Peter – I think we’re pretty much on the same page, but one important point to keep in mind is that the “Youth Vote” and youth politics are b.s. When I hear people talk about the “revolutionary” impact young people are having on politics I want to smack them on the side of the head to bump the record needle that’s stuck playing a forty year old tune (how’s that for a pre-web 2.0 metaphor?). Baby boomer reporters, vain politicians in full-mid-life-crisis mode, and other sixties nostalgists invested in the romance of youth and politics are constantly looking for signs the Youth are rising up. It never happens. It may not be a permanent trend of course, but the smart money always bets that the youth vote will amount to nothing or at least something very different from what those who rhapsodize about the youth vote expect. So, when I hear people talk about how Web 2.0 matters because young people are involved and young people matter because they understand Web 2.0, it sounds to me like two con men giddily planning to rip off each other without realizing that neither mark is in the money. It is a pas de deux of b.s.
If I may quote myself:
I despise youth politics. I do not consider “the youth” to be members in the Coalition of the Oppressed. “Youth Rights” is a concept best thought of as a sponge for the lugubrious rage of a handful of precocious teens and twenty-somethings who cannot find a more coherent vessel for their agenda. People involved in “youth politics” whine incessantly about how unfair it is that they are subjected to “stereotypes,” and yet the whole enterprise of youth politics is premised on the cliché that young people are somehow united politically. The terms “Generation X” and “Generation Y” were little more than secular astrology. The only thing that unites young people politically, as a general rule, is that they are — by definition — at the bottom of the learning curve and, consequently, they try to power their way uphill with passion instead of wisdom. As Oscar Wilde observed, “In America, the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.”