Will the Millennial generation be able to buck the hyperindividualist tendencies with which they were instilled thanks to 80s and 90s political mentalities? Will they be able to avoid getting in their own way when pushing forward for collective change? I have heard this question time and again and yesterday, as featured in our news links, Sally Kohn, senior campaign strategist with the Center for Community Change, addressed the issue in an op-ed for the Christian Science Monitor.

“The lone cowboy story was a myth,” writes Kohn, recognizing and celebrating the Millennial’s shift towards an embrace of collective action. I had a similarly themed conversation as early as last week with Josh Levy of Change.org, where we discussed our simultaneous appreciation for how awesome the movie Iron Man was while also marveling that it exists as yet another continuation of the dated mythology that suggests “one great hero will save us all.” Enabling collectivist political and social behaviors is impossible without the connectivity provided by Internet technologies, the Millennials are moving beyond that myth. As Douglas Rushkoff said at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum, “You can either be an in-charge individual, or an in-charge collective,” and this generation has showed which side they prefer.

I agree with Kohn’s caution, and believe it important to keep a close eye on the Millennial’s tendencies towards the hyperindividual (Kohn suggests that the Internet is a tool of the individualist). The Millennials are a generation struggling with its own identity. Further, I agree with Kohn’s assertion that the Millennials must be cautious with regard to how we move forward as a collective by taking as many of their actions offline as possible. They must strive to participate in as many face-to-face ways as they can, so as to strengthen a connection that goes beyond familiarity with screen names. It is important that the Internet is consistently embraced as a tool, not a single answer, with regard to increasing civic engagement and degrees of social capital.

Where Kohn’s assertion gets tricky, however, comes when she claims that “the Internet does not bind individuals in shared struggle the same as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and ’70s did.” Generational comparisons as measures of success are both tricky and dangerous. This mirrors an argument I have heard time and again between the 50+ crowd and Millennials themselves—an argument centered around an expectation held by the elder collectivists that believe that since the youth are not rioting in the streets ala France in May of ‘68, something isn’t going right. Unfortunately for that argument, May, 1968 is as mythical as the proverbial lone cowboy.

On the 40-year anniversary of said summer, it is sexy to remember all of the radicalism that took place all over the world, but in doing so, it is easy to forget that in the US, many of the fruits of that particular movement weren’t as attractive as we care to remember. There were, of course large successes with regard to “the culture war” and the movement towards a stronger civil rights policy, but the rise of Nixon’s “silent majority,” the cultivation of distrust in government and the collective, and an eventual embrace of the hyper individualism that we’re now trying to re-imagine also came out of it. It is important, as Kohn points out, to be sure that the Millennials are careful to embrace as many opportunities for face-to-face action as possible, be they opportunities provided by Meetups, using Couchsurfing, flash-mobbing, or other available tools and mechanisms. We must be careful, though, to not get too hung up on measuring the successes of this generation by the foggy, glamorized spectacle of the ones that came before.

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