Dailykos

I have been thinking about the generational differences in the use of the internet for political expression. I want to share my basic idea and hopefully you will share your thoughts about the subject.

We know that despite the stereotype, most political bloggers and active members of blogging communities like Daily Kos tend to be older, with Millennials not having a huge presence.

I believe that younger voters express themselves politically online using social networks as opposed to blogging. Their involvement and sharing has more of a retail peer-to-peer feel to it as opposed to blogging, a more wholesale form of expression.

One of the things we know from life is that a person has a much better opportunity to find like-minded people to discuss things with when they are in high school or college. There are a lot of people from the same generation concentrated in one place. Younger voters don't have to look very far to find friends to talk to about politics in real life, and they tend to engage online by sharing with those people through social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Older voters tend to have a harder time finding such people in real life. Many spend the majority of their time with a small group of coworkers, and a lot of employers don't encourage political discussion. These people who are passionate about politics look for an outlet for them to express themselves and find a community. They find this outlet in blogging communities like DailyKos. For the most part they have never met the people they end up discussing politics with in real life, at least until they attend some kind of meetup like Netroots Nation.

When I first started blogging about youth politics I wondered why there weren't more comments and why there weren't many young people blogging relative to those who are older, especially since our generation is supposed to be savvy digital natives.

My belief is that many young voters don't have to broadcast themselves online. They have people to talk to in person, and their online involvement is with those same people on social networks.

So those are my quick thoughts on this. What are yours? Help me flesh this idea out by sharing your ideas in the comments.

When I've been in Oklahoma City to visit family and friends for the past several weeks I always stop by and put in a few hours with Andrew Rice's campaign. Sometimes simply because he's another heartland democrat who needs help and has the volunteer mechanism in place to utilize me - and sometimes simply because he's a young democrat who is running for office.

So this week I heard about a rally with the OU YD's that was in part a response to a comment made by Markos (of the dailykos) about Rice's Senate race. I knew then, that I needed to hop in the car and make the schlep to Norman, Oklahoma to support both Andrew and young people. And what I found was astounding.

Neither rain nor sleet nor cold will stop the Oklahoma Young Democrats. Many braved the unexpected weather to hear State Senator Andrew Rice talk about why he is running for US Senate and compound the myth that young people in Oklahoma are less interested.

In the last few weeks young people have seen some serious hatin' going on with Thomas Friedman we saw a serious slam. And this week'sOklahoma Gazette did a huge profile on Rice where Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos blog, was asked to comment on the race.

“Inhofe is a national joke. He is very much a top-tier villain, somebody who could be easy to run against from a national perspective,” Moulitsas said. “(But) I wouldn’t even say it’s a second tier race for us. It’s a third-tier race.”

To climb the ladder, Rice will have to prove he can pull in $25 checks from rural Oklahomans and motivate college students to knock on doors for him.

“If he can do that, this race merits attention. If he can’t do that, then this isn’t going to be much of a race,” Moulitsas said.

Well get ready because the OU Dems have something to prove.

Mike crossposted his last diary over at Daily Kos today, and a commenter on it pointed to a "communal diary series dealing with issues that plague Kossacks under thirty five" titled appropriately Kossacks Under Thirty Five. The author, who says a new diary will be posted each Thursday, explains why the series is important:

Often, folks here [at Daily Kos] are surprised to see how many members of the community are in this age range. This ongoing series aims to deal with matters that primarily affect those under thirty five, as we transition away from our parents, out of education, into the work force, and even start our own families.

Having emailed with several folks while setting this up, it seems imperative that we at DailyKos continue to build and strengthen the Democratic majority amongst younger voters. The overarching goal of this series is to talk about issues and policies that affect the future electorate majority, and talk about how we can increase turnout and activism even more.

As Mike has noted in the past, the Kos community often seems ambivalent, if not outright hostile, to young voters. This is a great step in the right direction, now if only the Democratic Party and our elected officials would join in the discussion and pay attention to the issues effecting those of us under 35.

In the past, I've written about the media narrative surrounding young voters. First, how the media screwed up big-time and perpetuated myths about young voter apathy, and then about how youth and civic participation orgs helped change that narrative.

I had a big plan to do a post-election media analysis of youth vote stories in the major newspapers and magazines. Only problem (if you can call it that), was that the stories around the youth vote this year are overwhelmingly positive. Josh notes one instance below, but there are many more.

The Washington Post lavished praise on youth turnout and the benefits it has and may continue to bestow on Democrats. Joe Garofoli (old faithful) pumped us up in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a great piece about creating a youth vote culture (something we're highly in favor of here).

Some of our own helped steer the media narrative as well. Billy Wimsatt of The League of Young Voters had a piece in Mother Jones, The Nation ran a piece (which linked to our "Wave" graphic) which got syndicated by Yahoo!, and some young social/political entrepreneurs wrote about youth impact in the Western States over at Tom Paine.

But what about the blogs? Kos wrote a (positive) short post about the youth impact on the elections, but the community is rarely receptive to the ideas and concerns of its younger members. In fact, from my experiences writing on the site and trying to drum up support for young voters and youth projects, I would say that the community opinion on young voters ranges from somewhere between non-committal to downright hostile.

This situation seems to be coming to something of a head. In a comments thread dedicated to nominating new front-page writers, there were a slew of commenters clamoring for younger voices on the site. And in the last three days there have been a number of diaries on the topic directly calling out the Kos community for its open hostility to young voters.