Digitalisation, legal activism and the generational divide

Abstract

Whenever new developments (whether of an online or an offline kind) risk unsettling people’s lives as they know them, they can resort to different responses, including protest, advocacy and activism. One kind of activism, which may be chosen in response to regulatory and social change triggered by digitalisation, could be called legal activism, in that it focuses on reasserting extant rights, insisting on effective enforcement, and/or on adapting the legal framework so as to afford a higher level of protection and/or more effective enforcement, in an effort to ensure more direct access to the enjoyment of rights related to digital interaction. But how does legal activism relate to the (imagined or real) generational divide? This paper aims to provide some answers using selected vignettes on young people as legal activists (‘Examples of Digital Activists’). The vignettes will be discussed by drawing on various available theories, models and insights from social science (‘Discussion’). The question set (‘The Generational Divide: Representation versus Reality’) will be assessed in light of insights gained from discussing, contextualising, fact-checking and theorising the vignettes exercise (‘Conclusion’), but to allow for this, the question set will need to be further refined (‘Looking for Political Agency’ and ‘Digitalisation and the Generational Divide’). The focus will be on millennials, while zoomers obviously may be concerned, too.