Generation Q

If you have followed Future Majority over the last couple years, you will recognize that Thomas Friedman's hit piece on Millennials, labeling them "Generation Q" for being too quiet, serves as the foundation for many a post. His Boomer paradigm interferes with his ability to understand how Millennial activism differs.

Friedman argues that Millennials may be "too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good." The problem most of us had with Friedman's writing was that he was unable to see that one could be mad, could be online, and could be productive all at once. Another issue was the power Friedman ascribed to symbolic and yet meaningless acts. What good is chaining one's self to a bulldozer actually going to accomplish long-term? Very little.

With that in mind, we now have some more information regarding college students' heavy use of social media, and it is easy to see how our activism has changed course. The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland released a study revealing the considerable depth of students' connections to social media.

200 University of Maryland (College Park) students, as part of a class assignment, were asked to abstain from all media for 24 hours straight. Following this time window, they were then asked to describe their experiences in private blogs. Perhaps the most interesting nugget of information this study yielded was just how interwoven social media has become in 18-21 year olds' lives.

"The students did complain about how boring it was go anywhere and do anything without being plugged into music on their MP3 players," said Moeller. "And many commented that it was almost impossible to avoid the TVs on in the background at all times in their friends' rooms. But what they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, email and Facebook, meant that they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away."

"Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."

The student responses to the assignment showed not just that 18-21 year old college students are constantly texting and on Facebook -- with calling and email distant seconds as ways of staying in touch, especially with friends -- but that students' lives are wired together in such ways that opting out of that communication pattern would be tantamount to renouncing a social life.

Bringing this back to the Friedman contention that students should cut out the online crap and do something meaningful with their lives, this survey points to how misguided Friedman actually was in his writing. Social media is so pervasive and such a large part of our world that it is rewiring our brains. As the piece argues above, there is no exiting the social media world to "act" in the real world. To the wide majority of young people, social media is reality. If one had to renounce his or her social life in order to please Friedman, the activism would not mean anything.

Another enlightening conclusion was the impact the abstention from media had on these students' information-gathering capabilities. Participants in the study reported that they normally do not read the newspaper, watch mainstream television news, or listen to radio news, yet they were informed enough to discuss specific news stories. During the study, though, participants remarked on how uninformed they felt.

..."To be entirely honest I am glad I failed the assignment," wrote one student, "because if I hadn't opened my computer when I did I would not have known about the violent earthquake in Chile from an informal blog post on Tumblr."

"Students expressed tremendous anxiety about being cut-off from information," observed Ph.D. student Raymond McCaffrey, a former writer and editor at The Washington Post, and a current researcher on the study. "One student said he realized that he suddenly 'had less information than everyone else, whether it be news, class information, scores, or what happened on Family Guy."

"They care about what is going on among their friends and families and even in the world at large," said McCaffrey. " But most of all they care about being cut off from that instantaneous flow of information that comes from all sides and does not seemed tied to any single device or application or news outlet."

Students clearly rely on social media for information. Given our knowledge -- going clear back to Thomas Jefferson -- that information is vital in managing our country's affairs, dispensing with internet-based activism would be foolish and regressive, breeding even more disengagement and misinformation.

Friedman's Boomer lens assumes that we still have a critical mass of institutions that need tearing down, and that it needs to happen quickly. These Millennial college students, as Morley Winograd and Michael Hais point out, understand how decentralized our lives are, and, in role-modeling their "civic" archetype, they must rely on these anything-but-linear connections and the decentralized flow of information to reconstruct society.

Because idealist generations are unwilling to compromise on moral issues, they've always failed to solve the major social and economic problems of their eras. In the decades after the 1828 election, the country was pulled apart over slavery, ultimately leading to the Civil War. After the 1896 campaign, the United States couldn't find a way to help blue-collar workers and farmers to share fully in the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution. It took the Great Depression to usher in the sense of urgency that led to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Today, issues such as affordable health care or quality education or climate change are endlessly debated but never resolved by two sides unwilling to set aside their ideological agendas for the common good.

