colbert

From Chris Orr at TNR’s The Plank

Scientific proof that it is no longer possible to satirize the GOP:

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert’s political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

So when I’m pretending to be Pat Buchanan or Noam Chomsky in class to get a response from students, the ideological ones think I’m serious?

Not sure if it has academic value, but it sure makes me laugh!

Actually I don’t know of a public figure that has been as public (if you can call anything Colbert’s character does as “public”) about remixing his creative content. The possibilities of the peer to peer revolution are apparent when we talk about creative/artistic content, but the prospects for political content are harder (not impossible) to find. They do exist (go to the Sunlight Foundation’s page for some good examples). But these projects need mainstream vehicles to promote their existence.

I hope that in the coming months we see some creative (and public) remixing of Obama’s creative commons content. Annotating the material on WhiteHouse.gov and the newly created recovery.gov with annotation tools like Diigo or a mashup of where stimulis money is going using Google Maps might provide some useful results.

BTW….speaking of here is an interesting slideshow tracing the evolution of WhiteHouse.gov. HT: James DeHaan