The Geezer Effect and Internet Politics
This isn’t really apropos of anything in particular, but over the weekend I was thinking about the fact that a lot of our perceptions about the medium-term implications of digital technology are probably skewed by the fact that, at the moment, there’s a significant generational gap in online activity:
For example, there’s also a significant generational gap in attitudes toward Barack Obama:
This means that at the moment there’s a substantial relationship between being online and attitudes toward Barack Obama. The online population, in other words, is a lot more Obamaphilic than the population as a whole.
This sort of thing has spurred a lot of admiring commentary about the efficacy of progressive internet tools, and some conservative interest in building conservative new media platforms leading to the present-day’s right-wing obsession with Twitter. But it seems very plausible that Obama’s popularity on the internet is driven by completely coincidental demographic factors—the senior citizen cohort contains more white people than does the generation population and white seniors have more conservative attitudes about a number of social issues than do white non-seniors—and the “success” of the online left is thus something of an illusion.
37 Responses to “The Geezer Effect and Internet Politics”
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April 6th, 2009 at 11:50 am
I don’t think it’s about technology so much as it’s about the propaganda of CNN/Fox and the Sunday Pundit Conservative briggade. Yes, MSNBC has introduced two liberal hosts, but with cable news so overwhelmingly conservative, it’s not about the medium so much as it is about the bias of television versus the active agency provided in terms of news gathering online.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
DTM–
Because race plays a very significant role in the voting habits of seniors. Do recall that they came of age during segregation. If you grew up post 1968, you experienced a very different country that if you grew up before or during the war. Those attitudes persist.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
“the war” in this instance being WWII.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
You may be jumping the gap, here. What you’re noting as a substantial relationship, based on these three broad measures (age, on-line status, vote) appears to be a correlation that might not even be statistically significant.
It might be interesting to look at the vote among on/offline Americans w/in each of these age ranges, to see if the choices made at the polls corresponded with internet usage at all. If that showed an undeniable ‘Obama bump’ among onliners vs. total across every age range there would be cause to note a relationship.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Shorter Yglesias: “I got 2 sets of data and a fancy chart. The data doesn’t mean anything, and there is no relationship between the two, but what the heck I’m game for a counter-intuitive blog post. I’m not gonna talk about the actual success of the online left (raising cash, getting people involved so that they get people to the polls). Nope, I’m just gonna use words like Obamaphilic because it sounds cool.”
April 6th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
What is the Right Wing obsession with twitter? Are they using the medium because they like it or are they afraid of its subversive potential.
I must be living in a cave. I know nothing about this. It sounds interesting though.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Speaking as a member of the Silent Generation who spends a fair amount of time on-line, I’d say that there probably is a high correlation among my generation between being on-line and voting for Obama. Probably true in the GI Generation too. We retired-but-still-sentient have time on our hands, and the old activists and p[rogressives probably spend morew time on-line, while the Fox viewers vote GOP.
I’d say its less true among the young, since everyone seems to spend time on-line the younger you go.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Matt, leave the charts and interpreting research data to the professionals. As other posters have noted, there may be NO substantive relationship between online usage, age, and support for Obama. A few key questions you might want to answer before putting your hypothesis out there:
What activities are people doing online – by age, by voting record?
What issues influence voting selection in 2008 – by age, by voting record?
Where do voters obtain information about candidates?
April 6th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Matt, you should call it the “Geezer Gap.”
Yeah, fine, JimboSlice, correlation is not causation. So what? It’s still interesting. And maybe Matt’s wrong, and there is a relationship. So he gets people talking.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
The geezers I know really do think of it in partisan terms.
Obama could have been born more white than Jeb Bush, but in their eyes he’d still be a dangerous liberal more destructive to Our Way Of Life than anything the GOP could put forward.
Incidentally, all the geezers I know are much more active on the internet, including social networking and online dating, then my older boomer friends. Older boomers are some of the most technology-afraid group I’ve ever come across. But that doesn’t seem to translate to political perspectives.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Yes MattY it’s true.
ObaSuckcess is driven by the same demographic that made a hero of that chubby light saber guy and just leave britney alooone.
Woo Hoo!
In both cases little d democracy takes its long overdue revenge on us all.
And yes, though you are too polite to just say it, old farts do exhibit a much higher incidence of constipation.
One reason they smell so funny.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Yep – what CParis said.
Even if you can establish that there might be a relationship, correlation is not causation.
You can say that “old people are more likely to be Republicans” but, even if that were true it doesn’t mean a thing unless you can divine some idea as to why.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
two words: Soylent Green (familiarity with which may be a signal of incipient geezer status)
April 6th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
I’m working with a pretty broad survey dataset gathered throughout the campaign season, and a quickie analysis suggests that some online activities predict vote choice, some don’t, and controlling for age doesn’t change any of those relationships. Age does, of course, positively predict voting for Obama.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
As a 70 year old “GEEZER” born white and in Detroit I want you to know that I am proud to be a member of the 45%. I joined the Obama movement on September 12, 2007 and worked for his election with hundreds of calls. Also I was on the internet prior to Netscape. Please drop the this attack on senior citizens.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
@Aaron –
Are the predictor activities exclusive to the internet? Do the same/similar activities predict as well among those not online?
April 6th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Matt sez:
Just remember, correlation does not imply causation.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
I just quickly ran a set of online activities (con and lib blog use, watching political videos, political social networking, news aggregator use and online-only magazine use (e.g., Slate)) in one block, then added age. The blog and online magazine variables were significant in both models, the others were NS in both. I’m actually working on building a more sophisticated and comprehensive model of online media use and political activity, so if I remember I’ll come back and update.
