According to a new report on the political attitudes of the Millennial Generation called  The Progressive Generation: How Young Adults Think About the Economy: (link courtesy of MyDD)

• Millennials are more likely to support universal health coverage than any age group in the 30 previous years the question has been asked, with 57 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds saying that health insurance should come from a government insurance plan.
• Eighty-seven percent of Millennials think the government should spend more money on health care even if a tax increase is required to pay for it, the highest level of support in the question's 20-year history.
• An overwhelming 95 percent of Millennials think education spending should be increased even if a tax increase is required to pay for it, the highest level ever recorded on this question in the 20 years it has been asked.
• Sixty-one percent of Millennials think the government should provide more services, the most support of any age group in any of the previous 20 years the question was asked.
• When asked in the General Social Survey whether they were in favor or against the idea that cutting government was a good way to help the economy, Millennials had the lowest support of cutting government spending in the history of the question.
• Millennials are very supportive of  labor unions, giving them an average ranking of 60 on a 0-to-100 scale (with 0 indicating a more negative view of labor unions and 100 being a more positive view), the second-highest level of support of any age group in the over 40-year history of the question.

There are 80 million Millennials in the US, compared to 78 million Boomers and 53 million GenX. And they are voting in the highest numbers seen among young people since 1972.

(crossposted at the excellent career guidance site Brazen Careerist) 

The terms "tech-savvy" and "Millennial" seem joined at the hip, like "hopeless romantic" or "out-of-control pop diva." Of course, many romantics are nothing if not hopeful, some pop divas are models of good behavior, and not all Millennials are tech wizards - but we tend to hear much more about the stereotype than the exception. However, even Millennials who aren't bits-and-bytes pros do have something that only comes from having grown up marinated in technology, rather than learning it on the job: an innate level of comfort and familiarity with digital culture. That confers certain abilities, like seeing useful potential in new technologies, or finding fast ways to learn an unfamiliar application, that even clued-in older colleagues might lack.

In my book Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap, one of the main points I make to employers is that it is essential to create cross-generational conversations around technology to insure that everyone is making the most of their information toolkit. Part of this can involve formal training, where younger employees work directly with older colleagues in reciprocal mentoring environments to teach them tech skills while learning from their business knowledge. But the situation need not be so formal or structured, and it definitely does not need to come from the top down.

Millennials in a multi-generational workplace can make themselves more valuable to their employers and their colleagues - thus increasing their influence and opportunities at work - by becoming ambassadors of digital culture in a positive, pro-active way. This might also have the benefit of improving management perception of useful new technologies and practices at work, which might reduce some of the conflicts that are emerging in many workplaces between younger workers and rigid IT departments.

Some tips for turning yourself into an ambassador:

• Demonstrate practical uses for the technology at work: Let's say you've come up with a great way to use wikis to share knowledge among your team, but the term "wiki" draws blank looks or nervous laughter. Show, don't just click through features; actually show people how and why the particular application can make people's jobs easier
• Make an effort to understand IT's point of view. Some consumer-grade technology really is risky and dangerous from an IT perspective. If you want to introduce IM into your organization, don't just download Yahoo or AOL messenger, book up on some enterprise-grade solutions. If you anticipate IT concerns and help make their job easier, they may respect your point of view.
• Start conversations: Many older workers are looking to young colleagues for cues on how to use technology better, but don't want to appear ignorant. Having these conversations involves using some tact. Remember that people in their 50s and 60s are not target markets for technology and are not necessarily subject to the same stream of information about new stuff in their lives as consumers and citizens. They are curious, but may not even know how to ask the right questions. That said...
• Be a resource, not a know-it-all: Be patient, respectful and discrete when helping older colleagues or managers with technology. A lot of older workers I talked to report that they don't like asking for help with tech stuff because it could diminish their status and authority in the eyes of their peers - and in many cases, the younger person "helps" by taking over at the controls, doing the task so quickly that they can't follow, or explaining in terms they don't understand. Don't be that guy. Slow down, listen, show respect, and ask for your colleague's advice and experience in return.
• Try to speak your boss's language: Remember that his or her job is not necessarily to make work easier and more convenient for you, it's to build value for the business. One supervisor I spoke to was having trouble getting her manager to see the virtue of telecommuting, because he suspected it would lead to slacking off. I recommended designing a pilot program that made telework contingent on every member of the department maintaining certain levels of productivity - otherwise the whole program would be canceled. This met the manager's objections because it left it to the employees to step up and show they could manage themselves.

