One
The time is right to take the social network to the next level. The Internet has plenty of social sites and plenty of political sites but nothing that gives its users a place for both to come together.
Two
The time is right to stop being discounted as the collective "youth vote" and recognize that sometimes we want more than innumerable lists of friends and creepy profile stalkers. We are a new generation ready for something more in our online world.
Three
The time is right to tell everyone that we do like running jokes about Texas rangers, silly thirty-second video clips, repetitive animation, dancing hamsters, typing with both hands and spending hours of our day perusing profiles - but also that we are still as politically important and diverse as the people who have no idea what any of that means.
Four
The time is right to begin the digital age of politics where discussion is not limited to pundits, television personalities or funny fake news shows. The group voice of the youth is available on the Internet, a unique arena where every person can truly have a voice.
Five
The time is right to tell politicians that we do not care who invented the Internet because we've made it what it is, and that it is definitely not a series of tubes with e-mails stuck in them.
Six
The time is right to usher our generation into its place in politics. We are a new generation of people able to define ourselves by issues and not always by alignment with a political party. We are a party unto ourselves that feels at home debating, discussing and fighting for what we believe in a new venue: the World Wide Web.
Seven
The time is right to speak forthwith that we are not simply liberals and conservatives, but everything in between. We are the future of the nation who will bring politics to the Internet vigorously and responsibly. We are all citizens of a new era.
Politics is a confusing, problematic and, oftentimes, boring affair. No one who has ever stayed awake for a civics class in their life can dispute that. Yet, there are new, more subtle troubles that have emerged since the beginning of the twenty-first century that are not listed in any text book.
In the era of digital everything, politics has remained noticeably discrete. Candidates have Web sites, media organizations have online polls and there is a huge decentralized partisan blog network; but there is no single hub for political information and discussion. After all, you can only watch so much C-SPAN.
So, it seems that an obligation falls upon the youngest generation of voters and soon-to-be voters to lead politics to the Internet. At a time when most young net surfers are being mischaracterized as aimless finger clickers, they are actually communicating through more and more varied avenues. They interact in a virtual environment that has none of the usual limitations of time or distance.
Instant messaging has only one important word: instant. Now, Instant Politics most definitely does not have the same ring, but there is something interesting about the prospect.
Whatever the means or flashy name it takes, the Web generation is still waiting for one very important thing: a political movement that is both born and thrives online.
Voter Turnout and Threesome Videos
After most people had finished their stash of Y2K drinking water, the United States had one of the closest elections in its history. Everyone with a microphone or a podium or a talk show told the youth how important their vote was going to be. In kind, little more than 30 percent of the "youth demographic" voted. Again, in 2004, there was the same prophesy. About 42 percent showed up this time. Although this might seem like an impressive improvement over just a few turbulent political years, bear in mind that the 2002 mid-term election produced a 17-percent turnout.
Of course, low turnout has been the historical norm for the youngest voters for decades. So, what makes this newly baffling is that, at the same time, fake social groups promising threesome videos are able rally hundreds of thousands of people to a cause - a fake cause. Likely, many of them are the same people who were at the polls, but many more were people who could have been informed and confirmed voters. They just didn't have an option as accessible as the threesome group.
The amazing success of bringing issues, bizarre or otherwise, within a mouse click of the population remains largely untapped. Counter to that, oodles of people have been taking time to make the painstaking decision of "hot or not" for years. Still, some people have recently even suggested moving toward online voting, a practice on many college campuses (where quite a few members of the youth demographic are) that has in most cases increased voter turnout for student governments. Nonetheless, a lot of the country just got electronic voting machines. At least, they're trying.
Either way, policy makers are missing a step in between. Online voters would still have no central outlet in which to discuss and debate before clicking for their favorite candidates.
In a Web world where everything is subjected to votes and viewer tallies, politics is peculiarly absent. People, especially the youth, are being groomed to vote for anything and everything. In its own way, the Internet has pinned down the fundaments of democracy for its surfers en masse.
It may be that another great democratic experiment is on the horizon. Only this time, it's about becoming informed by the sharing of political information and opinion at the speed of byte.
So, the time has come to use this influence for something bigger. What if someone did it for real? No, not a threesome video - but a real cause. Shaping the political landscape, anyone?
You Don't Know Me
Hark! The Information Age cometh! Well, in truth, it has been cometh for some time now, but the youngest generation has been misrepresented during much of that time. In recent years, babies are being born waving wireless mice and are usually upgrading their parents' hard drives sometime right after they stop breastfeeding. At least, that's what you'd believe if you believed everything you heard or read. Luckily you don't anymore because the Internet has been known to hold some, well, uncorroborated information. And boy, do we love it.
Yet, the kingpins of uncorroborated information, the talking heads and hazy "experts" of TV news, often paint a more sinister story. Time and again, they portray young, Web-savvy citizens as juvenile bikini-picture-posting, aimless-surfing, useless-video-watching, pedophile-dodging, copyright-infringing, time-wasting slackers. Don't even get them started on those villainous hackers (especially the |-| @ [ |{ 3 ® 5 ) The consensus appears to be that the Internet is a tacky, trash-ridden cesspool. Sure, some of it is - maybe even a lot of it, but does that mean it should be treated as having intrinsic value?
