Mobile - up to a Point
Assuming that the responsibilities and the money are roughly the same, which would you prefer: having one job for 20 years or five jobs that you held for four years each?

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See the full survey results
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Surprise, surprise

After all, Connected people are poised to prosper in an era of great technological change. It may be in their best interest to ride the boat, rather than to rock it. I might have anticipated this. The Digital Citizens I've come to know are brainy, quarrelsome, and skeptical - but at heart, they are profoundly idealistic. They are proud of their new nation and culture, eager to explain, defend, and preserve it - and frequently called upon to do all three. 

There were other surprises. While there are thousands of Web sites devoted to spirituality and religion, I've seen little in the online world to make me believe that Digital Citizens readily embrace institutions like organized religion and incorporate prayer into their daily lives. Yet roughly a third of the Connected surveyed say they attend religious ceremonies an average of four times a month - almost precisely the same percentage as the Unconnected. Fifty-six percent of the Connected (like 59 percent of the Unconnected) pray at least once a day. I suspect the poll was picking up a trend that other surveys have also found about younger Americans: they have a deep spiritual - as opposed to religious - bent. With that possible distinction in mind, I remain convinced that this group is allergic to preaching and piety, whether it comes from the White House or the Vatican. 

My other concern about this survey has to do with the manner in which it defined and identified the select group of individuals known as Digital Citizens. By linking connectedness so closely to five specific technologies - email, laptops, personal computers, pagers, and cell phones - there seems to be a risk of excluding many people who simply don't have the money or the need for all this high tech machinery. I don't use all that stuff myself, nor do many of the online people I know. But using broader criteria - such as participation in digital forums on the Web or Usenet - Digital Citizens might prove to be even larger than that the 8.5 percent of the United States population uncovered by this survey. To me, being connected is about community, and not about hardware. 

In fact, the whole notion of connectedness has become so mired in posturing, paranoia, and propaganda that it has lost much of its meaning. Certain political and intellectual elites hate the idea of connectedness, in part because it threatens their longstanding primacy over the control of ideas and social agendas. But the tone of the rhetoric coming from Digital Citizens hasn't helped either - it has often been so shrouded in technobabble and arrogance that it has taken on an elitism of its own. It may not be pretty, but such attitudes are perhaps inevitable in a culture that is both new and revolutionary. 

Despite these qualms, the survey gets to the heart of what being connected is all about. Ultimately, it's not about gadgetry, hipness, or cultural domination. It's much more about giving individuals a taste of democracy, helping them create new kinds of communities, and reconnecting them with the institutions that shape their daily lives. It's about sharing knowledge and information, and spreading ideas and prosperity. These are the core values and goals of Digital Citizens. 

The survey's findings are in many ways a scathing indictment of the lazy, reactionary manner in which many contemporary institutions have resisted change, demeaned and patronized the young, and struggled to preserve their own power. Many of these critics remind me of the hoary old men in the Kremlin who hung on for dear life during the dying days of communism, shrouding their self-interest in gaseous talk of preserving a culture and a civilization. But in the process, US leaders have alienated a culture whose patronage and congfidence they could dearly miss in the years ahead. 

For educators, the survey suggests the need for some radical rethinking about the interaction between education and technology. The Internet is not, after all, something that children need to be protected from. Rather, they urgently need access to it. Clearly, there is now evidence that technology promotes democracy, citizenship, knowledge, literacy, and community. But to cultivate these virtues, our educational system needs to learn how to accommodate a culture that is interactive, knowledgeable, participatory, and frequently restless. 

For our political system, the implications of this survey are both urgent and obvious: it's time to move discussion about the Net and other new technologies beyond the current obsession with the evil they might cause and toward a focus on the truly revolutionary opportunities they create. But it remains unclear who will speak to this booming and powerful new culture to help it establish a meaningful agenda. Politicians like Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Newt Gingrich have all made noises about embracing new technology, yet they are so far removed from the core values of Digital Citizens that their pronouncements inevitably seem hollow and opportunistic. If they can be led at all, leadership for the Digital Citizens might have to come from within. For now, however, they exist as a wondrous, but orphaned, movement in waiting. 

Ours is a cynical world. In our smarty-pants media culture, idealism is out of style. Still, the question demands consideration: If Digital Citizens emerge as a powerful force in the 21st century, what might they build? 

I am no utopian, but if I allow myself to dream along those lines, I envision a new style of politics - less confrontational, more fact-driven, more responsive and agile. This politics might be practiced in a pluralistic and diverse world in which cultural differences are debated and celebrated, while garden-variety bigotry and horrors like the Bosnian slaughter are consigned, like smallpox, to the ash heap of history. It is a world in which the future is embraced, not dreaded. 

I've always seen the significance of the Internet as having much more do with the Enlightenment than the dawn of a New Millennium. Like the brave philosophers of the 18th century, Digital Citizens are united by an ambitious vision, much like the one historian Peter Gay described in his book The Enlightenment as "a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all, freedom in its many forms - freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one's talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his own way in the world." 

What finally emerges both from my own experience and the survey is a powerful feeling that we are, in fact, part of a political movement that will be much bigger than us. We are a political nation, citizens of reason with common values, struggling to come together in common cause. 

Meanwhile, the questions I asked last spring remain: "Can we build a new kind of politics? Can we construct a more civil society with our powerful technologies? Are we extending the evolution of freedom among human beings?" 

When I wrote that, my best answer was that I honestly couldn't say. But after poring over the Digital Citizen survey, I think that, just maybe, we can. 

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Discuss the survey with Jon Katz and other digital citizens, in Threads. 
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