The young – from teenagers to twenty-somethings - have never been interested in general news. Any message they get is usually through the media they consume - music, video, and film. Sometimes school, sometimes shopping.
Brian Stelter, from the New York Times, quotes Lauren Wolfe, 25, “I’d rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than search through a newspaper to find the story.”
The young are in constant communication with each other, mostly through their cellphone, but also through social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Because of this, recommendations from friends is what motivates them to follow up, to learn about something. He says, "In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth."
It’s a little more though. For it to be passed on by the young it has to reach some threshold of entertainment. The message has to do more, it has to entertain. Stelter provides an example,
A musical version of Mr. Obama’s campaign speech made by the singer will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and a bevy of celebrities, it was released on YouTube three days before the series of coast-to-coast nominating contests on Feb. 5. Counting hits on YouTube and other sites, the video has been viewed more than 17 million times.
A college student, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”
The Americans invaded Iraq arguing that it was for freedom and democracy, and against dictatorship and suppression. Mark Danner, journalist and author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Gharaib and the War on Terror, puts this very clearly,
This is a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical. In its ambitions, it is wholly foreign to the modesty of containment, the ideology of a status-quo power that lay at the heart of American strategy for half a century. It means to remake the world, to offer to a political threat a political answer. It represents a great step on the road toward President Bush’s ultimate vision of ‘freedom’s triumph over all its age-old foes.
The war the Americans wage on terror is a war on an ideology. The terrorists, likewise, are fighting against an ideology, a combination of western religion and capitalism, that they find evil.
An ideology is a system of abstract thought applied to public matters. It is central to politics in any form. It is an imaginary relationship to a real situation.
How do you win such a war? Those in power on each side believe they are right. Both sides think they must get rid of the other, that they cannot coexist peacefully.
They believe that only one system can be right, the other is evil and must be destroyed. President Bush, three days after September 11, 2001, "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.
What can change this belief? Perhaps, the understanding that neither side can win, the costs are too high, and the realisation of the absurdity of waging a war on ideology.
