How is GenZ perceiving and influencing American politics?
- Do you think that the American political culture is changing? Why yes or no?
- With the predominance of media, how is that changing the definition of citizenship? (Are we more self-interested citizens or collective-interested citizens? Are we more political? Do we have a new narrative?)
- What role do you think social media has played in the changing attitude toward justice in society?
- Make a top 5 of these issues based on the ones their importance to you, and why these? Health care, equal rights, gun policy, climate change, taxes, student loan debt, reproductive rights, immigration
- Assuming you don’t change your mind as you get older and that your generation (generation Z) has the same mindset, what would the U.S. run by your generation in the future look like
L (A friend of a friend that was visiting Alaska, don’t know him very well)
L thinks that the American political culture is changing because of social media. He believes that we have access to so much more information compared to previous generations.
When asked about citizenship and the influence of media, L mentioned censorship as a limit to our citizenship. He believes that a true citizen has a right to free speech, but in our day and age, fake news and editing compromise our participation in the public sphere. Even though media can alter narratives in a bad way, it can bring people, that would’ve never interacted, together.
For him, social media has helped with the spread of information, when we think about discrimination and injustice.
L’s top 5 issues that mattered the most are taxes, reproductive rights, health care, immigration, and climate change. He believes that taxing the richest people in the U.S. would balance out the gap with the working class, to give equal opportunities to people. Reproductive rights are important for women, and for him to ban them is a big step backward. Health care ties in with the previous issue, he thinks that people should have access to what they need no matter what their financial situation is. Immigration is important for the U.S. because it opens our eyes, we are not confined in our white, Christian world. He says we learn a lot from interacting with others and it’s important to him. Lastly, according to him, climate change needs to be addressed if we want to live a good life and give a viable planet to future generations.
When asked about the future of the U.S. he guessed it would be more socialist and liberal, which has its pros and cons. He states that our generation seems to care a lot about other people which is good, to an extent, and is probably going to be more open and progressive. He notes that there has been a recent push for progressiveness that he doesn’t think will go away.
P (My good friend, his dad was in the military so has travelled a lot, and is in the firefighter program here)
P thinks that the political culture here in the U.S. is changing because if you look back to World War I and II, it was super political, there were no social media, and so everything that happened was perceived as the “real” truth. Nowadays everybody can misconstrue our reality and stretch it in whatever ways they want to. With social media, it’s easy to spread thoughts, which has made people believe in some things more than others, and because of that people will “fight” one another and pull further away from each other, and as a country, we shouldn’t fight each other but rather come together and come over differences.
He believes that because of social media, people feel like they should have opinions about everything. He brought up an interesting point concerning the differences between red states and blue states. Because of the hyper-partisanship in our days, according to him, citizens are “modelled” differently depending on the leading party ideology of the state they grew up in. Because of that, it brings barriers to people, and he finds it sad that as a country we are not able to overcome those disagreements. He jokingly brought up the fact that when we grow up a lot of us are taught not to talk about politics in family gatherings because it causes disagreements. If politics weren’t a taboo subject and we were able to engage in respectful debates, we could listen to one another and try to find compromises.
When asked about social media and justice, he said that social media only shows the bad side of the justice system. He brought up the fact that you will see a lot more videos of police brutality than police officers helping families or kids. People will only look at that and won’t do more research, which means they will access partial truth. It’s misleading. Some videos circulating on the internet are cropped, so we will only see the person getting pulled out of his car, but we don’t see the part where that person was for example running away from the cops. He thinks that if you are going to get your information from one particular network, like Fox News, it is also important to watch the opposite side, like NBC to draw a bigger picture out of it but most people don’t go that far.
His top 5 issues are reproductive rights, equal rights, gun policies, immigration, and lastly health care. According to him, making abortion illegal is out of pocket. He cannot believe that a 10 years-old girl that has been rapped would have to carry and give birth to that baby. Equal rights are important not just between races, but also between men and women, it is time to close the wage gap between the two. To him, if you are not doing illegal things, you deserve your rights. He owns several guns himself but still believes that there should be more regulation. Background checks are important to slow down all the school shootings that are happening in America. Immigration is important, he said, “I mean we are all immigrants, except the Natives that were here first”. He has lived in low-income areas around multiple immigrant families, and he believes they are the hardest working and honest people because they often come with nothing and just want to provide a good life for their kids and family. When it comes to health, no one should have to pay to get care. We have a right to live, so paying an enormous amount of money is not normal.
At this rate, if our generation was running our government, he doesn’t think we would last long. He hates to say it, but he believes that we are a bunch of cowards. We throw a lot of things out of proportion; we cause many riots. Our generation hasn’t experienced war, and he believes that previous wars have guided America toward where it should be, people were able to learn and work from that.
K (my roommate, she is in the nursing program)
K believes that the American political culture is changing because of technology. People can communicate their views, share them on the internet and ally with people that feel the same way. But then it creates groups of people who think alike and fight the other groups that think differently. That creates more hate. She feels like people are not saying what they feel because of peer pressure. We created a need for everybody to have opinions, but people’s opinions become everybody’s business because of the internet.
She doesn’t think that the actual term citizenship exists anymore; maybe just the idea exists. America is the most vocal about our voting system because we vote for every level. She believes that with social media, we are citizens, and we are more political but it’s only to show. It elevates talk but there is less real action. We can see her idea tying in with the free-rider problem that interest groups have.
Social media allows people to show their side of the story. It’s a lot of clickbait and fake things, so we can’t trust things. To get good information, we must look at other sources than social media. So, in the end, social media is kind of creating more injustice and discrimination when we modify the truth.
Her top 5 issues were reproductive rights, immigration, health care, gun policy and equal rights. Reproductive rights have like a trickle-down effect, they determine a lot. It can influence immigration because some women won’t want to come to America if they can’t end their pregnancy and have fewer rights. She believes that the immigration process is very difficult so we should make the citizenship process easier. It would help with the illegal immigration problem we have right now. As a nursing student, she notices the nursing shortage, we see too many nurses caring for too many patients. Without a good healthcare system, it increases the chances of diseases, and we will live with something like COVID again. She believes that gun policy and the health care system tie in together because a lot of people that don’t get psychological help can snap one day, take their gun, and do some severe damage. She says, “if you ask anybody outside the U.S. what we are most known for, besides the answers of cheeseburger and milkshake, they will probably say mass-shooting”, and do we want to be associated with that? Equal rights are just normal, why treat people differently? And it ties in with the principle of everybody minding their own business. People can choose if they want an abortion or not, they can choose what they want in their bodies or not, etc. It’s equal rights to our minds.
She fears the future because she feels like our generation is too demanding and we want to do things our way. She fears we are going to see more diseases and more conflicts. We are going to be so lost because we are fed so many opinions and she feels like no one has their proper opinion. When we ask people why they think like that, they often don’t have a valid reason, and they probably think like that because someone else told them to. She mentioned that we are all going to have a service animal because she doesn’t believe we were raised to be independent.
I found this assignment interesting because it exposed me to new ideas. I would say that I stand with L on the progressist ideology side. To interview P and K and hear their more pessimist view on our generation and politics has helped me put things in perspective. I don’t think I agree with everything they said but it has opened my eyes to a lot of things, which is probably the goal of this assignment, at the end of the day.