Henry Jenkins on Obama and the "We" Generation

The community generation is how we describe what are otherwise known as Digital Natives

Henry Jenkins has added his thoughts on Barak Obama and the transformation of American politics, he states

Commentators have noted his tendency to use "We" far more often than first ("I")or second person ("You" pronouns, often with only minimal understanding of what is at stake in this language choice. Some of this no doubt emerges from Obama's experience as a community organizer, a very different role from Hillary Clinton's early experiences as a litigator or legal council for nonprofit organizations. Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement.

And this is a very interesting insight, movements engage people around higher order ideals and beliefs, it asks people to become self motivated. Barak Obama understands that people want to be part of the process. It’s the end of retail politics and the green shoots of networked politics premised upon engagement.

Obama says

Yes you can write your own profile

Yes you can supporters near you

Yes you can plan and attend events

Yes you can network with your friends

Yes can become a fundraiser

Yes you can write your own blog

Barak Obama is saying yes you can be part of this, you can be part of history.

You see people embrace what they create.

There is a sharp contrast to be drawn here with the ways that Bill Clinton changed the language of American politics a decade ago when he embraced the informality and intimacy of the town hall meeting, stepping to the edge of the stage to get as close to the voter as possible, repeating their name as part of his responses, trying to forge links between his experience and theirs, and channeling their pain as he offered a more empathic version of old style policy wonkism. Clinton was praised for embracing and incorporating his questioners into the discourse of the campaign. Yet, the Clinton approach still was very much focused on the connections between the politician and the voters as individuals ("I feel your pain") and the recognition of a still tangible division between the two. This can be seen as the last gasp of a broadcast era model of the American public.

What Obama embodies is something different -- a networked model of the relations amongst all of us who are involved in the process of transforming American society. The differences between Obama and Clinton have less to do with issues of policy but rather differences in process, in notions of governance, in cultural style, though the subtle differences in policy may reflect differences on these other levels, as when Clinton wants to require everyone to buy health insurance (top-down) and Obama seeks to make insurance accessible to everyone (bottom up). Those of us who are passionate about Obama (and yes, I'm an Obama boy) are responding to an alternative vision of the country -- one based less on fragmentation around identity politics or partisan differences than one which values diversity of perspectives as opening up the possibility of refining our collective organization and enabling us to solve problems together which defeat us as individuals.

This adds to our post Communities Dominate Politics and The man who would be President and The new web politics

Henry goes on

When I first heard the " Yes We Can " speech, I was struck by the ways that Obama was linking his campaign to a range of other historic struggles for social justice, most of which are better captured by the image of bottom-up movements rather than top-down campaigns. (These aspects are accented even more fully in the Black Eye Peas music video, where Obama's lone voice is expanded through a singing chorus.) I was impressed with how he integrated those various fights together to offer a shared vision of America's past and future, breaking out of the more fragmented understanding of these incidents within different chapters of the history of specific minority groups. In many ways, his language recalls that of Walt Whitman whose Leaves of Grass sought to develop a synthetic construction of what America was like as a nation, linking together a range of individual experiences, memories, perspectives, sense impressions, to create a vision of the nation as one big organism.