Digital Soapboxes

It doesn't have a lot of whizz-bang YouTube-friendly elements of the Diet-Coke-and-mentos variety that drive online video to the million views mark, but copyleft activist and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig's attempt at conveying a message about political reform that he describes as "insanely difficult to communicate to ordinary people in their ordinary lives" as part of a possible bid for a vacant congressional seat uses a lot of elements of digital rhetoric nonetheless, from its appropriation of the genre of the electronic slideshow to its incorporation of stock photographs to emphasize the alcoholism metaphor that is central to its pitch. You can check out Draft Lessig and Lessig '08 for more.