If one takes a step back to gain perspective, the wave of youth activism and committed opposition to the economic and political disenfranchisement that has been imposed upon marginalized young people is breathtaking. Consider the following examples of such protests and public uprisings: London, Puerto Rico and Ireland [tuition increases foreclosing higher education opportunity]; France and Greece [economic austerity measures]; Spain and Italy [unemployment levels over 30%]; Tunisia and Egypt [unemployment, marginalization and repression] and Libya [economic disenfranchisement and repression].
To the nature of the response, one may wonder what took so long for the cauldron to boil over. The rhetoric and political discourse orchestrated by elite moneyed interests with a stranglehold on power and the economy has been conflicting if not schizophrenic. While mouthing blandishments about the need to take action to secure the future for youth and the generations to come, actions by these powerbrokers toward today’s youth has been to marginalize, demonize or ignore their needs and concerns. Such systematic disenfranchisement and disinvestment has been carried out with the arrogant belief that young people were either not paying attention or did not care about even their own well-being and future. A very dangerous assumption.
The narcissistic mainstream media has become to believe that what it publishes is the official and only truth, and that young people are even remotely interested in such broadcast content other than as white noise. In fact, young people abandoned mainstream media quite some time ago in favor of electronic social media and blogs that spread information more efficiently and often more accurately across town, across the country and across the globe. The attention that the feature film “the Social Network” received this year is but a tacit recognition of a manifest history relating to new ways in which youth communicate. Yet the movie is already historical and outdated. The irony is stark when one realizes that youth who were believed to be asleep or complacent have managed to shake the fundament and even bring down repressive governments using tools that the powerbrokers had dismissed as toys and diversions. Henry Giroux* remarks:
Mass demonstrations have been organized through the emergent screen
cultures of a generation well versed in new technologically assisted
forms of social networking and political exchange.
Youth across the globe have joined together to speak with a collective voice against the marginalization and profligate stewardship by the power elite of economic and natural resources that represent the future of these young people. The information necessary to organize resistance, to record and to report the events of these youth movements ran like synaptic currents throughout a virtual brain that connected and assisted youth movement groups. And while the action was taking place, the mainstream media was more of an afterthought than a true journalistic presence, the high school senior without a prom date. Perhaps network executives have come to realize the truth that one thing worse than being hated is being deemed unimportant. The same media that turned its back on any sincere efforts to speak to, for or about the genuine needs and interests of young people now has come face to face with the realization that young people have mobilized while turning their backs on mainstream media. Recall the words of Gil Scott Heron who cautioned decades ago that “the revolution will not be televised.”
*Henry A. Giroux | Left Behind? American Youth and the Global Fight for Democracy
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