(Originally published at Greater Democracy)

“The Revolution will not be televised”. Gil Scott-Heron told us so. Joe Trippi repeated it, but CTBlogger, Spazeboy and Scarce, among others are doing it anyway.

“The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox”. No, it will be brought to you by Kinko’s and YouTube, by Sony and Microsoft. They will sell you Lenin’s rope.

“The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon”. It will show you pictures of Bush and Lieberman.

“The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb, Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.” However, clips from each of them are likely to appear in the mashup.

“The revolution will be no re-run brothers; The revolution will be live.” It will be recorded by all of us. It will be animated in flash. It will be mashed up, spread by emails and downloaded to video Ipods.

Maybe Marshall McLuhan was right. Maybe the medium is the message. When I was young, I had “thirteen channels of shit on the TV to chose from”. In other countries, where there was one state run television, the TV studios were the first thing to be taken over during a coup.

Now, we have YouTube, Google Video, and plethora of other tools for distributing video. We have Flash, Movie Maker and iMovies to make our content.

The seeds of the revolution is everyone becoming able create and distribute their own content. We saw the beginning of this with blogs. Now, we are seeing it with online videos.