, she said, online video has played a "demonstrative impact on art, narrative, and politics."

The amazing thing about these changes, she said, is that the practices that seem solely the work of teens and adults in their 20s are being adopted as deliberate strategies by organizations, artists, businesses, and political campaigns.

"They're beginning to get a sense that online video is not going away," she said – and the mainstream media is trying to catch up.

Online video is different, said Heffernan. Unlike its slickly produced predecessors in the mass media, online video is a product of the "Web 2.0" – unobtrusive and "kind of sly" and stealthy in the way it spreads mostly by word of mouth.

"There was no red carpet launch or no marquee lights when YouTube lauched," Heffernan said. "It was just there."

Even YouTube's site visually conveys this same utilitarian model.

"Despite the heavy-duty proprietary code behind it all, YouTube feels very 'low-fi,' very organic," she said. "… It's not very great-looking, it just works."

YouTube works also without the hassles of elaborate downloading, buffering, and advertising, Heffernan said. Instead, it delivers the viewer right into the thick of the video they search for – not introduced slickly by an announcer or analyzed by a commentator, just there for the viewer to see plainly see the video.

Video of Coulter's stab at Edward's masculinity, for example, struck Heffernan as "mean and humorless," she said.

"Nothing but real video could have conveyed this to me," she said.

An interesting side trend has emerged, said Heffernan – the response video or "video mash-up" that produced parodies of the film "Brokeback Mountain," like "Brokeback to the Future." In many of these videos, including a horror parody of "Mary Poppins," amateur online videographers have created artistic commentary on film using simple editing and their own contexts.

In a similar way, the Edwards campaign put the video of Coulter to good use – putting it on his own website and, rather than producing a response, simply labeled it "Shame on Ann Coulter."

This deliberate use of using public shame online, said Heffernan, has made the concept of "stockades and pillories much more effective."

By contrast, fellow Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton has her own videos online – very professionally produced but probably not nearly as well-known as the Coulter video on Edwards' campaign site, said Heffernan. Opportunistic campaigns that understand how to use online video may have found a key to victory at the polls, she added.

"If FDR was our radio president and JFK was our television president, maybe right now we're in search of our internet president," she said.

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