Digitization and the Future for and of Youth

Digitalization’s diverse spread into society creates opportunities and backlashes, respectfully, of furthering the information revolution, the spread and use of knowledge to name a few. Yet as a mass phenomenon, it desensitizes people, demeans knowledge, creates spaces for fake knowledge. In the hiatus between these totally opposite tendencies, youth have to navigate their day to day lives, careers, lifestyles and be able to manoeuvre their space in a post-COVID era of globally conservative withdrawals into nationalism, jingoism and regression. A set of combined epithets, such as ‘youth are the future’ and ‘the future is now’, that produce lifestyles, reactions and paraphernalia that are both at the cusp of such a future with all its forebodings, negations and opportunities, but also at the juncture to potentially maximize the socializing impact of digitalization, of knowledge development if handled carefully, and of creating a new generation of youth that can harness what digitalization brings with it.

The protest upsurges as in Middle East, UK, South Africa were based on social media networking, in a digital environment. Yet now data also rules student’s lives due to costs. Data is the new gold, yet there are digitalized drones used for war and massacre.

This paper outlines both tendencies, as an ambiguous terrain, of a submersion of youth into a digital future of artificial intelligence, robotics, of their perceived hegemony over it as it widens the digital generation gap, AND a set of opportunities to breakdown the traditional barriers of the global digital divide, of unleashing potential hybrid environments of work and play, of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, of relating and distancing. There are multiple youth responses to the new digital age, and this paper seeks to explore their development, impact and consequences on and for youth.