Hansen: #citygovernment … not so much

Poke your head into any local city hall meeting and chances are you won’t see anyone under 50.

I take that back. There will be one — the city’s audiovisual/webmaster/security dude, who moonlights for an online video comedy channel. His office is that small, dark room in the corner where no one ever goes.

The people who don’t show up to city hall meetings, by the way, are friends with that guy. His gamertag is CityRekt.

At least a generation of young people — and probably two — are not engaging in local issues. Forget naming their mayor. Today’s youths probably cannot articulate one prominent local news story.

Ann Owens is a Chapman University media lecturer and award-winning journalist. She grew up in Orange County and worked at PBS for 17 years covering local issues.

Her 17-year-old son is an Eagle Scout. She believes in engagement, so she’s passionate about seeing the world through a local lens.

Every year, she gives her students a test about Orange County. They hate it.

“I just get eye rolls. They absolutely despise it,” she said. “My point to them is no matter which city you go to for your first job as a reporter, you’re going to have to know that city. And you’re going to have to know the players and — not to be dramatic — you have to know the kingmakers. You have to know who is in charge.”

She admits one problem with this approach is that local issues cannot gain any traction or mindshare in today’s Internet-based culture, where the sheer volume of information — about presidential races or nanofame entertainment — drowns out everything else.

Any remaining bandwidth is left to personalized Reddit feeds that define importance with a simple like vote. Or there is the ephemeral Snapchat post that by its nature lasts only 24 hours or less.

As a result, the attention span of the 18-to-34 demographic is measured in characters, not minutes or chapters.

“There’s no storytelling now,” Owens said. “Every headline is the same, and we’ve completely homogenized the English language. In order to tell a story and get someone to read it, it almost has to look the same as the last headline. And students respond to that. They respond to 140 characters. That’s what an 18-year-old knows. They don’t know life before that.”

This seemingly acceptable attention deficit disorder runs completely contrary to the skills needed for civic involvement — patience, diplomacy and the ability to compromise and persevere.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that a young person was interested in getting involved on the local level. Do you think he or she could stand sitting in a committee room on weeknights for 12 months forming an 87-page report?

“I have to think that’s old school,” Owens said. “It’s like crocheting. It seems like a dying art. I don’t foresee that type of local activism continuing to happen. I could be very wrong and I hope that I am.”

Owens held up two examples of people who paid their dues through the local city food chain — Todd Spitzer, former state assemblyman and Orange County supervisor, and Betty Vasquez, news weather person. While they had different careers, they focused on issues close to them.

“Both of them started as teenagers. They started on that path long, long ago,” she said. “People like that have such a knowledge of their community, because they have worked in it and for it from the time they were in high school doing ROP, working for the local police station or whatever. That type of thing is dwindling.”

But the need for local involvement is stronger than ever. It hasn’t gone away. The challenge is how to sustain it.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation published a report in 2014 that confirmed the suspicions about millennials. Only 2% of young people plan to work for the federal government after leaving school, and furthermore they see no reason to participate.

“Millennials have little patience for the speed to which things get done and may not see the value in becoming a member of what they see as inefficient organizations,” the report said.

Owens worries that this degree of disengagement will come home to roost.

“There are always stories that need to be covered,” she said. “It just seems like there’s less of an interest to look at things that are hyper-local and are community based and in your backyard when you’ve got so many loud voices talking about national and international issues. I don’t know that we’ve fully seen what the repercussions of that lack of commitment will be on our communities.”

Whatever happens, one things is certain: Fewer people coming up through the ranks are interested in filling old shoes, Owens said.

“The generational gap is ever expanding between those who are willing and able to do those things and those who can’t.”

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at [email protected].