But now, with another civic generation emerging, the times, as boomer troubadour Bob Dylan sang, they are a-changin'. Civic generations react against the idealist generations' efforts to use politics to advance their own moral causes and focus instead on reenergizing social, political and government institutions to solve pressing national issues. Previous civic realignments occurred in 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1932, when the GI generation put Roosevelt in office. It's no coincidence that these "civic" presidents, along with George Washington, top all lists of our greatest presidents. All three led the country in resolving great crises by inspiring and guiding new generations and revitalizing and expanding the federal government.

In their book Millennial Makeover, Winograd and Hais describe technology as "[enabling] these changes by creating powerful new ways to reach new generations of voters with messages that relate directly to their concerns" (p. 24). Yes, face-to-face interaction continues to have its place in our society. However, if we were to scrap our reliance on social media, we would be willfully ignoring the new generations of voters Winograd and Hais mention. This study's results underscore how vital social media is to our generation's civic health. If we were to purge ourselves of our internet activism, only then could we legitimately be considered "quiet."

We've cited Thomas Friedman's attack on the Millennials, which he labeled "Generation Q," many a time here. Young people today are too quiet, Friedman wrote, arguing that our timidity is a sign that we're apathetic and not concerned with the world around us going to hell in a handbasket.

But 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.

[...]

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. 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.

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual.

Then, on December 7, 2008, Friedman again pricks young people, labeling our generational philosophy as "quietism" in the context of arguing for responsible spending in the stimulus bill.

Our kids should be so much more radical than they are today. I understand why they aren’t. They’re so worried about just getting a job or paying next semester’s tuition. But we must not take their quietism as license to do whatever we want with this bailout cash. They are going to have to pay this money back. And therefore, we have an incredibly weighty obligation to make sure that we not only spend every stimulus dollar wisely but also with an eye to creating new technologies.

So today, Friedman's piece is written about an experience he had in India with young American women while attending the Energy and Resources Institute Climate Conference. While there, two young Americans and one of their mothers asked Friedman to take a ride with them in a plug-in electric- and solar-powered car. Friedman, impressed, says yes, and away they go.

Friedman learns about the friends' partnership with the Indian Youth Climate Network, which now connects climate leaders from across the country, and he's amazed. The women tell him of their "climate caravan," which they organized to spread the message of energy conservation. Environmentally-friendly solar-powered and electric cars were donated by an Indian electric car company (one of the women knew the CEO), and the women then hopped inside them, traveling 2,100 miles across India, organizing entertainment at each stop to attract interest. The women trained local youth to begin their own initiatives.

Friedman sounds verklempt as he wraps up his column.

I met Howe and Ringwald after a tiring day, but I have to admit that as soon as they started telling me their story it really made me smile. After a year of watching adults engage in devastating recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in the global climate talks, it’s refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation.

A couple possibilities here.

1.) Friedman has seen the light, realizing that Millennials aren't "quiet," but have a different way of going about things than Friedman's generation.

2.) Millennial activism in America doesn't count for anything in Friedman's eyes, but in India -- it's worth a few hundred words in the New York Times.

I'm hoping it's numero uno, and that Friedman never uses the word "quiet" again.

And let's get something else straight -- the reason I write about Friedman is not a demonstration of the vanity that sometimes is ascribed to Millennials. I really don't care what Friedman himself thinks about young people. But I do care about others being fooled into thinking young people aren't doing anything simply because Friedman can't handle the philosophical discrepancy between the way his generation did things and the way ours does. Hopefully Friedman took care of that with his trip to India and his car ride.

Friedman aside, kudos to those young women -- Caroline Howe and Alexis Ringwald -- for doing their part by piecing together a great program that is truly making a difference.

On October 10th of last year, Thomas Friedman wrote about The Millennial Generation, showing everyone that his "expertise" on foreign affairs and energy policy doesn't extend to generational discussion.

But 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.

...

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. 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.

Friedman waded into generational waters again this morning, and while the content was slightly better (the overall gist of the column made good points), he showed again that he does not understand the Millennial brand of activism.

The carnage was mostly restricted to the intro:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Tom Brokaw’s book “The Greatest Generation,” that classic about our parents and their incredible sacrifices during World War II. What I’ve been thinking about actually is this: What book will our kids write about us? “The Greediest Generation?” “The Complacent Generation?” Or maybe: “The Subprime Generation: How My Parents Bailed Themselves Out for Their Excesses by Charging It All on My Visa Card.”