American Millennials enjoy (or perhaps not) a reputation as conformists and group-thinkers among some generation-watchers, but apparently they have nothing on their peers in the PRC. My old pal Matt Forney had a piece on the New York Times Op-Ed page over the weekend called "China's Loyal Youth," in which he bluntly observes: "Educated young Chinese, far from being embarrassed or upset by their government’s human-rights record, rank among the most patriotic, establishment-supporting people you’ll meet. As is clear to anyone who lives here, most young ethnic Chinese strongly support their government’s suppression of the recent Tibetan uprising."

In China, it is the GenXers who are the radicals and troublemakers. They are the ones who remember (and may have participated in) the 1989 uprisings culminating in Tienanmen Square. Matt notes: "It is received wisdom in China that people in their 40s are the most willing to challenge their government, and the Tibet crisis bears out that observation. Of the 29 ethnic-Chinese intellectuals who last month signed a widely publicized petition urging the government to show restraint in the crackdown, not one was under 30."

Chinese Millennials, although globally connected and more participative in the international economy than any previous generation, have taken different lessons from the experience than Western twentysomethings. Instead of internalizing a sense of ownership over the world's big issues, Chinese youth appear to view the problems of everyone else as a validation of the policies of the Chinese government and the virtues of the Chinese people, given their unbroken run of economic achievement in the past decade and a half. Matt conlcudes on a sobering note: "Barring major changes in China’s education system or economy, Westerners are not going to find allies among the vast majority of Chinese on key issues like Tibet, Darfur and the environment for some time."

I just saw this review of a new book called Millennial Makeover: YouTube, MySpace and the Remaking of American Politics by Morely Winogrand and Michael Hais. The reviewer, Mike Connery, is himself the author of a book on Millennials in politics called Future Majority. The political implications of generational theory interest me at least as much as the technology and workplace implications, which is part of the reason that I am moonlighting as a messaging strategist for a local Congressional campaign.

In my consultations with the professional campaign staff, it appears that convention thinking about the "youth vote" still refelects the disengaged voting patterns of GenX and the young Boomers in the 1970s (the ones who did not elect George McGovern president, for example, despite the urgings of Hunter S. Thompson and others). Barack Obama's success in getting young voters excited is unsurprising to them, but the fact that the under-26 crowd is actually showing up at the polls really seems to have thrown them for a loop.

Clay Shirky made an interesting point about Howard Dean's abortive run in 2004, noting that his use of technology such as meetups and web-rings did more to prove the community-building value of social networking tools than it said for their efficacy in actually delivering the results politicians care about, e.g., votes. Obama seems to have solved that problem. His supporters not only get excited and give money, they actually turn up - not merely to vote, but also to endure often lengthy and confusing caucuses with hardcore party regulars their parents' age or older.

Part of the credit belongs to Obama's campaign. He is a political organizer by trade, after all. Most of the real change, however, comes down to a newly-engaged and sophisticated electorate. Millennials are different from GenX and Boomers in many noticeable ways, and it should be no suprirse that their approach to citizenship is different as well. Strauss and Howe would suggest (and I suspect Winogrand and Hais would agree) that it would be so regardless of the existence of social networking technology, because the collaborative values of Millennials is part of their generational identity as civic builders. That's a tough counterfactual to prove, however, because social networks are here and they are obviously playing an important, if not decisive, role in the mobilization of young people.

In any case, I am looking forward to adding these books to my reading list.

Clay Shirky writes: "Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn't create change; it has to be around long enough that most of society is using it... for our young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming."

This observation, better than anything else I've seen so far, encapsulates the differences I talk about in Generation Blend. Pre-digital generations find social computing technology novel, and perhaps threatening. At the very least, it takes some conscious effort to embrace and understand because it is so different from prior experience. GenX finds the technology interesting, having grown up concurrently with IT innovation and surrounded by a constant conversation about the improving capabilities of new tools. We tend to be the ham radio operators, fiddling with the tubes and transistors instead of listening to the broadcasts.

Most Millennials, except those very self-consciously participating in discussions about technology and society, don't seem to think much about the tools, anymore than you would think about the pane of glass in a window rather than the view outside. I suspect they secretly laugh at GenXers (like Shirky and me) who fetishize this whole relationship between technology and social transformation and are much more interested in the content of new conversations than the wires through which they travel.