Mike Connery is a regular contributer to to Future Majority and MyDD and an occasional contributor to TechPresident and the Huffington Post. He also serves on the board of Young Voter PAC. He very recently authored Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority, a book that details the role of the Millennial Generation in modern progressive politics. He talks here about taking his book on tour, how young people are involved in politics in ways previously impossible and how the face of organization has changed in the rise of social platforms.

Make Something Happen: How was the tour?

Mike Connery: It was very hit or miss. Portland, Oregon was great and the Oregon Bus Project was very helpful. We got on the radio there and the place was packed, totally full. In other places, the groups weren’t quite as helpful. It was educational in that respect.

The book was well-received by everyone, minus the College Democrats.

MSH: Why is that?

Connery: They’re not exactly painted in the best light in the book. An old mentality really holds them back. They’re part of the DNC and they still operate from the top down. Even with Howard Dean in charge, they’re not getting a lot of support from the DNC and state parties in terms of money. The Young Democrats [of America] left the party in 2002 because they were better able to raise money on their own. In doing so, they have transformed over the years and created real field campaigns that have been helpful to the party. The College Democrats made the wrong decision.

MSH: Did you run into any rockstar activists or organizers on the road who really blew you away?

Connery: I met a lot of rockstar people out there. In California these two kids, Ian McGruder and Barak Wouk, came to this one event that took place at Berkeley. They make these great videos that the California Democrats actually use. They’re great. They’re really interested in the Obama campaign, but they’re also really concerned with making young voter outreach a part of what they do.

MSH: How have things changed in the past few years with regard to how the Millennial Generation uses the technologies available to them?

Connery: In the past four years, the interest has been there but the technology hasn’t been in place until now. When we were working the Music for America in 2003 and 2004, we were publicizing on Friendster but not many people were using it. We had done a series of Daily Show-style satirical videos and they were quite good. They were getting 100 thousand hits or so and this was before YouTube had come along. Everything–blogs and even the Dean Campaign–was centralized.

Now, content finds you. YouTube links can be embedded to the blogs you go to go to regularly. News stories are similarly versatile. I very recently read a PEW study about where young people get their news. It’s not that they’ve stopped looking. They still go to CNN and MSNBC but a huge chunk of the people polled say that they hear about their news online. We’re seeing the long tail of distribution. You go to a blog and that blog covered a story, or you see something mentioned on Facebook. Everything is so decentralized. All of this started in ‘03 and ‘04, but we’re so far ahead of that now. Information finds you where you are.

MSH: How are new paradigms of information distribution changing the ways that young people are becoming involved in political organization?

Connery: In terms of organization, it wasn’t possible four or five years ago to do a lot of things that you can do now. Music for America piggybacked on 2,400 live events and we used an open source content management system to organize for events. We were able to create this automated system online where most of the organization was taken care of.

Millennials have a whole different perception of how news is distributed. Have you seen the Here Comes Everybody video by Clay Shirky? He’s really got it. How much time did I spend watching Seinfeld and Friends instead of doing something proactive? I am at the older end of the Millennial Generation and I got my news from Meet the Press, The Nation and the New Republic–when it was still somewhat respectable–but now that all is different.

When I worked for the Dean Campaign, they had no money and I was working in Brooklyn and we were trying to figure out how we were going to proceed. From there, the participatory nature in campaigns began to rise. They has been changing the game. People are now putting their own commercials that are comparable to those made by parties or candidates up on YouTube. There were all these kids throwing keggers for Obama. There was an Act Blue page that organized something like Beers for Obama where these guys were putting their beer money towards his campaign.

MSH: What seems to have changed most is the element of comprehensive participation - Has this essentially posed a challenge to older, more traditional top-down organizations, where they now have to change how they operate?

There is now an expectation that participants are able to mold the political process. That is the expectation now and anything less doesn’t make any sense to young people. They have grown up as participators. Take Hip Hop, which is 28 years old or whatever. It introduced sampling and mix tapes and then we eventually got into mash-ups. There is all of this crossover that has become an expectation in everything that we do. Now your Flickr and Facebook crosses over and there is that same joint culture between you and your social network. The nature of all distribution is participatory; not passive.

Older, outside nonprofit organizations like GreenPeace are not adapting really. They’re hooked into these traditional canvassing models where they run slave labor canvass campaigns. There is very little room for upward mobility or a career with what they do. They’re not interesting. Groups like PIRG are interesting and exploring different ways to accommodate participation. This is especially the case for student PIRGs, which are changing deliberately. They’re using stuff like mobile communication to mobilize their volunteers.

Organizations like the Oregon Bus Project, groups using Facebook to organize events, and other groups doing peer-to-peer field work, are the ones that are really interesting. These are groups that are helping to convey that political action isn’t just taken care of during one day of hard work a year. It is a lifestyle. This culture of participation is changing all former perception of how we engage.

MSH: Is it an organizational unwillingness to change that is encouraging independent innovation?

There are some groups that are doing interesting stuff. The labor unions are even trying. SCIU is now working with something called Qvisory, which is a social networking/AARP for young people thing. It just launched and that will be interesting to watch.

But yeah - The older groups didn’t appear to be getting enough done. People were unhappy with the strategy and results. It was insular, DC-oriented, top down, and unappealing to a lot of people. If you have a desire to participate, the tools are now available to compete with these groups. You use Facebook and MySpace to organize, YouTube for messaging, CMS to bulk mail, and so on. The tools are out there and if you’re unhappy with how they’re working, just create it. The cost to do so is radically lower.

Clay Shirky presents a great example in his book about the abuse that took place in the Catholic Church. The church was organized from the top down and that prevented any organization within the church to do anything about the problem without approval by the Vatican or the Arch Diocese. Now with these tools factoring in, you see the rise of Voices of the Faithful who came out speaking out against the scandals. This was previously impossible without these tools. The same as everywhere else that benefits from these tools, this would have been otherwise impossible a few years ago.

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