Presidential candidate Barack Obama recently made the speech of his political career in Philadelphia. Really, he had no choice; the mainstream media was relentlessly attacking him for the content of sermons delivered by his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, which excoriated America’s institutional racism. For Obama, the time had finally come to have a discussion about race in America.

But that discussion was not the only thing whose time had come. New technologies have changed the way Americans interact – not only with each other – but with their would-be political leaders.

It’s too easy to call 2008 the YouTube election, but there is no denying that YouTube is changing the game. In the past, Americans were dependent on established media for news and information. Before YouTube, if you missed Obama’s speech when it aired live, you likely caught only small snippets replayed on the evening news. If you didn’t know about the speech, you were likely to only receive second-hand fragments from friends and family.

But with YouTube you can watch the whole speech whenever you want. Pause it, skip around, rewind it, and even remix it if you want. Suddenly “the truth” is not filtered down through three or four traditional channels. You can watch the truth from home, from work, from a friend’s house. And you don’t even have to bring a bulky VHS cassette with you. The Web and YouTube are shattering old constraints.

But perhaps the most important power of YouTube in the context of this speech is the opportunity for users to post video responses. Anyone can make a video and post it on YouTube in response to an existing video. Your video has the potential to show up in the “related videos” section, which could garner you a much wider audience. And sure enough, that’s what people are doing in response to Obama’s speech.

It’s refreshing to see people take the initiative to express themselves without prodding or compensation. The people in these videos were not approached by a reporter on the street; no one paid them to spew political punditry on the news; and their views are most certainly not approved by an editor or political establishment. They are, in short, real Americans, and they have a voice and a platform that didn’t exist in 2004.

Now that’s change American can believe in.

Video Responses:

KingYayo says he shouldn’t have had to make the speech in the first place:
Papaj48‘s hip-hop response:
Cptkevin takes a realist/moderate approach:
TheOrangeCrush77 says he was distracted by the news ticker and blurts “Go Hillary”:
Vitalfinds has a conservative take:
Cuddlynutbear is not so optimistic about American maturity: