On Oct 23, Shawn Katz will be visiting the University of Winnipeg campus to talk about his book, Generation Rising, which examines and explains the context of Québec’s student movements. This event is part of The Uniter Speaker Series, brought to you by the Mouseland Press.

The Uniter spoke to Katz about his book, generation gaps, the potential and limits of social media activism and our newly elected government. Here’s a sneak peek of Katz’s thoughts - come hear him in person on Friday at 3:30 in 2M70 for more.

Answers have been edited for length.

Uniter: This book was developed from your thesis. Were there many changes or revisions needed to turn it into a book?

Katz: Yeah, absolutely. When I graduated from my Master’s it was about 120 pages and it was obviously much more academic in language. It’s not pretending to be objective. It’s definitely factual or research-based, but I don’t pretend to not take a position on things. It very much is an opinionated work, so the language is really the largest change.

The actual structure and the argument is the same, but it took me a whole year after graduating to transform it into something that I was hoping would be more compelling to actually read. The language is a lot more flourishy, it’s a lot more colourful, more rousing in the rhetoric, whereas the thesis was much drier in tone, because that’s what you do with an academic book. You have to take your voice out of it, essentially. So with the book it was basically a year of me trying to put my voice back into it.

The Uniter: What is your academic background?

Shawn Katz: My Master’s is a joint Master’s between Ryerson and York University, and it’s called Communication and Culture, so it’s a mix of communications theory and cultural studies. My undergrad is an Honours Political Science Undergrad from Concordia.

Uniter: For those who may not be familiar with your work, can you tell us a little bit about the book?

“ We self-select for the people who already have our own opinions, who already have our own arguments, and we very rarely go out of our comfort zone to actually talk to people that we disagree with.

-Shawn Katz

Katz: Because it’s the first English-language account of the Student Spring, as I call it, it was important to provide a lot of context. So that’s one of the main things that differentiates it.

There’s a history of the Québec student movement, a history of Jean Charest’s Liberal government, which was the political context. There’s also the global context that preceded it, specifically the Occupy Wall Street movement that spread across Canada. And the Indignados and the Indignés in Europe, which was also very important because in Québec, because of the cultural and linguistic ties to France, we were much more aware of what was happening in Europe than in the rest of Canada.

The book really takes an analytical perspective, and this is at the heart of the book and the thesis: trying to explain the generational clash that emerged in Québec. In every single poll that was published throughout the spring, there was this really marked generational divide where you would see something like two-thirds of people under 30 on the sides of the students, and literally that same proportion - about two-thirds of people over 55 - against the students. It really was this “two generations come face to face” kind of moment.

The point of the book is to try to explain that, and I do it largely by looking at the democratic cultures of each generation; the social media generation on one side (I call them the network generation as well) versus the Baby Boomers, who had a very different idea of democracy, representative institutions and all that.

Uniter: Within communities or social movements that can agree on things ideologically, there can still be generational divides that exist. Do you have any suggestions for trying to bridge those gaps within communities or within activist movements?

Katz: I was in a conference a week ago with the head of the Insitut Du Nouveau Monde (INM), which is an organization in Québec that focuses on youth engagement. And he was basically saying that the main problem - and this might be heightened by social media forms - is that we tend to all talk in silos.

We self-select for the people who already have our own opinions, who already have our own arguments, and we very rarely go out of our comfort zone to actually talk to people that we disagree with. For example, youth don’t really talk much to people older than them.

The way that the head of the INM framed it is that we actually have to force interaction between different generations. You have to actually encourage us to get out of our comfort zones and actually just talk and engage longform with people who, at the beginning, you think have totally different values. But at the end of the day you might actually have more common ground than you realize.

So the point of the book was also trying to explain to older generations (hopefully they read it), where we as a generation are coming from, what we’re concerned about for the future, what we’re angry about, what we’re disillusioned about and also why we seem to behave the way we do politically - in terms of not voting as much but still being very engaged politically in other ways - and why we’re disillusioned with the representative system and what democracy means to us versus what it means to them. So it’s a mixture of communication, trying to explain our ways, also trying to listen too, to find common ground.

Uniter: Social media is a big theme in the way that you’re labelling the generation, and in the way that a lot of these protests and these mobilizing movements spread. That was also huge in the Occupy movement, in the Arab spring, and of course in the movement in Quebec. Do you have any specific limits or pitfalls to social media activism that you would highlight? 

“ We’re going to have to really assume our full potential and power through social media, through mobilization in the streets, through letter writing, through any means at our disposal.

-Shawn Katz

Katz: This whole silo thing is one of the main pitfalls, I think. We tend to only interact with the people we agree with on social media. Twitter is not a good forum to get into debates with people you don’t agree with. They end up devolving often into insults. There’s only so much you can do in 140 characters, it tends to bring out the worst in people sometimes. So there are absolutely limits.

We just came out of a federal election, and looking at the level of discourse on Twitter, online, I’m pretty skeptical about the kind of influence it really has. There are limits to these forms as forums for actually debating, I don’t think they really serve that purpose as much because again, we tend to self-select for the people who we already agree with in our networks.

But where they do have immense potential is for information: To circumvent the mainstream press, the corporate press, to try to get different media, different sources, different voices, that’s one of the main strengths of Facebook and other social media.

I think there are strengths and there are weakness, but nothing exists in and of itself. And people who are on social media aren’t just on social media. They still read mainstream media, they also still watch TV. Everything plays its role and there’s no media that’s either a panacea or the devil. We have to be skeptical of these Manichean arguments that it’s all good or it’s all bad, it’s obviously always a mix of all of the above.

Uniter: You mentioned the recent election. We’re beginning to witness a transition from Harper’s Conservatives to Trudeau’s Liberal majority. Do you think that this change bodes well for student groups and activists, or is it just the changing of the guard, the same issues moving along?

“ We are the most globalized generation that the world has ever seen and I think that there is something particularly common and universal about our political values across borders.

-Shawn Katz

Katz: It’s honestly far too early to tell. Trudeau’s campaign was run, ostensibly at least, on trying to reconnect with youth, on promises of renewal and all that. The actual distance between style and substance, between words and action, time will tell. The Liberals obviously do not have a very good track record or history with that.

There’s an expression in French: “On donne la chance au coureur.” It basically means we give the benefit of the doubt until reason not to. So we’re going to have to see. He is a new generation of politician.

Personally, just from my standpoint as a political observer I have yet to be really impressed by the substance behind Trudeau’s style. It seems like a whole lot of theatrics and image and marketing to me, and I haven’t yet seen him walk the walk. But that said, he’s not even in office yet.

Hopeful, yet skeptical is how I would define our present situation, and I would say that everyone should go have a look at the Liberal platform, because if you actually take him at his word and you actually take the Liberal party at their word, this can be quite a bold reformist government on many fronts, particularly from the point of democratization.

The challenge is going to be to hold them to their promises. That’s really what we’re going to have to all be on guard for. We’re going to have to really assume our full potential and power through social media, through mobilization in the streets, through letter writing, through any means at our disposal. To not just step back and say, “Aw, we have a majority government. Not much we can do but just wait another four years,” and just start inhabiting the democratic space in between elections so that we can actually influence governments from the ground up, rather than just expecting them to do the work and then we grade them like an exam four years from now.

That’s going to be the most important thing, that we continue to push them to honour their commitments.

Uniter: I know that our cultural context is different from Quebec, but there’s a lot we can learn from student movements all across the country. Is there anything in particular you’re hoping to inspire dialogue in Winnipeg about?

Katz: I think that what we saw here in Quebec, what we saw across North America in Occupy, what we saw in Europe, it’s going around the world.

We are the most globalized generation that the world has ever seen and I think that there is something particularly common and universal about our political values across borders. I don’t know if there’s something particular to Winnipeg, but I would say that the values of our generation are fairly shared through different cultural contexts.

There very much is a different cultural background in Québec, in that social justice movements here are much stronger, but there is a history and culture in Manitoba as well. That is one of the historical strongholds of the NDP, there’s the general strike in the early 20th century, and there is a history of social activism there as well.

And most importantly I would say beyond that historical element is just that our generation talks across borders. We are incredibly worldly and globalized, and there are certain things about this internet generation, the social media generation, that are common across cultures. And so that’s what I hope to speak to as well.