If my generation doesn’t wake up, it’ll drown itself in a sea of
debt and depression, both economic, and perhaps, mental. Tweeting
all the way to the black vapid bottom, no doubt.
A recent
Pew Research Poll found more people age 30 and under knew
what Twitter was rather than, in appallingly descending order,
which President enacted TARP, who the Chief Justice of the United
States is, and who serves as the current Prime Minister of
Britain, respectively.
In an earlier
July poll, nearly 60% of 18-29-year olds still planned on
voting Democratic in the midterm elections and roughly half of
that percentage are “closely following campaign news.”
The two polls may be separate, and the questions,
different, but the results are anything but mutually
exclusive.
Starting with Twitter v. Chief Justice Roberts. Don’t get
me wrong, I love Twitter. While I refrain from Tweeting myself, I
follow several people whose opinions are important to me, whose
recipes I crave or whose observations, in the thirty seconds it
takes to read them, make me think, laugh and even cry. I get
nearly daily Tweets from Rick
Bayless, arguably the best American chef cooking
Mexican cuisine in the United States (and no, he didn’t Tweet
from the White House while a recent guest chef for the visiting
Mexican President), to Slate’s Dahlia
Lithwick (on whose legal opinions I vehemently
disagree but whose writing voice and brilliant mind I
admire).
Twitter is to messaging what blogs were to the Internet.
Its fast-paced form is lucid, vast, and open to venom and to
veracity simultaneously. It’s the beautiful result of what
happens when the need for rapid communication and the beauty of
capitalism collude.
It may replace forms of communication, but it doesn’t
replace knowledge. I’m not talking about what Alyssa Milano
Tweets about the new (and hysterical) Old Spice commercials, or
what kind of knife blade John Mayer just Tweeted about and
ordered for a member of his band while drunk. All that is amusing
and entertaining, both of which have a place in culture. But I’m
talking about information which aids your view of subjects from
politics to religion to education to music. There’s nothing
humorous about a generation that doesn’t even know the head of
our court system or who’s running one of our most formidable
allies.
It’s no surprise, then, that this same age cohort not only
knows little about the world of politics, but more than half plan
on voting Democratic (if they do vote). They’re too busy
Twittering to flip on a news channel or read a candidate’s issues
page online. If they did either of the latter, they’d know
Democrats aren’t going to do anything they’ll want to Tweet about
in the next few years (save for how broke they are because
they’re over-taxed, or how sick they are because their free
healthcare “sux”).
John Adams had it right when he said: “I must study
politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study
mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics
and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture,
navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their
children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture,
statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
If Adams had Twitter, I’m guessing it would have landed
between poetry and music on the list. Before you label me a
kill-joy: Every moment of life doesn’t have to be spent reading
the New York Times (God forbid!) or following a
political candidate, but this generation doesn’t have to feign
interest in events and politics that shape this country and the
world. No wonder it keeps electing people who keep passing
legislation that keeps harming both.
Many use Twitter to pass along valuable information and
persuasive slices of belief. It can be a wonderful source through
which to pass along thoughts that provoke thinking. If
this generation does practice thinking, it’s not reflected in its
votes. I’m not even insinuating its members should or would
immediately starting voting conservative if they did to more
thinking, but poll after poll proves older, more educated,
less-Tweeting populations do. Perhaps therein lies the issue.
Maybe education is the battle, not Twitter.
Still: It’d be such a relief, such a finger in the faces of
those wise and aging Baby Boomers, a see-I-told-you-so moment, if
this generation started Tweeting about things that matter, in
addition to things that don’t. If they started thinking about
politics and not just their peeps. Maybe instead of waiting on
the world to change, they could start to change it.
