Still, by most accounts, there's a growing and significant divide emerging between generations, mostly here in Canada, when it comes to how our politics works.
While baby boomers and those older still tend to rely on old-school approaches to politics - party politics, TV debates and in-line voting at ballot boxes to name a few - there's a sense, particularly among my age group and younger, that conventional party politics is not worth paying attention to.
Why? Because my age group, the under-35 set, has come of age in a time where a fast-moving digital culture we've grown to love has become divorced from the cumbersome nature of party politics. We're a generation that has grown up in the face of e-mail, instant messages and blogs, continually moving at near-break-neck speeds to gather information in easily digestible chunks.
In theory, you'd think that having more access to broader sources of information online would actually engage young people in mainstream politics. The truth is far more complicated.
In reality, the web's ability to customize a person's personality online has turned democracy into something far more complex for youth.
As throughout the ages, youth are normally a skeptical and non-voting demographic. Yet we're seeing more and more that politicians, especially here in Canada, simply do not understand how important digital outreach is when it comes to youth. And the price will be paid by parties for years to come.
To be fair, the United States is significantly ahead of Canada when it comes to the use of digital culture as an effective campaign apparatus.
Take Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. His character aside, Obama may be the first candidate to fully and completely embrace the web as a mature platform to engage people.
His web site, My.BarackObama.com, is loaded with community meet-up tools, blogs, Facebook links and dozens of other Web 2.0-friendly tricks. Fundraising online has largely paid for Obama's epic journey to the Democratic nomination. He is, perhaps, the first truly 21st century candidate in Western politics and a source of inspiration to web-savvy young people.
Yet in Canada, young people remain largely disengaged from a process that does not speak to them. It has only been in the last few years that the major parties have enabled social networking tools on their websites. Most surprising is how the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP all have virtually identical, largely after-thought interfaces on their web sites - an observation that speaks volumes about how the party establishments view Web 2.0 tools as a means to communicate with the public.
Most interesting, however, is how Canadian parties and Obama differ when it comes to discussing issues actually important to young people.
While Obama offers up policy planks on concerns young people care about - network neutrality, environmental sustainability to name a few - prominently, Canadian political parties have opted for a very Web 2.0-unfriendly strategy of pushing their parties as a take-it-or-leave-it package deal: all issues, all the time to all people. Focusing on long-term demographic concerns is clearly not on the Canadian parties' agendas.
Wired youth, which generally tend to eschew party politics as a corrupt process catering to those who invest the most donations, tend to follow a new mantra when it comes to politics: ideas are more important than the people in them.
More to the point, we're interested in the ideas that cater to our individual interests. If 20th century politics was akin to everyone buying a Rolling Stones LP, 21st century politics is more like an iPod - everyone customizes their experience based on what they want, not what people tell them they want.
So why is any of this important for business?
Well, there's a lesson to be learned here for businesses trying to figure out exactly how to cater to young people. As Canadian politics and politicians are slowly learning, the old ways of the one-size-fits-all approach to party politics is turning more and more youth off. It does not bode well for the future of our democracy in its current, largely dysfunctional form.
From a business perspective, it means the days of assembly line standardization are coming to an end sooner rather than later. The youth of today demand more options, more individual choices - a focus on What Matters To Me.
Some may argue this is a sign of how digital culture creates narcissism in youth, but it's an unavoidable reality for businesses and governments alike.
After all, given that my generation has had the message hammered into us from childhood that computers, the web and Web 2.0 are must-have business applications, isn't it understandable we'd demand the same from how our politics and products are made?