After installing Amikumu, I started receiving almost daily push noti- fications and messages on the app, from my Paris-based Esperantist friends, from unknown local Esperantists inviting app users to attend face-to-face meetings and from Esperanto-speaking travellers who wished to meet during their stay in Paris. Likewise, at every meeting with Cedric, Maxime and the young Esperantists I knew beforehand, the materiality of the Internet was increasingly present. Mobile phones were constantly on people's hands and bar tables—a broader trend analysed since Daniel Miller's approach to the material bearings of digital media (Miller and Horst 2006; Miller 2009). Yet, among Esperantists, the presence of the mobile phone owed not only to the expectation of receiving a text at any time. Mobile phones were also essential to search for Esperanto words in online dictionaries during a conversation and to check, through Amikumu's GPS, whether there were other Esperantists nearby and whether the friends they had invited were on their way to their Esperanto gatherings.
Interestingly, while digital media brought Esperantists together and helped popularise the language, these media also brought about unin- tended consequences. The first generations of digital natives—who are '"native speakers" of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet' (Prensky 2001: 1)—seem comfortable learning languages online, socialising primarily via text, making friends on the Internet (Boellstorff 2008) and using digital media as a means to arrange face-to- face gatherings. Yet digital immigrants—those not born amidst online communication technologies and who are non-native users of digital media (Prensky 2001)—seldom do the same. The latter seem to prefer face-to-face meetings over online chats and to perceive their digital media use as a continuation of everyday friendships, rather than a gateway to new, online friendships. This brings to the fore an already existing, but now amplified age cleavage in the Esperanto community and movement, in which previous generations struggle to use the same technologies as the latest ones, and vice versa.
Understanding this age cleavage requires reaching back to the 1920s, when the international Esperanto youth movement began being institu- tionalised in the embryonic association that later became the Tutmonda Esperantista Junulara Organizo (World Esperanto Youth Organisa- tion, hereafter TEJO) (see Lins 1974; Fians 2017). Headquartered in Rotterdam (just like UEA), TEJO aims to promote Esperanto among young people and to organise youth-oriented congresses and festivals. In turn, TEJO's French branch, Junulara Esperanta Franca Organizo/Esperanto-jeunes (French Esperanto Youth Organisation, hereafter JEFO), was founded in the late 1960s and is headquartered in Paris (using Esperanto-France's headquarters).[31] By promoting the use of the language among young people, these youth associations also insti- tutionalise and reinforce an age-based segmentation within Esperantujo, for JEFO's statute (2000), for instance, states that its members must be 35 years old or younger.[32]
In his classical discussion on age groups and age-based segmentation in the book Centuries of Childhood (1962), Phillipe Aries explains how the distinction among stages of life became increasingly central in the West via the establishment of a correspondence between biological phases of human development and the specific social functions and expectations attributed to each of these phases. Since the seventeenth century, chil- dren have been expected to devote more time to activities different from those performed by adults. In this sense, schooling played a major role in the constitution of childhood as a distinct stage in people's life cycle. Unlike medieval societies, the way in which modern Western societies emphasised the transition from childhood to adulthood culminated in the consolidation of adolescence and youth as intermediary life stages (Ben-Amos 1995: 70). More recently, youth gained centrality in the years since the Second World War: a consumer boom led to the creation of youth-targeted leisure and cultural products, such as music, fashion and literature, resulting in the consolidation of a lifestyle widely recognised as characteristic of this specific age group (Bennett 2015: 43—45).
Studies that focus on childhood (Hardman 2001: 504; Qvortrup 2009) argue that age groups constitute a transitory period in one's life as well as a permanent form in society—regardless of the individuals who compose each age group at a given moment. In concrete terms, this means that, when one comes of age, one leaves childhood and assumes a new status in another age group, but childhood as a structural form remains nonetheless. The main specificity of age groups—when compared to ethnic groups or social classes—is that the former are char- acterised by quicker turnover. As children become teenagers and adults become elders, age groups experience a total replacement with each generation (Sarmento 2005: 363—364; Qvortrup 2009). Yet this is not the case with generations as such, which sets an important distinction. The latter refers to a cohort of people born within a given time interval and exposed to similar age-related references and experiences (Pilcher 1994: 482—484). Hence, individuals born in a particular decade belong to a specific age group only for a certain period, but will pertain to the same generation from cradle to grave.
Having clarified the terms of the discussion, the age cleavage that historically led to the idea of youth—and the preferences and lifestyles associated with it—resulted in the establishment of Esperanto associa- tions such as TEJO and JEFO, as well as of festivals and congresses oriented especially towards young people. The Universal Congresses, for people from all ages, stand in contrast to the Internaciaj Junularaj Kongresoj (IJK, International Youth Congresses) held by TEJO and targeting younger Esperantists. Esperanto youth associations gained momentum after the Second World War, marking a distinction between two formally acknowledged and representative age groups: on the one hand, those younger than 30 years old and, on the other, every Esperan- tist older than that.
From this, we can begin to see the age cleavage between Esperantists younger than 30 years old and older Esperantists as a structural issue historically characterising enactments of Esperantujo. As Nikola Rasic (1994) illustrates through statistical data, most of the Esperanto associ- ations in Europe that surveyed their members throughout the twentieth century displayed larger numbers of older members than younger ones. These surveys also revealed the constant absence of an intermediary age group—made up of people in their middle adulthood years who likely devote more time to marriage, child-rearing and full-time employment than to volunteer work and activities at associations (Rasic 1994: 180— 181). Proving that such age cleavage among Esperantists is not exclusive to twenty-first-century France, Rasic leaves an open-ended question: to what extent are associations willing to adapt their activities to make them more appealing to young people?[33]
Age groups have permanence, but are, at the same time, 'subject to change due to changing societal parameters and perhaps also changing size' (Qvortrup 2009: 27). In this sense, the perceived long-standing age cleavage in Esperantujo may be widening in recent years due to the unequal use of emerging technologies by Esperantists from different age groups. Natively digital Esperantists are familiar with the use of digital media to make Esperantist friends, to text and arrange face-to- face meetings with them, as well as to share Internet memes and links to blogs and other platforms. By contrast, older Esperantists customarily resort to associations, failing to follow certain references to online Esper- antist participatory cultures, and concentrating their efforts on editing magazines, holding face-to-face debates and calculating membership figures.
This, partly in line with Marc Prensky's (2001) stress on the impor- tance of speaking the 'digital language', leads to the conclusion that digital media has played a significant role in widening age cleavages on the grounds of what is regularly communicated between people from different generations—and what is not. Which is paradoxical, given that digital media is said to increase, accelerate and intensify communication, not to obstruct it. One outcome of this phenomenon is that younger and older Esperantists—relatively kept apart from each other and only loosely connected by the language they all speak—do not usually use Esperanto to speak to each other.