Research/Thoughs

I really think you all should give this article a read:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20080925_Viral_video_melds_Obama__McCain__Letterman__Palin___Couric_into_cyber-soup.html
It puts the spotlight on the role of viral videos in politics. It even makes commentary about what viral videos are doing to print media. It has interesting arguments about the way people ignore important stuff (Bush's speech) in favor of less important things (Letterman's rant) but also argues that there are some benefits: i.e. people who couldn't see the Couric interview can watch it online.
I also think you all should look at these two videos:

When I'm posting this the video has been watched almost 1.25 million times. It has only been online for a day.
This next one has been viewed almost 400,000 times but it looks like some earlier versions have been taken off so that may not be an accurate number:

These videos are among the most viewed content on YouTube and the Letterman rant is #1 with a bullet, viewed almost 800,000 times more than number 2.
So questions: what are the impacts this has on democracy? I'm assuming some are good and some are bad, but can we safely say that "viral video" culture is a phenomenon fully separate from the way we've talked about the internet in the past?

Second, to everyone and especially new media folk, this seems like one of the major stories of this election. I already have a giant stack of news articles about the way youtube videos and such have played out in other elections (especially in 2006). Should we be talking about a research project that gets at the question of viral videos? What questions should we be asking? What kind of research should we conduct?