President Of My Reality

In FDR’s day, a fireside chat was the way to impress upon the citizenry that you were earnest and accessible. Everyone could related to a fireside back then. Hell, the word hearth still has a nearly primordial feel to it. Cozy, warm, one on one or at most a small gathering.

Of course, FDR’s fireside chats were made possible by television, and unlike today when authoring and publishing video content is a click away, generating and broadcasting video back then was a big deal.

Audio-only has always been much easier endpoint to endpoint: easier to record, store, transport, copy, broadcast, archive, playback. All these, coupled with the relatively high information density in audio (music, audiobooks, lectures, etc.), make it obvious that any form of audio-only address would be well worthwhile.

Even predating FDR’s fireside chats, Presidents of the United States have been making weekly radio addresses: radio’s been around longer than TV, of course, and it continues today. But there’s also iTunes, MP3s, Podcasts.

George W Bush’s radio addresses are available as an iTunes subscription (free). If you haven’t subscribed (not just manually downloaded) podcasts before, you really should give it a go. It’s how I watch Rachel Maddow every day: my master iTunes server subscribes to the Rachel Maddow video podcast (full episodes) and I watch it on my HDTV through my Apple TV. I can’t wait to get rid of cable.

But Barak Obama is the news of the day. Apparently when President Clinton was in office, he sent “at least one” email. Ahem. Who knows if W. ever even sent one. Or surfed the web. EVAR.

Today, Obama posted his first weekly video address.

And he did it right:

• he’s continuing to make Change.GOV the go-to place for his administration
• his weekly addresses will be, as I said, in video
• he posted the video to YouTube
• he provided the video and the transcript to change.gov
• he’s provided a downloadable copy of the video in HD (Quicktime, MPEG-4, H.264)

They got it all right.

A President of the United States who uses Macs, who uses the Internet and who expects to video iChat with his family when he’s away from home.

A 21st century POTUS.