GlobalCitizenCorps

This is a guest post by Sarah Standish, a Global Citizen Corps staff member.

One of the many interesting discussions at the 2010 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit was a discussion about the relationship between youth and media that raised some provocative questions.

Is digital communication bad for youth? Anne, a professor at Columbia University, worried that spending so much time online was making it harder for youth to develop other skills, and that it was exposing youth to ideas they were too young for. Others focused on online bullying, saying that the issue wasn’t getting enough attention outside of the United States. Some participants, however, believed that none of these problems were worse on the Internet than they had been before it, and one even argued that the Internet provided a new way for students who were being bullied to fight back.

Do youth really want their voices to be heard? While the discussion moderator, Emily, believed that the most important function of youth organizations was to give youth a way to make their voices heard, Juliana, the Global Voices video editor, disagreed. She explained that while she believes youth have distinct voices, she questions the assumption that youth want the world to hear these voices. She thinks instead that youth often prefer to communicate with each other in ways that are not meant for adults to see—whether by passing notes in class or writing to each other on Facebook.

Nishant, an Internet researcher from India, believed that youth do want to make their voices heard, but not necessarily on the topics that adults want them to talk about. He cited the example of the Back Dorm Boys, a Chinese duo whose performances consist solely of lipsyncing to songs originally performed by the Backstreet Boys. Most people may think of this as a silly activity, but the Back Dorm Boys became very popular on YouTube. When Nishant interviewed the duo, they told him that they saw their work as a profound rebellion against dominant Chinese culture, but that they were rarely given the chance to express that idea. From this experience, Nishant concluded that what youth want to talk about is actually incredibly important, and that adults should give them a wider space to do so.

Victor, a Malawian journalist and Global Voices author, agreed with Nishant on this point—that youth do want unedited platforms to express themselves. However, he pointed out that there may not be one platform that appeals to all kinds of youth and noted that in his past experience working in youth media, some youth seem very interested in Facebook and others very enthusiastic about radio, but few were equally interested in both.

Is a short attention span a bad thing? One participant from Egypt expressed frustration at the fact that youth generally stop participating in her online feminism project after just a short while. Others, however, said that this was simply the nature of youth participation and not necessarily a bad thing.

How do youth participate in politics? Emily wanted to find ways to involve youth in mainstream political debates, nothing that she saw as particularly important since youth don’t have full legal rights. Nishant, on the other hand, believed that today’s youth have already have a different way of being political than other generations did—so different, in fact, that contemporary adults might not recognize it as political most. In fact, he believes that youth’s use of new media tools, like Facebook and YouTube, often has a political dimension that adults just don’t see.

The discussion ended with many questions raised, and few answers. How would you respond to questions like these?

Photo: stampcny (flickr)