Analog Generation Holds Levers Of Power In A Digital Age

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 01/16/2026) The push-and-pull between youth and their elders has played out over time immemorial. Every generation says theirs is different.

The youth determine popular culture and drive change. The elders govern and use experience to temper ideas.

In the case of the Baby Boomers, though, evidence suggests the shift from their generation to subsequent ones is possibly the most significant, yet. The move to social media. Analog to digital.

The generational leap from one generation to the next can always be viewed as seismic. This one, though, may be epochal.

“Time comes for us all, and when it does, things change, and the people who like the way things were don’t like when things change,” said Dante Chinni, American communities project director at Michigan State University.

Chinni said the Baby Boomers were the largest generation in history. They've also held on to the levers of power in the United States longer than other generations.

“We still have not had a president past the Baby Boomers. We have not had a Gen X President. We may very well skip over Generation X and go straight to the Millennial for our next President from a different generation. I won’t say it’s not normal, but this is different than what we’re used to experiencing, and it has profound effects,” he said.

The Boomer generation was formed in a different time, with a different worldview and different circumstances. That world has changed into an online cyberspace that doesn’t fit the analog ideology.

Smartphones have replaced newspapers, books, cameras, watches, telephones, radios, network TV, record players and all so many of the devices that Boomers relied on for entertainment and connect with culture.

“There are real differences between people who grew up analog and have kind of learned to accept some parts of the digital world as it is, and people who are what we call digital natives,” Chinni said.

Digital natives include the Millennials and Generation Z. These generations grew up with smartphones and instant information.

This difference has played out in the modern political dialogue, with younger voters and policymakers feeling they don’t have a place. The state Legislature and local city councils or mayors have switched, but those seem far from the top of the political establishment.

“The very top of the pollical order is set in a different time, and, I think, for that reason, they feel the parties are disconnected. Young people in particular, feel the parties are disconnected from their understanding of reality, of how the world works, and that’s a problem,” Chinni said.

He pointed out that the Millennials aren’t that young anymore. They're starting to see the first pangs of nostalgia. They're being stacked up with Gen Z since the Boomers haven't passed the torch to Generation X -- the bridge generation between analog and digital - to facilitate evolution. There's been minimal evolution, some “tinkering at the edges.”

“When you don’t have evolution, and you want change, change looks like revolution, and I think some of that is what we’re seeing now," Chinni said. “I’m not saying we’re going to have a revolution in this country or suddenly going to dramatically flip to the left or dramatically flip to the right.”

The shift of power could end up feeling very sudden, but still inadequate to the younger generations. Past generational torch passing was incremental and the fights felt as if they being played out on the same field. To the analog generation, the digital generation is playing on an entirely different field.

Looking at the data from the American Communities Project, Chinni said the majority of the country is still largely in the center of the political spectrum, with drifts left and right.

Chinni said the lag in time between the creation of a technology and the effect on politics is a generational factor, and with the advent of artificial intelligence, the political disruptions that are being seen are only the first small bits of those repercussions.

“I can’t promise you anything about the future of the United States. It’s a really complicated picture right now. The one thing I can promise you is it’ll be different. I just don’t know how it’s going to be different,” Chinni said.

What Matt Grossmann sees is an aging country. People are staying in their careers longer and that includes people who stay in Congress. The political science professor and director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research Director at Michigan State University said the relatively high age of members of Congress is increasing over time.

"Gerontocracy” is evident. The people in power want to stay there. Sometimes, that's due to fear of technological change.

“To defend the older generations a little bit, you know some of the things that people complain about, about moves in our politics, it’s all a culture war now, and we’re not trying to solve basic economic problems, or trying to use government for economic gains and redistribution,” Grossmann said.

He said that was a consequence of paying attention to the concerns of the youth.

“The divisions are often less about policy positions than about policy priorities or the relative salience of social, and cultural, and economic issues. So, in both parties, younger parts of the party are more consumed with social and cultural issue concerns and less concerned with the old kind of economic policy concerns of the parties,” Grossmann said.

He said it leads to a perspective in each party that they have given up on the core ideas that have defined a Republican or Democrat in the past.

