Not literally, of course, but when it comes to leadership and how young people are consuming news, i.e. who has the authority, this wired generation prefers peer-to-peer vs. a top down style -- if you connect the themes of two interesting stories in The Washington Post and New York Times.

The first story is about leadership. The Girl Scouts did a national survey of youth and found found that the majority of boys and girls in the United States "have little or no interest with achieving leadership roles when they become adults, ranking 'being a leader' behind other goals such as 'fitting in,' 'making a lot of money' and 'helping animals or the environment.'" What's fascinating about this survey is the disconnect between how leadership is defined (people who prize collaboration, stand up for their beliefs and values, and try to improve society) vs. the style of leadership they actually see in the world (traditional top-down management).

This quote gets at the heart of the issue:

"The millennial generation has ambivalent, even negative, feelings about formal leadership," said Peter Levine, director of a nonpartisan research center at the University of Maryland that studies young people and civic involvement. "They prefer horizontal leadership in which everyone's a leader."

It's not that they don't want to be leaders, it's that they want to (and will) redefine leadership. I drew a parallel with this story and the New York Times, reg. required, story about how younger voters are consuming their news about the election -- virally, through friends via social media. From the article:

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well -- sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter -- reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com -- with a social one.

The shift again is from top down or traditional media being "the authority" to everyone or all my friends having just as much authority -- not in creating the news but in filtering the news as well as pointing to the full story.

When I was at Current TV, one of the "pods" they would run was basically unedited raw news footage of some protest or riot or conflict. Sometimes it would run for 7 minutes, which would be a lifetime in traditional news media. As the Times article points out, it's these uncut speeches or the full Rev. Wright sermons that people are watching on YouTube. A generation who creates their own media is savvy about editing and knows they are only getting part of the story from traditional media -- they rely on their peers to point them to the rest.

Posted by anastasia