iBlog, iFacebook, iVote

Call us Generation Y, the iGeneration, the Indigo Children or DotNet.

Our generation plugged into MP3 players, talking on cell phones, blogging, Facebooking and Googling our little hearts out online — we’re taking over, and you don’t even have to unpeel us from the monitor screens.

When social networking sites and media from all across the world began appearing on our monitors at light speeds — unless you have a dial-up modem connection, you poor soul — Gen Yers had nothing better to do than to explore sites like MySpace and Google — heck, even Wikipedia.

All that information, what does it really mean for Gen Y? It made us not want to participate in conventional politics. It made us skeptical.

It should be no surprise to the men and women of simpler days past that technology changed the dynamics of power for individuals.

Back in the day, you had to spend hours in a library doing research on a topic. Now, you spend minutes online to retrieve tons more data on virtually any topic you want. That’s power.

Members of Gen Y, born within a disputable time period of 1978 to 1995, rode the coming digital revolutionary wave that completely immersed those born later in a torrent of information.

Growing up on Nintendo, AOL and CD players changed the way Gen Y processed information — think short attention spans. Think what?

In fact, the vast amount of knowledge available at Gen Y’s techno-savvy fingertips brought them into a virtual world packed with Web sites competing for our attention. Being online, it bypassed the traditional filters to learning — like narrow-minded, agenda-driven teachers, who still mold student minds today.

Look at polls and news articles and you see that Gen Y is in fact disengaging from normal politics, not contributing as much to political campaigns and not expressing themselves at a polling booth near you.

Blame technology? Not even.

Although Gen Y seems to be as skeptical of status quo politics in this country as scientists are of the existence of God, more youngsters seem to be expressing themselves through direct political action and education, both online and in person.

They’re involving themselves in the community, boycotting corporations with horrible business practices and having political conversations with others in an attempt to persuade them.

Members of that generation, like so many in this country, felt disenchanted with skeptical electoral practices in major elections since the turn of the century. Why vote when the U.S. Supreme Court decides the winner? Why care when the hyper-consolidated media handpicks the candidates that make it onto television, into print and on the airwaves.

That kind of control provoked the recent viral Web 2.0 campaigns of Howard Dean, Ron Paul and Barack Obama, which show the power the often-touted-as-apathetic youth can wield when they band together and focus their political energies.

The digital world gives the youth an opportunity to participate like never before. That empowerment, that sense of importance that you, as an individual, may somehow be directly involved in a process kept close and restricted by this country’s elite for so long, is a force of reckoning that will show its true value in November’s election.

Oh, and that apathy talk earlier, youth voter turnout steadily climbed through 2006 and broke records this year. If that trend continues, this country will see an explosion of untapped potential at the polls that may in fact change the very direction of this country for years to come.

Watch out, this generation has broadband and a purpose.

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Originally published in The Eureka Reporter

~ by Ozzy on July 1, 2008.