Our kids should be so much more radical than they are today. I understand why they aren’t. They’re so worried about just getting a job or paying next semester’s tuition. But we must not take their quietism as license to do whatever we want with this bailout cash. They are going to have to pay this money back. And therefore, we have an incredibly weighty obligation to make sure that we not only spend every stimulus dollar wisely but also with an eye to creating new technologies.

Friedman is still on his radical shtick, once again arguing that times are so dire that we need to sit in the streets and chain ourselves to bulldozers. Friedman believes that the only way to act with urgency is to go crazy, like much of the Boomer activists did, marching in streets, braving teargas, screaming chants, and disrupting society. But we know that we can show appreciation for how urgent this moment is in our own way. Today's youth were involved in this election at a rate not seen since 1972. CIRCLE finds that about 23 million young Americans cast a ballot this year, over 3 million more than the number in 2004. How many times do we need to cite data that shows that Millennials volunteer at record rates? Friedman once again equates activism with being "radical," and he's wrong.

Friedman writes about Millennials as if we're still seven years old, too distracted with getting the latest toy that comes with our Happy Meal to understand what's going on. Friedman acts like we're impotent, like we didn't just make history ourselves, uniting behind a candidate, sweeping him through the Democratic primary and into the White House. Yes, Tom, that happened. And we did it.

Boomers do owe us. They got us into this mess. Millennials aren't being "quiet" because we're not aware of what's going on. We're doing our thing, working through the establishment, changing the system from the inside out. And we're also watching to make sure the Baby Boomers stay focused on their "weighty obligation." We've already turned the political world upside down. We're not afraid to do it again.

It's Getting Hot in Here is live blogging from the Clinton Global Initiative conference, and they note that Al Gore is calling on young people to practice civil disobedience to stop climate change. Now, I don't know exactly what he said because I'm getting this second-hand, but Al Gore has made these claims before and they kind of piss me off.

For one, last time he made such comments he implied that young people weren't doing such things, which is patently false. If you read It's Getting Hot in Here at all, you've certainly encountered stories of young people doing exactly that.

Second, it's not at all clear to me what that would accomplish. Protest requires a novelty and element of surprise, as well as the complicity of the media, in order to be effective. The reason anti-war protests were ineffective in preventing the invasion of Iraq is that they were totally unsurprising, and the media didn't care one bit about them. Contrast that to the student immigration marches - they caught the media completely off guard and were thus "a real story." That meant good coverage and a higher level of efficacy.

It's not at all clear to me that kids blocking bulldozers or protesting a power plant meets the threshold required for successful action via the protest model. Gore's comments are somewhat insulting to me as part of a generation doing quite a bit to raise awareness, alter our lifestyles, and prevent climate change. They also strike me as terrible strategy advice.

Bumped. Great story about how college students created effective, on the ground change on their campus without protesting and by using the internet and available levers of power. --Mike

Crossposted at Politics of the Common Good.

Many blogs focusing on politics and the Millennial Generation have written about comments made by former public officials, New York Times columnists, and others that criticized Millennials for their lack of activism (equating activism with the 1960s-style protests) and that encouraged them to get offline and start demanding change.

Al Gore's comments about the Millennials:

"I can’t understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers," Mr. Gore said, "and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants."

New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman's comments:

I just spent the past week visiting several colleges — Auburn, the University of Mississippi, Lake Forest and Williams — and I can report that the more I am around this generation of college students, the more I am both baffled and impressed.

I am impressed because they are so much more optimistic and idealistic than they should be. I am baffled because they are so much less radical and politically engaged than they need to be.

...

The Iraq war may be a mess, but I noticed at Auburn and Ole Miss more than a few young men and women proudly wearing their R.O.T.C. uniforms. Many of those not going abroad have channeled their national service impulses into increasingly popular programs at home like “Teach for America,” which has become to this generation what the Peace Corps was to mine.

It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.

But 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.

...

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. 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.

Sally Kohn (Director of the Movement Vision Lab at the Center for Community Change) had something to say as well, in an essay published in the Christian Science Monitor:

Today's American young people feel a deep connection to people in Tibet and Darfur, want to hold corporations accountable to environmental standards and worker justice, and value the role of government in meeting our shared needs. Yet the Internet tools that help Millennials appreciate our interconnectedness may actually erode the community values they seek.

