The young and experienced
Too often New Zealand is having an informational apartheid, where older voters whose own wisdom is so very hard-earned, are talking only among themselves.
Young people haven’t so much disengaged with politics as been disenchanted by it. Such are the ashen implications of a recently published Lincoln University study. But buck up. Positives emerge. First, the 70 in-depth interviews that informed the study were conducted in 2015 and since then there’s been a palpable increase in youth activism. Rising numbers of young people are done with feeling neglected. As Green MP Chloe Swarbrick says, they are seized with the need to take hold of some of the levers of power themselves.
That’s something the Lincoln study suggests they’d previously doubted their ability to achieve. They needn’t have, but it became the worst sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. If it’s at last being found out, that’s a fine thing.
Second, we should welcome this trend for reasons that go beyond demographic representational fairness. Many of these young activists can bring more to the wider political process than what’s condescendingly called their youthful idealism.
Weirdly, perhaps, their other great skill is experience.
New Zealand has another problem that runs parallel to young people having been disenchanted. It’s the extent to which older voters, and citizens generally, can be enchanted. By which we mean those who are already engaged in the political process, but are naifs when it comes to negotiating the deceptive eddies of social media.
Older voters have invaluable real-world experience. But much of the real world nowadays is manipulated by online informational battles in which the rules of fair, decent, even lawful
behaviour can be sidestepped and outpaced.
New Zealand’s political parties are increasingly coming to you direct by social media, and we don’t have the clear constitutional safeguards we need to rein this in to an extent that keeps them honest.
Technology commentator Paul Brislen is hardly alone in worrying less about young people imbibing falsehoods than the oldies doing so.
New Zealand’s digital natives have grown up with an awareness of social media. Theirs is an educated scepticism. They’re experienced and, to an extent that teachers haven’t been given sufficient credit for, they’ve been learning about it in schools.
As anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers can produce mountains of online support for their delusions, impressing themselves with what looks for all the world like peer-reviewed wisdoms, and media factcheckers fling themselves in often forlorn attempts to ankle-tap a runaway lie or shimmying halftruth, it’s often the kids who are most swiftly determining that in these cases the peers are divorced from the educated disciplines of science.
Then, all too often, they entertain their own circle by posting it as a meme or mocking the duped. It won’t do.
These are modern-world survival skills and all too often New Zealand is having an informational apartheid where older voters, whose own wisdom is so very hard-earned, are talking only among themselves. Meanwhile the younger ones, whose modern-day aptitudes are all too often underappreciated, tend to complain about each other rather than do half as much as they could to inform and influence the rest of us.