This isn’t really apropos of anything in particular, but over the weekend I was thinking about the fact that a lot of our perceptions about the medium-term implications of digital technology are probably skewed by the fact that, at the moment, there’s a significant generational gap in online activity:
For example, there’s also a significant generational gap in attitudes toward Barack Obama:
This means that at the moment there’s a substantial relationship between being online and attitudes toward Barack Obama. The online population, in other words, is a lot more Obamaphilic than the population as a whole.
This sort of thing has spurred a lot of admiring commentary about the efficacy of progressive internet tools, and some conservative interest in building conservative new media platforms leading to the present-day’s right-wing obsession with Twitter. But it seems very plausible that Obama’s popularity on the internet is driven by completely coincidental demographic factors—the senior citizen cohort contains more white people than does the generation population and white seniors have more conservative attitudes about a number of social issues than do white non-seniors—and the “success” of the online left is thus something of an illusion.
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