DWP has launched a YouTube channel.  It’s not the first for a UK government department – No 10 and the FCO at least were there before.  And there is no easy way of telling whether it is the first government use of YouTube as a campaign channel – that’s one of the problems with emergent classification – but it’s a brave attempt to explore new ways of communicating.  This isn’t about grand policy or prime ministerial speeches – it’s about helping and encouraging lone parents to find their way back to work.

Various thoughts come to mind when watching them:

• This is very much niche entertainment:  one video has been up for six weeks and has been viewed 1,400 times, the other has been there for a couple of weeks and has been watched 400 times
• There is a nod to the amateur ethos of YouTube:  the earlier video in particular has shaky camera work and a self-referential knowingness – “say hello to the camera”.  This is not the style of public information films, but also doesn’t quite get past the professional trying hard to look slightly amateur.
• There is a deliberate blurring between staff and customers.  In this video,
  the Jobcentre Plus lone parent adviser reveals that she is herself a
  lone parent and a past beneficiary of the support which she now gives others.  This is government trying to act like big sister, not look like big brother.
• YouTube is in many ways a social network – it is about sharing and contributing, not just about passively watching.  Government hasn’t quite worked out how to do that yet:  on the lone parent videos, comments are disabled.  This is still, in its post-modern way, a monologue  not a conversation.
• But YouTube is more subversive than that.  The conversation is going to happen anyway.  Looking at the videos on the YouTube site, rather than embedded  here, is a different experience.  From this page, there is a splendidly anarchic list of “related videos” – starting with Jobcentre Wierdo and followed by a number of others which don’t quite toe the official line.  It is a success of social engagement of a kind – I suspect the FCO doesn’t have many related videos with their customers setting their experiences to music.  And indeed, looking at Haydon Warren-Gash, British Ambassador in Colombia  sitting behind a desk speaking straight to a static camera, his head framed by the British and Colombian flags, the semiotics point in a very different direction.  Yet even here there is a conversation to be had – viewers can add comments if they want to, though so far none of the 136 viewers has chosen to do so.