What do I think
I think the status quo is to ‘knock’ the youth of the day. In our recent activist past, youngens were criticized for their radical views, long hair, and obsession with flowers. Today, we chide young adults as apathetic computer-potatoes.
Is the admonishment of our youth not a timeless American pastime? Baseball, apple pie, bald eagles, and god-dang teenagers.

To comment on our current youth: One of the sources of their ostensible apathy may be the massive exposure to information that they experience daily. The good news is that there are a million issues to get excited about, but the bad news is that there are a million issues to get excited about.

The Heath brothers, in their new book “Made to Stick” (great read), explain decision paralysis with a study that showed that college students are more likely to do nothing when they are presented with more options: “Giving students two good alternatives to studying, rather than one, paradoxically makes them less likely to choose either. This behavior isn’t ‘rational,’ but its human” (p. 37).

Perhaps our youth just need some help focusing. As the late Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

A few questions, the answers of which I’m uncertain, but which might point us a little closer to understanding that the ‘young people are apathetic’ thesis has some pretty shaky foundations:

In recent years how many adults have we seen taking to the streets with their protests?

How many of the protests that have taken place have been void of active young people? How many have, when they took place, seen significant youth representation?

If the level of protest and political action in general has dropped – why? We need to answer that before we can isolate the specifics of lower political participation amongst young people.

Why was the cohort that is our point of comparison politically active?

If we want to see people ‘mobilised’, then we need to ask:

What are the young people who could be leaders of the mass movements doing instead? Or are there simply less leaders about.

If there are young people who could have been leaders of mass movements, but who are doing something else instead – is that something else aiming to create change and are they being more or less successful than if they had been leading mass movements?

And, if your intuitions match mine with respect to answering these questions (that protest as a whole has declined, that the past ‘mass movements’ were not less apathetic – just more mobilised, that the leaders who could be leading mass movements are instead adopting different tactics) – the question to tell us should we be worried or not is something around:

Does participation in mass movements contribute to the development of a political conciousness in a practically/morally important way?

And I think there, I would probably be answering yes. I am concerned. But I think if we try and pin the problem on the apathy of young people, and try to re-create a ‘golden age’ of political participation… we may be failing to look at the factors that really matter….

It’s somewhat ironic that we continually speak of the “engagement” of youths because of technology yet it might actually be that the ubiquity of ICT and thus unimpeded information access creates traffic that could in fact impede meaningful participation. So not only do we have to separate those who self-select to “engage and participate”, who within that segment you have to figure out who’s doing more than simple window-dressing.

As you noted, K.Bah’s talk about community is probably the most on target – and it shouldn’t be surprising. We’re all self-interested human beings aren’t we, so what happens in our own backyards is going to take a higher place on the priority list than whatever places highist on today’s foreign affairs caution list.

The term ‘engagement’ gets thrown around a lot and given the informational environment we live in, it is not surprising that people start — perhaps ironically — disengaging from material the more they see something. Engagement requires not only capturing interest, but also the means to turn the energy and passion related to that topic into action. It is here that the information revolution has largely failed to translate knowledge into action. Sure, youth are informed, but do they have the skills and tools to take the step from online vocalization to real-world action? I’m not sure that is the case very often. This is still a remnant of the misguided belief that knowledge changes behaviour. In truth, it rarely does, otherwise we wouldn’t have one in five adults smoking cigarettes in countries like Canada and the United States where the knowledge of tobacco’s harms is high.

The romanticization of days gone by when youth were highly engaged in political action is a false nostalgia. Although young people are engaging in the political act of voting less than before, the opportunities for them to voice their concerns have risen exponentially and I think this translates into a far more engaged generation of youth than we’ve ever had. That said, the 180 turn from having an environment where young people were rarely heard to where they are heard all time (whether they are listened to is another matter) has meant that the impact of a single act of raising one’s voice is diminished in a cacophony of voices. Where one might have had the opportunity to sign a petition a few times a year, youth now are bombarded with them daily from emails to Facebook. With so many ’causes’ out there, how is one to choose, particularly when they are all worthwhile? It is hard to find your place in the world when you have the entire world to consider.

Our challenge is to work with young people to identify the issues that are important to them; to harness the other motivational forces like a perceived threat, the desire to help others, professional and social benefits related to these issues they’ve identified and collaborate to use the incredible tools out there to take the next step. Maybe then we’ll see some real engagement.

There is an interesting idea here that an excess of information actually causes inaction. I think this is worth exploring further. How do we solve this problem, especially in the context of recent numbers from IDC that claim in 2006 alone we created 161 exabytes of information, or about 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written? Figures from the same study suggest that, “between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes.” Will all this information lead to even more inaction? Clearly, the killer apps of the future will be the ones that help triage information and guide decision making. But even that may not be enough.

As Cameron noted in the comment above, information is useless without “the means to turn the energy and passion related to that topic into action.” Also, I never really thought about the generational change from children never being heard to them being heard all the time, but the comment about how “the impact of a single act of raising one’s voice is diminished in a cacophony of voices” is, I think, particularly relevant in this Webified world. So not only do we have information overload, but when we do raise our voices, the rest of the world also suffers from opinion overload; both situations cause inaction. As New Paradigm continues its research with the Government 2.0 project, I think these will be interesting areas to look at in terms of citizen engagement and the Net Generation.

Also, I think Lucas and Tim are probably right – we tend to be overly harsh on youth when really the problem could be emblematic of the population as a whole. And, if everyone is more apathetic, then why? Here’s an idea, maybe it’s a sign of progress, that as a population (in North America anyways) we are generally more content with life and less inclined to complain. And as for all those “other” problem occurring half way around the work, maybe it goes back to the first point; there’s just so many to choose from that we have decision paralysis.

Another thought is that maybe we’re just too busy. Most households pretty much rely on a double income situation to survive these days, commute times in urban centers are getting worse so we spend more time in our cars, students have to work more to pay high tuition fees and battle debt, young people are told that extracurricular activities are just as important as studies if they want to get into top tier universities, and media such as TV, Internet, cell phones, and PDAs are increasingly consuming our “free” time. So, to answer Tim’s question of ‘what else are we doing, if not leading social movements’ a lot I guess ; )

Dan just pointed me towards a recent column by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times that is worth a read. Friedman is also advocating a “take it to the streets” approach for the youth of today, or Generation Quiet, as he calls them.

From the Oct. 10th article, “Generation Q“:

“Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention. And we’ll just keep piling it on them.

…That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.”

And Friedman isn’t the only one complaining about youth inaction. Reading the Generation Q column reminded me of a great rant I read by Lee Iacocca.

From his recent book, “Where Have All the Leaders Gone“:

“Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

…My friends tell me to calm down. They say, “Lee, you’re eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people.” I’d love to—as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I’m going to speak up because it’s my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I’ll tell you how I see it, and it’s not pretty, but at least it’s real. I’m hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don’t vote because they don’t trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us.”

Great stuff from a couple of great writers.