On Obama's Reddit Appearance

That's President Obama, purportedly during his Ask Me Anything session on the social network Reddit. Ask Me Anythings allow Reddit users to pose queries of all kinds of people from some guy from the show Community to Darrell Issa to the President. 

In short, the conceit is that a famous person climbs down out of his or her bubble and just gets real with the Reddit community. They get intimate. They get honest. 

And sometimes that really works, at least as well as a Terry Gross interview on Fresh Air. The sheer weirdness of the Reddit community's questions can unlock bits and pieces of people who've had to function within the envelope of their public personas. And that's cool and fun and hilarious and sometimes profound.

Think about it this way: a politician gets a captive audience (of say, 200,000 people) to pay attention to and identify with him. The audience gets to ask a bunch of questions from which the politician selects only those he wants to answer. Those he does answer, he can answer at any length and with any level of detail. There are no follow-up questions and answers, no real penalties for ducking.

The AMA presumption is unmediated access by which I mean questions can be about Anything, ("And I mean anything!") and they lack media filtering. Finally, Redditors can hit the President with all those questions that the media won't!!! 

Well, OK. But maybe just asking the question is not really the tough part. Take a look for yourself at the President's answers. It's milquetoast defense after quip after simple explainer. It's a campaign stop (or as Tim Maly put it, "a factory tour"). 

Do you get to bathe in the warm glow of charisma, fame, and power? Sure. Did President Obama give a single answer that he wouldn't to a standard media outlet? I don't think so. In the 10 answers Obama gave, there was not a single one that'd be interesting to Redditors if it had appeared somewhere else. 

Much as many would like to believe that the medium determines the message, a modern politician is never unmediated. Not in a pie shop in Pennsylvania, not at a basketball game, not while having dinner, not on the phone with NASA, not on TV, not doing a Reddit AMA. Reddit is not a mic accidentally left on during a private moment. The kind of intimacy and honesty that Redditors crave does not scale up to national politics, where no one ever lets down his or her guard. Instead of using the stiffness and formality of the MSM to drive his message home, Obama simply used the looseness and casual banter of Reddit to drive his message home. Here more than in almost anything else: Tech is not the answer to the problems of modern politics. 

This is not to rain on Reddit's parade or to deny the slickness of the Obama campaign's surprise appearance. Nice job everyone, take a bow. But we'll know Reddit has really arrived as a political community when he uses a visit to announce a policy change they've been promoting, perhaps around marijuana policy or civil liberties broadly construed. Until then, it's all kissing babies and shaking hands, only with more LOLs.