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Youth live in a “urban wilderness”. Helping them envision their own future will help them navigate through this wilderness.

Howard Rheingold and Andrea Saveri of the Institute for the Future came to our office to talk about Youth and Civic Engagement in the Public Sphere. Here are my rough notes about their presentation and the conversation.

“How do you get youth to engage in civic health?” Howard is teaching a course with college students on technology and media tools and how that can be applied towards public voice in the public sphere. Andrea wants to use what the Institute has learned about the practice of understanding the future to go from foresight to insight to action.

Andrea introduced a funny acronym: VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous). Civic engagement is increasingly VUCA.

How can this emerging wilderness be characterized?

• It has extreme diversity (not just racial and ethnic diversity—family and household structure)
• We are increasingly one herd and this one heard is more susceptible to disease and vulnerable—she uses the term “sick herd”.
• seeing more afflictions as disesases of affluence or conditions of the urban environment

• Characterized by economic instability

Is there an explanatory model of this environment? What does MySpace mean and how does the Flat World play into it? Andrea talks about a cofigurative culture in developing the model.

What is the need? To connect the future in meaningful ways to present day youth realities and actions

Are we losing ground on civic participation (are we bowling more alone?) or are there new publics being developed (a la danah boyd’s writings about MySpace and social networks)?

IFTF forte is to take people/corporations/communities “from foresight to insight to action”. This project is about helping youth to develop…

• create a grammar to link present to the future
• connecting youth passions to critical issues

• translating digital to civic literacy

Grammer: let’s develop a shared language and concepts. Richard Slaughter, social foresight researcher. Let’s understand the community capacity to think together-young people don’t always do it—know how to do so or see models around it.

The youth were asked to think about ten years ahead—what will the world look like when they are the ripe old age of 26? Connect the Personal to the Future. One young Latina woman wanted to use digital media to go back three generations of a family recipe for mole. Others are asked to think about climate change. Or race and ethnicity in an era where you can pick the genetic attributes of your children.

Can you convert digital literacy into civic literacy – not just the ability to encode and decode concepts, but to be a functioning part of a community. And if the youth exercise their political clout—and the will to exercise it collectively, there will be no putting the Genie back in the bottle.