Ian Shapira has an article in the Washington Post about how to define today’s younger generations. Are they “Millennials” or “Gen Y”? What year is the cutoff for each generation? What generalizations can we make about today’s youngest group? Are they idealistic, pragmatic, anti-hierarchical?

People are born continuously, so generations are arbitrary constructs. The study of generations began in the 1920s (as far as I know), in response to perhaps the world’s single most traumatic event, WWI. Both men and women who were born between 1884 and 1902 were affected by the war in dramatic ways that permanently distinguished them from those born before 1884. Not only did millions of them die, but the social and political structures that had formed them collapsed, especially if they lived in the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman Empires. They shaved their faces, raised their hemlines, and in every other way they could imagine, differentiated themselves from their Victorian parents.

That was a generation gap. All the other gaps since then have been subtler, and some have been imaginary–mere marketing hype. It’s particularly dubious to define a whole generation on the basis of how its first members act when they are young adults. Conventionally, a generation extends over twenty years of births and then lasts throughout its members’ lives. So it really makes no sense to generalize about the Millennials today when the youngest are four years old and may live as late as 2104. Do we imagine that they will be notably idealistic in 2090 just because their older siblings voted at high rates in 2008?

On the other hand, it is true that we are more malleable when we are young than later on. Therefore, major political events and social conditions that we experience before age 25 affect us and turn us into permanent groups or cohorts. Therefore, the analysis of generations is not mere hype, although one has to be careful about it.

Senator Obama’s national service plan got lots of attention when he re-announced it this week, in contrast to the original announcement in February, which got no press coverage at all. I guess a proposal is more interesting if a nominee offers it than if it comes from one Democratic candidate among many–although I was surprised by the complete lack of interest in Obama’s $3.5 billion plan when he introduced it last winter. The current version is very popular in my circles and has drawn interesting endorsements. (For instance, my friend John Bridgeland, formerly a senior adviser to George Bush, supports it.) But the influential liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias calls the “underlying idea … bad and illiberal.” He provides an amusing video parody of national service as a kind of softcore fascism, and gives the Obama plan a pass only because it is so “vague” as to be “harmless.”

National and community service plans have a great progressive heritage (from the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal to the Lyndon Johnson’s Job Corps and VISTA), but they do require a justification. Sometimes, when I am deep into a strategy meeting in which everyone assumes that we need to increase the numbers of paid federal volunteers, I start to wonder whether this is the right goal, after all. So I welcome Yglesias’ challenge–but I believe it can be met.

Paid community service opportunities are good for those who serve. The evidence is quite strong. As a dramatic example, on entering Youth Build (a federally funded program) the new volunteers estimate their own life expectancies at something like 40 years. By the time they leave the program, they expect to live three decades longer. Having an opportunity to do something constructive is a powerful way to build skills and to enhance confidence and self-worth. For the much more academically successful citizens who enroll in competitive programs like the Peace Corps, the benefits are also powerful, but different. They learn about social problems and about working with people who are different from themselves.

It is also important that the people who are served benefit; otherwise, a service program is artificial. (No one will develop confidence and skills from “serving” if the service itself is pointless.) There have been evaluations that find strongly positive impacts on communities. But I disagree with Yglesias that “the relevant test should be effectiveness of outcomes (does TFA help kids learn, does the PeaceCorps help build the American brand).” That is an important but secondary consideration.

The national and community service programs also help to break down the wall between government and the public, or between officials and citizens, by enrolling thousands of citizens in temporary public service jobs. I think this is essential for progressivism. Citizens’ intense distrust for government reduces public support for national health care, environmental protection, and education. If citizens have some experience working on public issues in collaboration with the government, their opinions will be better informed and will probably be more favorable. (And if direct experience with the government makes them less supportive, then we obviously need to reform the state before we can expand it.)

Finally, the national and community service programs are important for Obama, because the core of his message is empowerment–we can make a difference working together. He needs to explain how we can make a difference after the election. Helping to elect him cannot be our only way to participate. Community service programs symbolize his commitment to public participation–and also underline the best parts of his own biography. For instance, Barack was a founding board member of Public Allies, an Americorps program, and Michelle directed its Chicago office.

For all these reasons, progressives should be excited about the Obama service plan and should see it as fairly central to his campaign. I am afraid that their skepticism reveals a basic lack of sympathy with Obama and the people who surround him.

PBS (the public broadcasting service in the USA) has a new book and broadcast series entitled “Democracy’s Local Heroes.” It draws attention to citizens who work with others to address public problems. I have not seen the show or read the book, but I am grateful for the website. It provides good short definitions of civic activism and related concepts and a great selection of links, including a prominent one to the November Fifth Coalition.

This is my first blog from the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University in Medford, MA. Effective today, CIRCLE is part the Tisch College and I am also research director of Tisch. I am deeply absorbed in trying to get my old calendar system to sync with my new calendar, but I encourage you to explore Tisch, which is (I believe) still the only whole college devoted exclusively to civic engagement.

Robert Darnton, the great Princeton historian, is no Luddite. He welcomes Google’s Book Search, which provides direct access to scanned versions of books from the New York Public Library, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, and the Bodleian. However, he lists several reasons not to give up on traditional, bricks-and-mortar libraries or to assume that a digital archive can replace them. I will add another reason, which applies (an any rate) to the current version of Google Book Search. Google uses black-and-white photography to reproduce books that were originally printed in black ink. But all real books have color–especially the old ones, whose paper yellows unevenly. In Google’s photographs, all the books published before 1900 look bleached and considerably less attractive than they really are.