No way. If you're going to use your allotted thirty seconds to simply talk about the perceived dangers or the evils of the Internet, just stop talking - please. This is a case of gross misunderstanding. The young people of the WWW are defining it, from 20-something CEOs to self-made blog celebrities. When it crosses over into "the real world," it's usually treated as a novelty.
Every good generation needs something that the previous one just doesn't get. It isn't exactly Elvis, but it's ours - and it does have Elvis impersonators. What keeps the masses in the dark about the true movement online is a missing positive force to unite the young people with more than friend lists and video clips.
We know who we are, and we understand what we want. We are an online society unto ourselves, ready to take the next step and bring politics into our world - sandwiched right in between updating our photo collection and checking our six e-mail addresses. There need only be an outlet to open the floodgates on a new generation.
With that, foreboding headlines such as "Survey reveals Internet dangers for children, "Internet poses dangers for youth," and "Teen took mother's head to Internet cafe" will be mixed with "Youth political movement changes everything, man." The Web just might be able to regain some face if the youth stand up and show just how much we actually do matter when put into action on our terms.
Spanning the Aisle
Red State or Blue State, Republican or Democrat, right-wing or left-wing, liberal or conservative - these words have become synonymous monikers for how most citizens identify with the political process. In nearly every instance, the words must be divided with an "or," hardly ever an "and."
In 21st century American politics, the terms conservative and liberal most often signify the extremely polarized platforms of the two major parties. Scholars, historians and the occasional celebrity often debate the meaning and usage of the words. Many also assert that the political parties have more similarities than differences in the modern world. Theories are fun. They turn into book deals, too. This will surely continue as long as political theory and book deals exist, but few people offer tangible means to address this issue.
Yet, no matter what semantic debates exist, the political world of information has taken hold of the familiar definitions. Everything has been labeled as either one or the other from media companies to food. This leaves little room for varying degrees of either side to exist, especially in the mainstream.
Even the Internet follows suit. Blogs exist for both, but good luck finding a place that will provide them side-by-side. This staunch separation only increases the division that has overtaken American and some world politics. More than anything, this strict partisanship is the reason that politics has been unable to truly thrive on the Web.
Government is all about communication and compromise. When the voters are unable to even come together on the grandest information channel in history, how can they expect their representatives to work together? But this is not a "can't we all just get along" snooze-fest. This is an indictment for letting this issue languish in the first place.
It is a compounding problem that starts from the bottom up, rather than the top down. The civic disengagement of the youth and the crippling, polarized factions that dominate politics keep the worthwhile democratic process under-utilized.
Given that, online is prime real estate to make a difference. The youngest voters are a Web-savvy, opinionated population whose addresses all start with WWW. With a forum that provides open debate and both sides of every issue, the impressionable youth demographic may be able to shake the funk of the all-too-partisan system. There has never been such an opportunity to make politics so accessible and identifiable.
With or without such an environment, the Internet will produce a new generation of citizens. There exists as responsibility and a broader onus to use this truth in order to
facilitate a generation of exceptionally well-connected voters. The need for the classic party-defined discussion is waning. With the power to create nationwide and even worldwide community of political thought, the only question is who will step up to the challenge?
The youth will.
The solution is 20DC.com, the next generation of social network Web sites. 20DC must provide a unified outlet for political information and discussion with no party affiliations. It must be dedicated to providing an equal opportunity for all sides to any given issue, presented literally side-by-side. The community must also be an outlet for political news, information and education. And in the spirit of democracy, it must all be driven by its citizens, all of whom have an equal vote.
The concept is no great leap in technology, but rather the next logical step to utilize the incredible knowledge that has emerged out of the Internet. It can be the first of a new generation of sites dedicated to a specific human need for information and communication.
Foremost, 20DC must be a social network, able to provide its citizens with the means to communicate, debate, argue, learn and imagine. Citizens should have the ability to gather friends and start groups that share political views, that engage others with opposite views and that spread the information they think is important. Whether discussing budget deficits, supply-side economics or candidate haircuts, it is all 20DC.
With citizenship open to any individual, the political tone of 20DC can be completely defined by the community. With the technology for such equal representation, each vote for a blog, profile, group or other facet can create a strong democracy of users. This sort of self-defined functionality, when applied to a political arena, is the essence of 20DC's mission.
The Web site's most unique and most central feature must be a two-column color design, an unprecedented visual arena. On the left, variants of liberal citizens will define their forum in shades of blue. On the right, variants of conservative citizens will define their own forum in reds.
Each citizen will also be given the opportunity to define their own political philosophy by these colors and further by shades of the color. This empowers them to define themselves not by one of two polarized options, but by how they actually see themselves. Allowing for as much or as little self-definition as possible with even political overlap more accurately reflects the community's population in a groundbreaking way.
In conjunction with user input, 20DC must also be dedicated to providing the political news, information and entertainment that Web users demand. Whether through its own production, partnerships, citizen-input or, most preferably, all of the above, 20DC will introduce new features and series to further the mission of entertainment and enlightenment. There might even be jokes.
Most importantly, the 20DC community must be free and open to its citizens. With the support of the Internet generation, the site can accomplish a great service for political junkies and casual voters alike: a new era of political awareness.
