Reaching back to the discussion in the previous chapter, association- bound Esperantists tend to mirror Mark Fettes' perspective, according to which the early natively digital generations of Esperantists hardly acknowledge the features that characterise Esperanto as 'more than a language', namely the regular and institutionalised community, the social movement, the sets of cosmopolitan principles and the political causes historically linked to Esperanto. From this perspective, if Esperanto is emptied of these, then what is left, apart from grammar and vocabulary?
Cedric, Maxime and several of their friends and followers on social media did not regularly spread the word about the language at stalls at events and rarely volunteered at Esperanto associations or attended Universal Congresses. Yet, using Esperanto, they engaged in participa- tory cultures and activism for freedom of speech through freedom to code, rendered software freely available and information more acces- sible, as well as chatted (online and offline) and met fellow Esperantists from diverse national and linguistic backgrounds. As they did so, they had fun: having coolified Esperanto (Gobbo 2021), they read it through the lenses of collaboration, playfulness and sociability. Ultimately, the distance that keeps association-bound and natively digital Esperantists apart and widens the age cleavage described above begins with different uses of media that lead to distinct experiences of time.
In his work on forms of engaging with time and political activism in present-day Germany's fastest-shrinking city, Felix Ringel (2012, 2018) argues that differences in political activism also owe to how each activist group engages with specific regimes of temporal reasoning. Ringel describes how the neo-Nazis in that city had a rather distant original past behind them and, as a consequence, a strong basis for thinking of them- selves as embedded in history. In this sense, they longed for a glorious past that Germany once lived, which they tried to bring back through practices oriented towards the distant future, built upon a long-term endeavour. By contrast, the anarchist collective established in the same city focused its actions on the present and near future. Since this collec- tive had come into being in recent times, it had no long-term past to be remembered, re-enacted or reclaimed.
In a comparable manner, Esperanto associations stand on the shoul- ders of giants, which imbues their members with a sense of duty to keep these associations up and running, given their history of endurance and their expected futures. Although duolinganoj and natively digital Esperantists share with associations the history that brought Esperanto into being as it currently is, their experiences of learning and using the language are only partly analogous to previous generations—which, in turn, have gone by without relying on online resources and digital media.
Most importantly, the fact that the latest generations' engagements with Esperanto are less shaped by the perception of Esperanto as a cause to be advanced helps characterise these generations' experience of time as being more focused on the present. On the one hand, association-bound Esperantists like Dominique and JoPo (volunteers at SAT-Amikaro) and Mark Fettes (UEA's president) have clear goals in mind—such as the use of Esperanto for left-wing political activism or the consolidation of the language in the international communication scenario—and try to materialise these goals through their association-based activism. Doing so implies equalling the Esperanto movement to traditional social move- ments, thus positing a linear march towards a given moment in the (near or far) future in which a final, predetermined goal should be reached (Maeckelbergh 2011). On the other hand, natively digital Esperantists regularly use Esperanto to build networks of sociability and to code, as well as to translate and co-produce publicly available knowledge. In the latter case, acknowledging past contributions and working towards the future give way to a present-oriented approach: their actions bear fruits in real time, as their contributions to Vikipedio are uploaded and the apps they create and enhance are downloaded in minutes or seconds.
Digital media, then, appear at the heart of a thought-provoking phenomenon. In several ways, the younger generations of natively digital Esperantists have strengthened the Esperanto community—a new form of community, whose materialisations can be systematically traced back to the Internet. However, they do so at the expense of the movement—by relating to Esperanto as an ordinary collaborative tool more than a cause to be promoted. Social class and political orientations were once the central elements that characterised the schisms in Esperantujo between a neutral and a left-wing, workers' Esperanto movement. Over time, as the stereotypes associated with Esperantists shifted from revolutionaries to geeks, Esperantujo came to be segmented mostly along the lines of generations of digital natives and digital immigrants, with the latter occa- sionally raising concerns over the future of the language being left on the hands of those who seize the present.
Although this generational distinction may seem stark at first, it does not mean that association-bound Esperantists do not use the language online. Yet, they are not usually familiar with gifs, Internet memes or technical vocabulary about open-source software, nor do they establish digital media as their primary means of joining Esperantujo. Commu- nicating through text in a rapid pace in online settings with readily available interlocutors, gathering contributors to co-write a Wikipedia article that can be accessed few hours later and holding a well-attended gathering organised last-minute: such forms of experiencing time do not speak equally to every Esperantist—nor to every human being within the same community or society. Thus, the cleavages distinguishing such generations sometimes leave digital natives with little to communicate and share with association-bound activists, despite the fact that they all speak the same language.
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