...

Internet activism is individualistic. It's great for a sense of interconnectedness, but the Internet does not bind individuals in shared struggle the same as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and '70s did. It allows us to channel our individual power for good, but it stops there.

This is great for signing a petition to Congress or donating to a cause. But the real challenges in our society – the growing gap between rich and poor, the intransigence of racism and discrimination, the abuses from Iraq to Burma (Myanmar) – won't politely go away with a few clicks of a mouse. Or even a million.

...

To avoid eroding the values Millennials so appreciate, and to truly influence the world around them, they must transform their online activism into off-line communities and build an effective movement for change. From church basements to campus meetings to voters' doors, Millennials need to add face-to-face action to their innate sense of community.

All of these comments are ignorant and miss many things.

Georgia10, from DailyKos, wrote a fantastic rebuttal to Kohn's essay this past Sunday, pointing out many of the mistakes Kohn makes in coming to her conclusions. Mike, here at Future Majority, has taken down these intellectually lazy comments many a time.

But in this post, I wanted to show an example, a case study, of student-created positive change that happened on a college campus without the kind of demonstrations Thomas Friedman and Al Gore seem to advocate.

Harvard University's president, Drew G. Faust, has just announced a commitment to reduce Harvard's greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by the year 2036. From the Crimson:

Faust announced the formation of a student and faculty task force in February to study cuts in Harvard's greenhouse gas emissions, giving the committee until the end of the academic year to outline a set of recommendations.

In a statement today, Faust praised the group's recommendation for a 30 percent cut as "ambitious and far-reaching" and "reflecting both the urgency of the climate problem and Harvard's opportunity to show leadership in addressing the issue." The sizable reduction target and the very aggressive timetable make the goal among the most ambitious that any university has committed itself to.

...

Student organizing efforts in recent months have focused on pressuring Faust to sign a pledge committing Harvard to "climate neutrality."

While Hunter said that student activists "still would have preferred" such a pledge, they were pleased with the outcome because the task force's recommendations will put Harvard "on track to achieve climate neutrality even before the 2036 timeline that the EAC originally advocated."

While reading about this effort, I decided to dig a little deeper. I e-mailed the Crimson editor-in-chief Paras Bhayani (a contributor to the story) to ask whether or not the student organizing efforts had started as a result of Faust's pledge or whether they had led to it. Paras noted that Faust's task force (which included four students) was a result of the student organizing:

The organizing efforts have been going on for years so they predated Faust's task force by some time (indeed, they actually predate her presidency!).

For example, the initiative that got the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (the central part of the university) to commit to an 11 percent reduction below 1990 levels was a student enviro-sponsored referendum that ran as a ballot initiative during the student government elections. There was also a student push to get Faust to sign the university presidents' commitment to climate neutrality. As a result, the task force included four students.

Not only were the students engaged; they used technology to do it! A Facebook group called "The Harvard Climate Change Colloquium" had 161 members as of today's post. The Harvard Environmental Action Committee, which appears to be the primary climate change organization on campus, has a very nice and organized website with a lot of information for students, faculty, staff, and anyone else that might be interested, from events and resources to contact information.

Here is an effort in which Millennials identified something they wanted to be changed, they worked within the system, were patient, compromised a bit, and came out with a pretty good commitment. Technology was used to organize this effort. This wasn't a Facebook group or a website merely dedicated to hosting diatribes about Harvard's use of greenhouse gases. The technology was a vehicle for an organized, interpersonal effort offline that was successful.

I understand that some Boomers have the natural instinct to march in streets, demanding change. After reading Nixonland, I can understand why they had to do that. The society and establishment was not responding to any petitions for change. Working within the system was not an option for them because, to them, there was no system.

But we do have a system. Even if John Mayer laments the system's molasses-like qualities, we do have a system with which we can work. Harvard has proved this.

The other thing we can take from this is that Internet activism is not limited to the web. As the National Conference on Citizenship report notes, internet use is a signal of engagement among young people.

