Topic > Critical Analysis of Voting for Youth, Martin Wattenberg

From the book Voting for Youth, Martin Wattenberg stated the fact that millennials in the United States are not very engaged in politics. He summarized this conclusion by analyzing surveys and polls, which identified three important causes including declining newspaper readership, television audiences and electoral voters. Martin Wattenberg focused on discussing the problem of many young people not voting in America. According to 2010 survey data from the Census Bureau, only 24 percent of US citizens under the age of thirty reported having voted. He believes that the media is one of the main means through which people can receive political messages. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay However, young people nowadays are mostly addicted to smartphones and social media, which becomes another way for them to receive messages rather than newspapers and television programs. Therefore, Martin Wattenberg argues that declining newspaper readership and television audiences are the main reasons why young people are politically apathetic and, therefore, refuse to vote. From my point of view, although political messages can also be shared on social media, young people avoid knowing about them. I agree with what Martin Wattenberg said that young adults can potentially learn a huge amount about politics from news sites, but only very few of them choose to do so. Although newspapers and TV are also platforms that provide diversity of messages, political news is reported every day in a certain period of time. However, the Internet has an infinite amount of information that competes with political news, young people can easily choose information that attracts them and ignore “boring” and “boring” politics. The media is a crucial element in solving the problem of political apathy among young people. As mentioned above, social media has replaced newspapers and television programs for new generations to receive messages. Martin Wattenberg said that regardless of whether you are educated or not, reading a newspaper and watching television news are always the main ways that people gain knowledge about the political world. However, I think it is almost impossible to ask people to move away from smartphones and nowadays they rely on the newspaper or TV. To compete with the enormous amount of information coming from the Internet, politics must be “fun” and “engaging” when it comes to the public. Instead of presenting political news with long paragraphs of words, political news should be more creative in its presentation. Taking my experience as an example, I usually watch YouTube videos, which provide visual effects or animations, to explain certain political topics when I find it difficult to understand from the texts. Some people may have found that political advertising is annoying when it appears on TV or in the video we are watching, however, we cannot deny its effectiveness in providing audiences with as much information as possible in just a few seconds. With the advancement of technology today, there are actually more opportunities to promote politics than we expected. Apart from what Martin Wattenberg says about the media in the book, I think the problem of political apathy among young people is also influenced by older generations. . Take Hong Kong for example: in 2014 there was a huge democracy protest organized by young people to fight for universal suffrage, called the Umbrella Movement..