“It’s not as if young people aren’t in favor of tax cuts or whatever, but it’s just not their priority,” he said.

He said there is another problem that is being played out and exacerbated by the megaphone of social media.

“People don’t know how privileged they are,” he said.

He said the sense that politics caters to the young is a belief held by the elders, but the major policy fights are still being had over the issues of social welfare and tax policy, which are issues of the elders.

He said the youth feel the older generations didn’t have to go through the same struggles they did and that they have it much worse in the labor market.

“All of that is basically false. The newest generations are just going through the same age-related changes that everyone else did,” Grossmann said.

He said early wealth, income, and job stability hasn’t changed for many generations.

“It always sucks to be a young person moving into the labor market,” he said.

The Legislature is still about policymaking, budgets and economics. Republicans still retreat to the belief of small government. Democrats see government programs as an avenue to help people.

The newer generations aren't connecting with these well-worn battles.

"They’re more motivated by social and cultural issues and so that’s also why unions are shifting,” Grossmann said.

The other factor is that the older people get, the more likely they'll participate in politics. They're more likely to vote in off-year elections, and more likely to call a member of Congress.

“Older people still dominate political participation in an era in which there’s big division and prorates based on age," Grossmann said. “That’s going to increase the sense that the politicians are not listening, or divorced from their voters.”

Civil Rights Activist DeRay Mckesson, 40, is one of the Millennials. He backed the Black Lives Matter movement and co-founded the progressive nonprofit Campaign Zero.

Mckesson pointed to the civil rights movement starting as radio had taken hold, changing how people got their information, and on the cusp of television changing a generation and how they got their information.

He said speeches made by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were broadcast in a way that wasn’t possible during other eras.

“We have so many really incredible recordings of him giving speeches, not because he liked to be recorded, but because, if not for the radio, there was no other real way to hear him, or to hear (James) Baldwin, or to hear anybody organizing in that movement, and those speeches were wildly disruptive,” Mckesson said.

He said the Montgomery bus boycotts had flyers created after teachers gave them access to the copy machines, which were a new technology.

“In our era, it was not simply the internet. It was Twitter. It was this place where not only could you spread a message, but you could legitimately organize, and when I say organize, I mean build relationships that are sustainable in ways that attack structural power,” he said.

He said those digital relationships weren’t a blip or momentary, but sustained and in two seconds someone could have the ear of a million people across the nation.

“In a way that King never could, no fault of his own. It was a function of what technology was,” he said.

He said he feels like the mediums of social media were taken for granted by the digital natives. They didn’t know a world without it. They knew that the algorithms showed that pushing people to say and do wilder things got them paid for their content.

“All of a sudden, you go to this current world we live in, there’s this weird financial incentive to perform in a way that you just weren’t rewarded for that monetarily, if you did it in ’14, ’15, and ’16,” he said.

He said as an organizer, he feels like there are two separate worlds: One that is online and one that exists in the older broadcast space of network television or cable networks.

“I think this moment too has shepherded in a sort of crisis of expertise. All of a sudden, it is easier for everybody to talk in public, so you don’t really know who’s an expert anymore. Whereas, I think there’s a generation where to get a public platform almost meant that you were an expert,” Mckesson said.

He said it seems like if one generation was going to hold tight to the levers of power for so long that they wouldn’t have used it to do some larger changes, especially given that the Baby Boomers were the generation of the hippies.

They aren't, though, not anymore.

"That, I think, is why people are so frustrated by the people clinging to power. Because you think that the security would make them more willing to engage in big ideas, and that has not proven to be true,” he said.

Mckeeson also pointed out the problem with the ideology of youth.

“Young people don’t quite understand the way systems work. Government is a systems game, and that is also not helpful as we think about equipping young people,” he said.

He said the big ideas of young people need to be trimmed by age to fit into the systems of government.

It explains why young people are more interested in entertaining a third party. They feel Republicans hold outdated views and Democrats turned their backs on their concerns.

“You will have to choose an imperfect solution, and that is not a values misalignment,” Mckeeson said. “That’s just a part of what real life requires.”