Contrary to predictions that the Internet might replace face-to-face participation, the survey finds no trade off. In fact, the netizens are much more likely than other people to attend public meetings in which there was discussion of community affairs (38 percent versus 23 percent), attend a club meeting (72 percent versus 47 percent) or take part in a protest or demonstration (31 percent versus 15 percent).

Student organizers used the tools they needed in order to better organize their offline efforts. The real change ended up taking place face to face in some meeting room on Harvard's campus. As Paras pointed out, because of the students' efforts that predated Faust's presidency, they were given four seats at the table at those task force meetings. Students showed that they were more civically engaged than merely clicking a mouse or typing on a keyboard.

The Center for Community Change's Sally Kohn has a piece today about the passionate Millennial activism that is taking place online and the extent to which it happens off line.

We've kinda heard this complaint before with Thomas Friedman's Generation Q piece that slammed the Millennial Generation for not being disgusted enough by our contemporary world to take to the streets. In Mike's rebuttal of the piece and indeed many of us who spoke out against Friedman's uneducated assumptions, it isn't that Millennials aren't taking to the streets, indeed they are, they are just virtual streets

Kohn is bothered by the virtual part. She agrees that young people feel "deeply connected" with causes - things going on in Darfur, Tibet, you name it.... Bus she fears the online activism will "erode the community values [Millennials] seek"

"On the one hand, they have grown up with new technologies that have helped the world connect more easily; on the other hand, they have been raised alongside the rise of hyperindividualism in American culture that has isolated us from each other and the world around us...

But social movements are based on collective action. The American Revolution, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and every significant social change movement in between and since has relied on community organizing, building mutually responsible communities to challenge the status quo."

Kohn says that the internets are very individualistic. Seems Kohn hasn't heard of Web 2.0. I don't know about ya'll but we are collectively communicating right here on the tubes. And this blog is fed into facebook - which if you haven't seen it is this SOCIAL networking site where all these people who went to school together, work together, or associate in the same causes collectively chill together on line.

For example, Invisible Children started out just on MySpace and Facebook, living through social networking sites, this organization brought awareness and action to a cause among an age specific group of people. Now, young people are serving to help walk these children to safe houses daily, people are donating online, showing the film, and raising awareness about something no one was talking about a few years ago.

IC isn't the only one. Save Darfur is another cause that I hardly think would have the passion and power that it does today without a mobilized group of people online. If you look at online donations on Change.org or the FB Causes application you see that Save Darfur has raised $2,657 on Change with 1997 actions and $24,000 on the Causes Application on Facebook.

Young people have a lot of power and that power can take place on-line or off, each action is just as valid and just as powerful and appreciated. No one should be allowed to get away with diminishing that.

So remember when Tom Friedman was running around spilling all that ink about how young Millennials aren't as involved as their parents were back in the 60's? There was a huge response from the youth community noting that many of today's climate activists - and other activists - are taking a more pragmatic approach to their activism.

It was around that same time that fellow Boomer Al Gore, lamented the fact that young people weren't chaining themselves to bulldozers to stop the construction of more carbon-spewing, coal-fired power plants.

Well, apparently we do that too. From It's Getting Hot in Here:

Yesterday, Earth First and Rising Tide blockaded a gas-fired power plant construction site in Palm Beach County, Florida near “the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge which sits 1000 ft from the power plant site.”

27 people were arrested putting their bodies on the line with over 200 people rallying in support. The action stopped construction on the site for six hours.

A whole 6 hours. Not really that effective as a tactic. I wonder if Friedman will cover it?

Recently, there have been an extraordinary number of dismissive, sneering media attacks on America's young people and the utility of the internet in politics.  This website has tried to correct the condescending, disdainful narratives time and time and time and time and time and time again but yet the haters persist.

One fine example, The New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman recently put on an album of Captain Beefheart, got sentimental, then in turn, regretful; and so he lashed out at whippersnappers, his infernal computer, and those geeks who like infernal computers. 

"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. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms."

Bobby Kennedy didn't travel between farms or factories by horse-drawn carriage  - and there was no teaching of songs! Would journalists who also covered the AFL's growth in the 1890s or of California's Wobblies in the 1930's have rolled their eyes at RFK's silly methods?  Martin Luther King always made sure to have newfangled mechanized-photo-graphic picture-illustrators present at his heavily stage-managed lunch-counter sit-ins.  No planned riots and not a single engraver was invited! 