I should also note that I looked at age gaps by race and only the black category didn’t have a noteworthy one (I say “noteworthy” instead of “significant” because Asians had a gap that was NS due to sample size, but actually bigger than the white gap in raw numbers).
April 6th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
That first chart says only 82% of Gen Xers “go online”. That seems strikingly low..I mean, we’re going on at least 15 years of net access now, who are the other 18 percent who don’t use the net? Prisoners? Itinerant farmers? Strange.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
One thing: I don’t like that split up. “Generation X” isn’t 33-44 year olds by any means. Heck, I was out of high school before the term really caught on, and _then_ it was applied to pre-teens.
“Generation X” are people born between about 1976 and 1990. “Generation Y” are people born between 1990 and 2000. Those born between 1964 and 1976, like me, belong to no generation whatsoever.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Those born between 1964 and 1976, like me, belong to no generation whatsoever.
Isn’t that the point of the “Generation X” moniker? By your definition, Kurt Cobain was born ten years too early.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Aaron,
You’re working off of the Pew Internet Survey, right?
I’d take another approach. I’d build a probit or logit model based on purely demographic non-internet factors, then throw in the “uses the internet” question and see if it’s significant.
The way you’d want to do it, you’re going to get a lot of missing values that will distort your result.
Let me know how it turns out(shoot me an email or comment on my blog). I was going to do something on the Pew survey myself, but the missing values were tedious to deal with, and their weights seemed to give odd results.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
No, I’m using data from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, which was administered by Polimetrix/YouGov. It’s a nice dataset in a lot of ways, but frustrating in that some models can be done using the base survey (N of roughly 17,000) and some can only be done using the custom content that my group put together (N of roughly 1,000), so I’m constantly having to readjust my thinking.
I think your modeling suggestion is probably where the final version of this will end up. In my initial post, I wanted to see specifically if there were any Internet use/vote choice relationships at all, because I think that aspect of the campaign has been widely overstated. Pundits and scholars alike continue to bitterly cling to the idea that Internet users == young people despite the fact that, e.g., the mean age of political blog readers is about 45. I do think there’s some merit to the idea that the Net facilitated GOTV (as opposed to sheer vote choice) and that’s something I’ll be looking into, but I think that’s a different beast than the Magical Obama Internet Express that we often hear about.
April 6th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
“Generation X” are people born between about 1976 and 1990. “Generation Y” are people born between 1990 and 2000. Those born between 1964 and 1976, like me, belong to no generation whatsoever.
Wikipedia disagrees. Defining generations is obviously pretty shaky, but Generation X comes immediately after the Baby Boomers – in the phrase’s first use in American contexts, a Douglas Coupland novel published in 1991, it actually overlapped with the Baby Boom generation by a few years. Generation Y began with people born around 1980, depending on who you ask, and continued for 15 to 20 years.
Apparently, now that I read that Wikipedia link, I learn that some people are offended by the phrase “Generation Y.” Bizarre. I guess I can kind of see why it’s annoying to be classed in a demographic afterthought to Generation X, but it’s not like there are any better alternatives. “Net generation” sounds as dated as “information superhighway.” And apparently some people prefer “Millenials,” but that makes us sound like Y2K counterparts of Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children.” No thanks.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
The voter chart suggests to me that a majority of 65 and older likely voters who would answer the phone and submit to a phone survey were a) ignorant of McCain’s policies re: Medicare/SS, and/or b) too stupid to defend their basic pocket book issues.
Excuse me, did I say “stupid”? That was insensitive of me. I meant “retarded”.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
the limpublicans like twitter cause you don’t have to use sentences…or…real thoughts..there are no links……and they like knowing
someone is following them – into the bathroom……
April 6th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Maybe he could rename the whole blog “apropos of nothing.”
April 6th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
“Generation X” are people born between about 1976 and 1990.
Count me in with Cyrus in disagreeing. I was born in 1973, and I remember hearing about Generation X all through the early 90s, when I was in college. But they weren’t applying it to teenagers so much at the time as they were to people my own age and a bit older. We were all supposed to be disaffected “slackers” exemplified by Kurt Cobain, and then five years later we were all supposedly internet millionaires. Remember all that kiddie nostalgia for the Brady Bunch, H.R. Pufnstuf, etc.? That was big in the GenX zeitgeist, and yet that actually predated me; I only watched Brady Bunch in reruns.
I think your definitions are about 10 years off.
April 6th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
@ 30 Limpublicans! Onward to the bathroom! … Thanks konnie.
April 6th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Incidentally, all the geezers I know are much more active on the internet, including social networking and online dating, then my older boomer friends. Older boomers are some of the most technology-afraid group I’ve ever come across. But that doesn’t seem to translate to political perspectives.
Boomers are spoiled and dumb.
They are also fantastically greedy.
April 6th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Forget the Gen-X definition… 73-year-olds are part of the “G.I. generation” now? Exactly how many 9-year-old G.I.s were there?*
*outside the German army, of course
April 7th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Forget the Gen-X definition… 73-year-olds are part of the “G.I. generation” now? Exactly how many 9-year-old G.I.s were there?*
I guess there could have been 17-year-olds in the U.S. military at the end of the Korean War (1953), but that’s really stretching the definition thin.
April 9th, 2009 at 10:56 am
This topic is quite hot in the net right now. What do you pay the most attention to while choosing what to write about?
April 12th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Interesting article. Were did you got all the information from…
April 13th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Thanks, I enjoyed your post. It’s nice to see someone writing something worth reading.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
yea nice Work
April 15th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
You are a very smart person!