Generational Shift in Citizen Identity: Implications for Civic Learning Online, (The)

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing civic education today is for educators, youth workers, policy makers and scholars to recognize the profound generational shift in citizenship styles that is occurring to varying degrees in most of the post-industrial democracies. The core of the shift is that young people are far less willing to subscribe to the notion held by earlier generations that citizenship is a matter of duty and obligation. This earlier sense of common commitment to participate at some level in public affairs was supported, indeed forged, within a group and class based civil society. The underlying sense of citizenship has shifted in societies in which individuals are more responsible for defining their own identities, using the various tools offered by social networks and communication media. This generational shift reflects the profound changes associated with the transition away from a modernist society defined by membership organizations, social hierarchies (guided by leaders), and one-way mass communication. Replacing these social conditions in late modern society are social organizations increasingly based on personal social networks that flatten hierarchies with loose-tied (opt in-opt out) affiliations. Social technologies both facilitate such organizational forms and transform information exchange into multi-channel participatory communication.