A Lack of Youth Reaction to Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Win

When something newsworthy happens, Social Media outlets are a buzz with reactions, theories, explanations, stories, etc. Social Media is reflective of the culture it exists within. So it was no surprise that today's announcement resulted in a variety of opinions and thoughts flooding the Social Media outlets.

Just in case you aren't up to date, today President Barack Obama was awarded one of the highest honors in history, the Nobel Peace Prize.

I'm not here to discuss whether I think he "deserved" the win - which seems to be the most popular topic of conversation. I'm here to talk about young people's reaction to Obama's Nobel Peace Prize win - or rather their lack of reaction.

I was surprised at how few of my friends on Facebook were talking about Obama's Nobel Prize Win. My Twitter account has been flooded all morning with tweets discussing the nomination.

For a very long time analysts have been asking themselves why young people seem so apathetic towards politics. My Facebook friends aren't apathetic towards Obama's Nobel Peace Prize win, but they are jaded by politics.

Young people are not engaged in politics because despite all the statements to the contrary, young people think their opinions don't matter and are jaded by the bickering, and the name calling and the finger pointing. At then end of the day, politics feels like a bureaucratic mess. It's easy to sit back and watch a bunch of old men fight over a law or social program. Said law or social program will probably be overturned or have the funding stripped from it anyway with the next president. Why work so hard for something that can be so easily lost? Young people are realists and they know better than to wear their hearts on their sleeves, hearts are fragile and easily broken. So are laws and social programs.

In the broader scope of things, young people care more about what's going on in pop culture than what's going on in the world.For example, in college I had a French professor from Mali. He asked the class, "How many of you know where my country is on this map of Africa?" The map was a lot like the one below - there were no country names, but lines were shown to indicate the borders of each country. Nobody could answer our professor. Nobody had any idea where Mali was on a map of Africa. Had my professor asked us where Borat was from, I'm sure we could have at least named the country and identified a general area on the continent of Asia where we believed the fictional country of Kazakhastan should be located.

Questions like those make me wonder how many young people know where Iraq and Afghanistan are located on a map of Asia. This isn't a criticism of young people, it's an explanation of why young people don't update their Facebook status expressing their opinions over Obama's Nobel Prize Win.

Young people don't care because it's not relevant to their lives. Most young people don't own any property, were given the vehicle they drive, work part-time as a babysitter, fast food employee or retail employee. The world matters in the context of the few events that affect their lives at that very moment. Why?

Because in young people's lives, their opinions don't matter - not at work, not at school, not even with their parents. Inevitably, young people do what they are told or they defy orders and face whatever consequences they receive as a result. After defiance, they are often told how they made poor decisions, were irresponsible or shouldn't defy authority. If the world shunned your opinions by punishing your actions, would you continue to express your opinions or would you just say "eff it" and let it be?

So when you read young people's Facebook status updates, don't be surprised if they don't seem to care much about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize win. The only people I could find who cared and expressed their opinion about Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Win were both law students.

Either way, Social Media outlets like Facebook are a great place for young people to express their opinions on their daily lives or pop culture, but don't expect to see too many updates on politics. It would be very antisocial for a young person to post a news article on a serious topic on Facebook. Young people primarily use Facebook for it's social aspect, not for its informative value. (Unless of course the informative value is to see who is dating whom and what that cute guy from high school is doing now.)

Social Media is reflective of our culture. Therefore, if a few pieces of informative content get squished into some status updates and a few jaded young people become a little more informed, then maybe my law student friends who post informative articles on Facebook aren't updating their statuses in vain.