How to Approach Technology

For young people, digital connectedness is as natural to their way of being as telephones and rock music were to their parents. More than 20 million teenagers use the Internet daily. Eighty percent of teens have mobile phones. Three-quarters of them read news online, and more than half have accounts on social networking sites.

Millennials are not considered to be as rebellious in their beliefs and attitudes as their Baby Boomer parents were. Neil Howe and William Strauss, authors of “Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation,” write of Millennials that “more than 90 percent of teens now say they ‘get along’ with their parents, and nearly 80 percent say they get along ‘very well’ or ‘extremely well.’” Still, a significant generation gap exists due to digital technology.

Blogging is this century’s pamphleteering. Petitions have moved online, and millions of people vote by text message for their favorite idols or dance couples. Millennials are using these same tools inside and outside of the entertainment context to protest the blocking of social networking sites from school or the presence of military recruiters on high school campuses.

Millennials cast a big, wide-open net across their lives, pinging and poking friends on social networking sites, instant messaging and emailing, blogging and posting, uploading and downloading—all instantly and incessantly. They are the children of the Connected Age, native to and immersed in technology.

The constant connectedness of Millennials to their gadgets and networks of friends is confounding and concerning for parents. For young people, it provides a sense of power over their elders, who are often skittish with digital media and can lack fluency with the new toolset. With any new means of communication, however, there are legitimate concerns, which include such dangers as personal intrusions and cyber bullying.

Although such costs of immersive living should not be overlooked, the potential inherent in marrying social media to the activist passion of young people is too great to diminish or dismiss because of risk. As Ivan Boothe of the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net) says, “social media allows you to claim your own part in the movement.” And that’s exactly what Millennials are doing.

Beyond using social media to connect with individuals and share information, Millennials are prolific content creators. Everyone is an Oscar-winner-to-be in the Connected Age. A study by the Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia in December 2007 predicts an entertainment future in which “up to a quarter of the entertainment consumed by people in five years time will have been created, edited, and shared within their peer circle rather than coming out of traditional media groups.”

With a mouse-click, Millennials are mashing-up and sharing music, videos, and personal opinions, creating “a new kind of ‘folk culture’ that stands in sharp contrast to the highly choreographed cultural production system of the industrial information economy.” The lines between real and virtual lives are blurred in this new mode called “immersive living.” The blending of what used to be private and public lives is puzzling to older people, but comes very naturally to young people who are living in a fishbowl described as “microcelebrity.”

Entertainment culture is a critical element of immersive living. Often chided for their rabid interest in entertainment, Millennials are more than active consumers and content creators, they are actually “entertainment citizens,” using the levers and switches of power to protest corporate decisions that affect their favorite shows and pop stars. American life, from entertainment to activism, has become immersed in movement-language and democracy tools.