I am always wary of injecting politics into my nonpolitical writing because something about hearing a differing opinion makes people shut down entirely, discounting all of your ideas. However, the disastrous infusion of politics + family gathering has monopolized my thoughts so much this weekend that I feel compelled to share my reflections, at my on risk, of course.
Christopher Long recently posted on the voting tendencies of the younger generation in the recent primary and linked to an interesting article that offered a possible explanation for the demographics. Based on my own experiences this weekend, I'd like to offer some of my own observations.
I mentioned before that I'm not a Gen Y and I'm at the tail end of Gen X. Just as Jim Leous noted that younger voters not having a land line has had an influence on polling numbers, other trends in communications and technology are affecting the election.
While I'm not quite in the text-messaging, land-line category of people, there is one technology and media use pattern that applies to me that makes all the difference between me and my relatives: I don't have cable. I don't get the paper.
I still stream the same television content, via Hulu and networks. I still get the same movies via Netflix. However, this was the first time that something (other than missing out on commercials) has made me feel that there were two cultures forming: not an under 30 and over 60, not red state and blue state, not a black and white, not a blue collar and white collar.
No, this was the first real digital divide. And It wasn't just about access. It was about how we use our technology, our levels of technical proficiency, and media literacy .
On this family occasion, the divide was about was sound bite vs. full text on Google search. It what O'Reilly said vs. having the RSS feeds of how all the candidates and our congressmen vote (courtesy of the Washington Post Database, if you want it). It was talking point from lobbyist-supplied analyst vs. reading blogs from Robert Reich and Lawrence Lessig. It was email forwards of urban myths vs. going to Snopes and debunking them.
I think the real difference between voters, is who is digging deeper. Perhaps there is a demographic of voters who are more likely to use technology than TV. Perhaps they come from a time when TV was never "fair and balanced", so they never took it for granted. Perhaps they were just lucky enough to be born at a time when they could take advantage of this technology.
Some may assume younger voters are being naive and optimistic. I wonder if their media use tells a different story. I think they are informed, but by different sources. I think they are skeptical of mainstream media (of television and of "dead tree media").
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