Global Youth Transforming Our Future - Brave, Comfortable With Diversity, And Caring

Chapter One: The First Global Generation

 

Where does this representative of global youth culture live? (Hint: Not in the West.)

 

I’m cool and awesome. Megan, 11, f, California

 

I’m not a citizen of France. I am a citizen of the world.

Rene, 11, m, I Am Eleven documentary (2014)

 

Adults should know the kind of world teenagers nowadays live in. We get exposed to so many different things that my parents would probably want to protect me from. It’s too late. I’ve seen people having sex on TV, I’ve heard my friends doing it with their boyfriends, I’ve seen violence and gunshots from TV, I’m friends with lesbians and bisexuals, my best friend is what my family would call infidel, I’m on various social networking sites, I’ve been bullied and made stupid mistakes. Adults shouldn’t pretend that their children are still living in a world of innocence, for the exposure we get from our environment is far from naïve. They shouldn’t even think about “protecting” us from these things. What they should do is guide us through this insane world and be with us all the time. If they don’t, then the rest of our environment will become our definition for life. Diandra, 15, f, Indonesia

 

I think I was destined to help people around me feel peaceful. I enjoy listening to my family members and friends if they need to release emotion. And I feel like I reach the best in me when protecting someone or something like animals.

Khue, 16, f, Vietnam

 

We believe to change society, we need not our words to appeal to politicians, but to use activism to pressure them.40

Joshua Wong, 17, m, Hong Kong student activist

 

The spread of the “American Dream” among youths has become so widespread that many countless people have been influenced by it in one way or another. Watching American shows, listening to American music, conversing in American slang, has become the norm worldwide. Roohi, 17, f, Singapore

 

The global culture is kinda more prevalent and stronger in comparison than local culture. Hence that shapes up as a dominant force.  Hassan, 23, m, Pakistan

 

A society that cuts itself off from the youth severs the lifeline; it is condemned to bleed to death. Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General

 

Contents: Youth Characteristics; Academic Ageism; Get to Know Eva, Abel, Sahar and Yuan; Glocal Hybrid Youth Culture; Global Media Influence, Global Tends Shaping Our Future; How Youth Will Change the Future

 

 

                  Youth Characteristics

How do we foretell the future? Some use a crystal ball. A more accurate way is to analyze youth culture in order to see how our world will evolve. The values, beliefs, styles, and attitudes of educated global youth are different from their elders and will transform our future, while the uneducated often live as if in a past century. Young people are at the forefront of the major trends of this century and are also the most impacted, such as by the digital revolution and global Internet communication, mass migration, the growing gulf between the rich and poor, outsourcing jobs to developing countries, and inventing green technology to reduce climate change. They suffer most from unemployment and a reduction in social services caused by the global economic neoliberal system and its erosion of welfare states under the guise of austerity programs.41 (The youth unemployment rate was over 13% in 2019.42)

After a decade of dialogue with over 4,000 young people and some of their teachers and parents from 88 countries, raising a son, and teaching young people all my adult life, I see the following themes emerge that will shape our planetary future. Educated youth are altruistic, egalitarian and value democracy. The major difference between young people today is not their nationality; rather it’s if they’re urban or rural. Illiterate villagers live in a past century. For example, I interviewed village kids in Indonesia, India and Pakistan who had never heard of global warming. The United Nations confirmed in 2018 that world youth care about global issues partly because over half of them use the Internet, especially climate change and conflict, but too many are not able to attend school, can’t find jobs, and live in war zones.43

In this chapter we see that educated youth are creating a global youth culture facilitated by electronic media. We’ll meet four young people who illustrate international influences, then identify future trends that will impact youth development and our planetary future. Their values and beliefs are more relativistic, more tolerant and open-minded and sometimes they have more freedom to openly act on hedonistic impulses than previous generations who had more traditional values. Cultures are no longer separated by national boundaries because they’re connected by satellites, Wi-Fi, miles of fiber optics and a rallying cry to make the world a better place. However, only 30% of global youth aged 15 to 24 are “digital natives,” who have spent at least five years actively using the Internet.44 South Korea leads with almost 100% digital natives. In developing countries youth are more likely to be Internet users than their elders, while developed countries don’t report a generation gap in Internet use.

With instant availability of information and connection, educated young people often don’t respect religious, political, and business leaders who they view as behind the times, bureaucratic, hierarchical or corrupt, with the exception of iconoclasts like Pope Francis. Instead of ideologies and theologies, they value relationships with their families and friends, including virtual friends. As Yostina (17, f, Egypt) said, “There are bad authorities everywhere, even in religions. Our generation is a thinking generation.” Her life purpose is to do good as a gynecologist and to work for charities. Sneha (16, f, India) commented on contradictions brought about by social media, “Our generation mostly values friends higher than family, which has both positive and negative sides. We also know how to live and not just merely survive. But in that process we have lost all the worth we had for health and wealth. We also don’t know what real love is.” The most traditional SpeakOut students are Muslim males, but some of those young men who use ICT (information and communications technology) confessed to me they get distracted from praying five times a day.

I gave SpeakOut youth surveys to young people aged 19 and younger from 2004 to 2017. The questions I set out to answer were how are young activists able to organize revolutionary changes such as unseating Egypt’s President Mubarak in 18 days? Can their leaderless horizontal organizing style sustain positive change? Those two questions are answered in Democracy Uprisings Led by Global Youth. Do young women and men have different approaches to changemaking? This is answered in Brave: The Global Girls’ Revolution. This book focuses on the question what do youth value and believe? What are their goals and how will they change our future?

The United Nations defines youth as being aged 15 to 24. Young people under 25 are the largest youth cohort in history, the best educated, and the most connected via the Internet where they share information and aspirations.45 The recent democracy uprisings are generally led by young well-educated precariats, middle-class people worried about their future financial security and indignant about government control by the 1% financial elite. Youth activists passed around slogans, manuals and organizing methods on the Internet so that occupations around the world look similar. This leads older leaders like President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey to charge that a central command center organizes the similar uprisings because he can’t imagine non-hierarchical networks.

The Millennial Generation, also called Gen Y, was born from around 1980 to 2000 with many variations, depending on the scholar who defines the particular dates. They are also called Generation Me or We, Generation Occupy, Indignant Generation, Desperate Generation, Youth without a Future, the Lost Generation, the Global Generation, and Net Generation. These young adults created a new global political force called “The Square People.” Beginning in the 21st century, social movements took the form of a virus traveling around the world via the Internet that produced a “cycle of struggle,” cyberactivism and cyberpolitics. This is the widely quoted observation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their 2000 book Empire. Abolhassan Banisadrof, the first president of Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution, observed, “The wave of revolutions from North Africa to the borders of Pakistan is an indicator that young people in these countries are on the move, and moving towards what might be seen as an international revolution.”46 They led uprisings in Tunis, Cairo, Istanbul, New Delhi, Damascus, Tripoli, Beirut, Sanaa, Tehran, Moscow, Montreal, New York, São Paulo and Rio de Janerio, Tel Aviv, Kiev, Taipei, Hong Kong and Paris, as well as the virtual squares of social media users in repressive Saudi Arabia, China and Vietnam.47

A revealing interview with Mashal, an illiterate Pakistani girl included on the global youth website, reveals the traditional restrictions on her ability to go outside her home,...