Age, Intensity, and the Technological Habits of Millennials

Last Monday, Kevin posted an interesting piece on the technology divide between Millennials, and GenX/Boomers in which he surmised that Millennials do not blog as a form of political expression to the same degree as Boomers/Xers because they are enmeshed in geographically tighter social circles that allow for daily, peer-to-peer political expression (presumably in the form of face to face conversations, instant messaging, and link sharing/wall posts on social networks).

In the comments, I wondered if the more "activist" Millennials would age into the blogosphere as their work required more deliberative formats than could be provided by link sharing on social networks and 160 character messages on Twitter. As it happens, Colin Delaney of ePolitics, in his continuing efforts to rescue the ever-maligned importance of email, pointed to a lecture by Vint Cerf positing a somewhat similar argument:

In a presentation I attended with a group of friends from the online politics crowd at The Cosmos Club on Monday, internet pioneer/Google “Technology Evangelist” (and future U.S. CTO?) Vint Cerf happened to make the issue snap into focus: while answering a question from the audience, he mentioned that he expected today’s young people to change their behavior as they age because they’ll be maintaining different kinds of relationships then than they do now. In high school and college, young people are usually communicating with peers who are nearby and living lives with similar patterns, but as they all move into adulthood, their lives will scatter and diverge in ways that often make delayed/deferred communications more useful than immediate communications. In other words, IM’ing is great when you’re gossipping with classmates, but email may be better when you’re catching up with that friend across the country who suddenly has three kids under the age of five.

That caught it in a powerfully simple and straightforward way: one of email’s strengths is that it IS asynchronous — that it ISN’T necessarily immediate, since you can read that email instantly or a week later. Of course, the same applies to messaging via Facebook or MySpace, but here’s where my personal bias connects with Cerf’s observation: I’ll submit that the thing that made Facebook messsaging useful (to me, at least) was when the “you have a message” notification emails began including the actual text someone was sending to you. Before that, when I had to click through to the Facebook site to see any message at all, I often didn’t bother. But since connecting email and Facebook (connecting Facebook to a common communications ground) made BOTH more effective, the change hasn’t led me to replace email completely with a proprietary messaging system — Facebook helps keep me in touch with people with whom I then email MORE.

Cerf's comments map nicely onto what Kevin and I were discussing. Cerf thinks that as Millennials age - and those geographically tight communities with high levels of leisure time disperse - that young people will gradually adopt more of the "old," deliberative technologies like email. It's not a big leap to think that similar patterns will be exhibited when it comes to political expression on the web. Changes in lifestyles and physical connection to social networks won't be the death of Twitter or Social Networks, but it will shift the balance in terms of how and how often they are used. If Cerf is right, then, as those geographic communities and similar life schedule disperse, Millennials would be expected to engage the blogosphere at rates similar to Boomers and Xers. Only time will tell.

I wonder if it's possible to make an analogous argument about Millennial activism and technology habits?

We've already seen that Millennials with low or average levels of political awareness/engagement can be motivated and moved to offline action via social networks and text messaging. That seems to be the preferred mode of "new" engagement this cycle, and that's exactly what happened in 2006 during the student immigration rallies - lots of people who were never particularly engaged held conversations and activated their social networks via MySpace and text messaging. We also saw this type of activism emerge from nowhere in late 2006 and early 2007 with the rise of 1 Million Strong for Barack Obama and the rise of Students for Barack Obama on Facebook.

Here's the thing, though. That kind of spontaneous activism is enabled by social media and can accomplish one-off goals, but in most instances it can't be sustained by social media to effect change over a long period of time. Today, there is nothing left from the student rallies driving comprehensive immigration reform. Such efforts can only be found in the nonprofit sector on on blogs like The Sanctuary and Citizen Orange. Students for Barack Obama quickly outgrew Facebook and set up their own website before merging with the Obama campaign. At some point, a limit is reached beyond which the effectiveness of the tools breaksdown for the task at hand.

Just a few days ago, Micah Sifry reported on the relaunch of Change.org, a website/activist hub that tried to use a social networking model to channel activism around a host of political issues. Despite garnering 120,000 users, Ben Rattray, the founder, calls the original model a failure. Now, he's retooling the site around a model that combined topical blogging on issues and a huge focus on SEO to make these blogs hubs of trusted information:

Josh adds, "I should be able to search 'human rights' and get more than static pages from nonprofits." And that's the second key part of their strategy: to win in search, they will offer a ton of dynamic, up-to-date content around key issues. Says Ben: "We want to aggregate and filter and provide context. If I care about human rights, what do I need to know, what’s going on in this space, and how do I connect to others. And the big difference is rather than have everything happen on Change.org, we want to point out to most compelling content on the web or the most useful actions. Rather than thinking of other sites as competitors, they’re our content. We want to be a media hub for social action."

That said, they are planning to do more than blog the news of the day on an issue, or list hundreds of available actions a motivated reader can take. Each of their topic bloggers will aim to provide real focus to readers. Ben says, "I don't want to see 8500 campaigns about global warming." And Josh adds, "The idea is to create trusted sources on each issue."

If this sounds a lot like what Jason Calacanis or Nick Denton might do if they cared about politics, that's no coincidence. Says Ben, "This is very much a Weblogs, Inc. strategy. I really want to own this space." He adds:

It seems like there is a limit beyond which social networks, twitter, and other forms of "immediate" media breakdown and become less useful or not useful. Beyond that limit, a more deliberative (and yes, at times top-down) technology needs to be deployed: email, blogging, central campaign structures, etc. The more I think of it, the more a "sliding scale" analogy is more appropriate. The point being, though, that one one side of the scale, among the less engaged, social networks and twitter, adn the information sharing they enable are perfectly suitable modes of political expression and engagement. On the other side, when long-term activism is the goal, they require other technologies to supplement them.

Bringing this back to the question of "how do Millennials participate" and "at what points do we see changes in that behavior," according to the 2006 Blog Ads survey, about 15% of political blog readers are under the age of 30 (aka, Millenials). If there is an "intensity gap" among Millennials in terms of how they engage in activism online - with higher intensity individuals on the blogs and less intense individuals staying on the social networks, then political blog readership among Millenials should increase as political activism among Millennials increases, right? In which case, with the huge surge in youth participation we've seen, we should also see a huge jump this year in blog readership among Millennials. Anecdotally, I know that is certainly true here at Future Majority. Our readership is up 267% for the year over 2007, and over 500% for the last 3 months over 2007. I wonder if other youth blogs like Pushback and It's Getting Hot in Here have seen similar growth patterns. Likewise for some of the bigger community sites such as Daily Kos, MyDD and Open Left.

This is all, of course, only scratching the surface of this issue. Time and data will tell us some answers (as will a 2008 Blog Ads reader survey . . . ). I expect this will be one of the larger questions we look at consistently over the next year, especially as it applies to motivating young people to action around specific policy proposals in Congress.