Brexit and the old geezers
Unless you have been hiding in a cave somewhere with no wifi, you probably know that the UK will vote on whether to stay or leave the EU on June 23rd, And the polls show an almost dead-run between the two sides.
Here is the latest data from YouGov UK:
But there is something in this data that I find absolutely fascinating, and it’s the massive difference we see between the younger and the older generations.
If we instead look at this data by age, the result is this:
Here, you see that young people very firmly wants the UK to stay in the EU, while the older generations don’t. The cutoff point is at 43 years old.
BTW: The yellow line is the population totals by age. And, as you can see, there are more people between 20 and 30 than between 60 and 70.
This pattern is also true when we look at the US. When YouGov asked people in the US about free trade, we saw the same massive difference between the old and the young.
As you can see, 48% of the younger generations think free trade between nations is a good thing, while only 12% think it’s bad for the US. Meanwhile, 39% of those above 65% consider it to be a bad thing while only 23% think it’s good.
Isn’t this amazing?
What we see here is the difference between the digital and the analog generations. The digital generations (all the young people) have been brought up in a world where we are all connected by default, and where our market and our definition of success are defined by the interest of the people, rather than as a place.
The older analog generations, however, are used to thinking about their world as something being defined by place on a map. And when things start to go wrong, they blame people in other places for all their troubles.
Another place where we see this is when we look at how we define something as being ‘local’. Think about local news, for instance. The older generations define it in the traditional way, like this:
Their definition of local is defined geographically. Local news is something that is limited to a specific city.
The younger generations, however, don’t think like this at all. They instead define ‘local’ as the importance of the connection:
Look at young Instagrammers or YouTubers. You never see them create a YouTube channel for a city because that would be insane. Why would you limit yourself to a geographic place?
Instead, young YouTubers define their channels around people’s interests and concerns. Which means that local news is about stories that match a certain topic.
And, as you can see in the graphs above, this has a dramatic impact on how young and old people see the world.
So who does the future belong to? And more to the point, think about where we will be if we could skip one generation forward.
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BTW: I wrote much more about how this impacts the future of local news on Baekdal Plus.
