The youth bulge and the electorate

The report of the last official census conducted in 2012 indicates that 23.2% of the population is between 20-34. Another 6.9% are between 35-39. Sri Lanka has what can be called a millennial bulge (Horovitz 2012). This segment in turn offers revealing insights into how 1st to 4th-time voters in Sri Lanka engage with political content and frames online, and by extension, how what is embryonic today will, as they age, become the norm or baseline for society writ large.

“Digital blooms” as used in the title to this chapter refers to the explosive growth in the number of mobile devices used to access social media in Sri Lanka after the war. It also refers to the growth of content that is only ever digital, or in other words, never intended, designed or developed for broadcast over terrestrial media or for printed distribution.

As in other parts of the world and particularly in the Global South, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, instant messaging and social media engagement in general by those aged between 18-34 will significantly inform and influence political communications and frames in Sri Lanka. It stands to reason that the genesis, spread and engagement with violent conflict dynamics, post-war, will also be framed by what this demographic consumes online, or is exposed to, and over time, will be normalised.

Social media is both an opportunity and threat. As an increasingly networked society' with an enduring democratic deficit even after the Presidential and Parliamentary elections in 2015, Sri Lanka’s social media growth is both a vector tor much that is positive and democratic, and simultaneously, is a critical risk vector that can contribute to efforts to destabilise society'.

The democratic mandate captured by the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2015 failed to fully recognise the impatience over systemic reform. The inherent messiness of democracy coupled with the legacy of severe institutional decay has today resulted in unmet public expectations, most keenly felt among a younger demographic who voted in both the President and the Prime Minister on their promise of change. Without the experience to compare performance across governments and political leaders, or to acknowledge Sri Lanka’s glacial pace of institutional reform, believing in the promises made by the government and then confronted with an overwhelming silence around the lack of delivery, this demographic is increasingly influenced by rhetoric on social media that holds up the past as better. Nostalgia, carefully designed and promoted, fulfils a political goal.