The infectiously enthusiastic Hank Green writes about the negative blowback he and other YouTubers are receiving for being chosen to interview President Obama. There are so many good insights here:
I may be biased here, but I feel like there’s an actual and honorable goal in all of this. America needs to convince young people that there are good reasons to be civically involved. Millenials are soon to be the biggest hunk of the electorate and, if the mid-terms are any indication, they simply don’t care. And that shouldn’t be surprising since no one is connecting to them in the ways they connect with each other or talking about issues that matter to them from perspectives they can identify with.Legacy media accuses young people of being apathetic while actively attempting to remove them from the discussion.
There’s a problem that needs to be solved and this is clearly an attempt to solve it. That’s part of what convinced me it was a good idea for me to be involved. The other part, to be clear, was that I got to interview the freaking President.
Finding relevance and value in youth culture is an ongoing struggle, one that most people give up by their mid-30s. If only pieces like this got as much signal boost as those useless "How Teens Use Social Media…By An Actual Teen!" pieces beloved by the press.