Think young people don’t care anymore about politics? Think again.

Here’s a chunk from a New York Times story this morning that shows how the YouTube generation are finding, digesting and sharing political information with friends and contacts. Essentially, they are making news that interests and stimulates them part of their social web and hence one story – that could have been buried in the fishwrap of yesteryear – can now take on the same linked import of even the silliest online meme.

The NYT writes:

Senator Barack Obama’s videotaped response to President Bush’s final State of the Union address
— almost five minutes of Mr. Obama’s talking directly to the camera —
elicited little attention from newspaper and television reporters in
January.

But on the medium it was made for, the Internet, the video caught fire.
Quickly after it was posted on YouTube, it appeared on the
video-sharing site’s most popular list and Google’s
most blogged list. It has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, been
linked by more than 500 blogs and distributed widely on social
networking sites like Facebook.

In the same way that some journalists surprised to discover that stories they wrote six or seven years’ ago are suddenly being read and shared all over again (I like to think of this as the half-life of information online), so today’s news (and often stories that Generation Y thinks the mainstream media underplays) are being given new importance and exposure by the social web.

- Matthew