Absurdly, Thomas Friedman's beef with the do-gooding college children of the millennial generation is that they're just all too Facebookey. "But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good." Really? Online equals... quiet?  What then would Rip Van Friedman think about this:

Youths silent rally met with force in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Ahsan Pirzada and his high-school buddies spread the word via Facebook, e-mail and cell phone text messages: Let's meet at McDonald's after school on Monday.But not to hang out.

About 100 students pulled out banners, taped their mouths shut in symbolic protest and marched silently toward the office of President Pervez Musharraf. Before they had gone 1,000 yards, truckloads of police, including an anti-terrorist squad, swooped in and dispersed the threat, hauling about 50 teens to a police station.

Using facebook, twitter and cell phones they did a flashmob protest.  (That alone is enough politics 2.0 to literally blow Friedman's head off his shoulders.) 

"We know that many people cannot afford to join us," said Samad Khurram, a Harvard University student who stayed home this semester to work in the pro-democracy movement. "At least 30 percent of Pakistanis are surviving day to day on their wages. They can't afford to take off a day to protest" or to risk indefinite arrest.

Thomas please note, an undergrad organized a political cause using the internet's free tools, such as online petitions, emails, webby gizmo for cell phones "twitter" and the dread facebook...  the result of this online organizing: offline action for thousands. 

"This is how people are really networking, expressing themselves," said Adnan Rehmat, who heads Internews Pakistan, a Washington-based media watchdog group. "People are sending messages of solidarity, relaying information about protest sites, that sort of thing."

I'm a little behind on this, but it's worth noting that a number of high-profile blogs have responded to the Tom Friedman "Generation Q" column we posted on a few weeks ago (here and here). I wanted to call attention to these pieces for those who have might not have seen them, as well as respond to them as I don't agree 100% with all of their assessments.

First up is Georgia10, a front pager at Daily Kos, whose response, A Generation in Waiting calls out Freidman for singling out youth without turning his admonishing eye back onto the current apathy of his own generation on issues such as the war, global warming, or any number of problems. Georgia also hones in on the idea that Milennials view government as a joke, an ineffective institution that inspires cynicism, not action.

I can't say that I agree with that. All polling - from PEW or the Harvard Institute of Politics - indicates that we are optimistic and actually have a steadfast belief in the power of ourselves and our government to effect change. I think it might be more accurate to suggest that we have no faith in the current actors who occupy positions of power. It's the people - Friedman's own generation - that we are mistrustful and cynical about, not the institutions themselves, which we actually view as potentially powerful vehicles for change.

Generation Overwhelmed, a piece in the American Prospect by Courtney Martin, drew the most attention this week, with responses posted by Millennial commentators Ezra Klein and others. Martin smartly picks up on what I think is one of the main faults with Friedman's column - the old ways of effecting political change (marching in the streets, chaining ourselves to bulldozers (thanks Al Gore!) are no longer effective. Nor do they fit the moment. Nicholas Handler suggested much the same thing in his New York Times essay, and I'll quote Martin here because I think she hits the nail perfectly on the head:

Many of us have protested, but we -- by and large -- felt like we were imitating an earlier generation, playing dress-up in our parents' old hippie clothes. I marched against the war and my president called it a focus group. The worst part was that I did feel inert while doing it. In the 21st century, a bunch of people marching down the street, complimenting one another on their original slogans and pretty protest signs, feels like self-flagellation, not real and true social change.

That said, I didn't wholly agree with her thesis and conclusions. Rather than Generation Quiet, she labels us Generation Overwhelmed. We are indeed overwhelmed, but that does not lead to paralysis and inaction as she suggest. She gives too little credit to the "lifestyle choices" of her friends and colleagues. When Millennials pursue careers in socially responsible business, pursue Green architecture, work in the public sector, start nonprofits, run for office, these are all forms of action, all more suited to our current environment. Martin also leaves out the increasing civic engagement of our generation, which is participating in politics at a greater rate and in greater numbers than ever. That too is significant and can lead to change.

It's not that we're paralyzed. It's that our form of activism looks completely different from what the past 40 years has taught us activism should look like. Obviously there is no one defining issue as there was back in Friedman's youth, and those choices are overwhelming. But that doesn't cause us to freeze up, it causes us to zoom in and focus on one problem - sweatshops, climate change, poverty - we specialize and either create new institutions where none exist (see everything I've ever written about youth politics), or to quickly work our way into existing institutions and try to instill in them our values.

It's also important to point out that there are no shortages of young people protesting. Between the Iraq War protests, climate change activism like Step It Up, Students Against Sweatshops, the One Campaign, the WTO in Seattle - more students have been marching in the streets in the last 10 years than ever did during Friedman's time. It's just that the media and political establishment - Friedman and his generation - don't care.

Finally, Chris Bowers weighed in with the most cynical piece of the bunch: The Ultimate Frustration of Political Activism. Bower's piece isn't wholly focused on Millennials (he's skeptical of any criticism that uses such a broad brush category as a "generation"). Instead, he uses his own experience over the past 4 years to illustrate how entrepreneurial activism of the kind I reference above ultimately serves the purposes of those you are looking to displace more than it does your own goals:

Your life doesn't improve, but their's does. And then, when its all over, first they condemn you, and then they ask you why you aren't more politically active. While that makes me want to pick up my pitchfork and torch and engage in as many intra-party struggles as possible, I can understand why for many it would cause them to instead wonder what was on television, or to simply transfer their activism to volunteer social justice work and lifestyle choices. Really, what is the point of continuing to do their dirty work for them?

I can't say that he's wrong - given his examples - but I have to chalk that up to the fact that the type of change he (and we, really) are engaging in is not revolutionary. The balance of power does not flip immediately, and it will be years before positions of power are occupied by those who truly agree with Bowers, the Netroots, or Millennials generally. Until then, yes, those in power do reap the benefits of our actions and small changes to the system. However I don't really see that as a discouraging factor on a macro level across a whole generation of activists. If he's right, we'll see a downturn in activism over time, if not, we'll keep pushing for change in spite of these conditions.

Matthew Segal is the founder and executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment — (SAVE), a student-led, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to removing access barriers and increasing civic education for young people. He is also a senior fellow and national challenge coordinator, overseeing policy and lobbying efforts with the Roosevelt Institution — the nation’s first student think-tank.

I must confess: when reading Thomas Friedman’s article “Generation Q” (on 10/10/2007), I couldn’t help but think of a lyric from Bob Dylan’s song “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why,” in which Dylan sings, “Oh what did the newspaper tell?/ Well, it rolled in the door/ And it laid on the floor, /Saying, ‘Things ain't going so well.’” And with all due to respect to Bob Dylan, the times are not a-changin’ in regards to media coverage. Now more than ever, the media can’t wait to uncover the latest scandal, blast someone’s slippage of words, or report on the latest celebrity murder trial.

In other words, it’s easy to talk about how deep a hole we’ve been dug in, it’s easy to carp our optimism when times seem like we should be down and dejected, but in truth, it’s the pervasive negativity of the media that disillusions our peer group—stifling political participation. Mr. Friedman wonders why volunteering in the Gulf Coast region and signing up for Teach for America is so popular. It is because, unlike in politics, youth can enter these fields without risking media annihilation or partisan smear.

What Mr. Friedman has failed to notice about Generation “Q” is that our blogging, think-tanking, and social networking frame news more positively. On these “passive” websites, youth encourage one another, read each other’s thoughts, and spread the word about an interesting service project or a voter registration drive they want help administering. We are more productive than ever before; filling an auditorium is doable by simply creating a Facebook event, rather than spending hours taping up posters all around campus—not to mention the waste of paper. Websites like Facebook are not the activism itself, but merely the means for mobilizing such activism.

So let me ask this question: why don’t we see a story in the New York Times about college students and their efforts to bring organic food to their dining halls? Why doesn’t Fox News run a story about high school students pressing their administration to use renewable energy sources? Where is the news coverage on the newly established youth-led non-profit organizations?

More significant than the possible answers to these questions is the need for these stories to receive increased coverage. Such publicity would inspire more young people, stir more creative juices, and launch more activism. However, in order to achieve this, the media needs more courage— the courage to stop writing about tendentious political gossip and start celebrating youth innovation and creative accomplishment.