Yes, youth engagement in general is very important, certainly around science and technology issues.
One of the things I would say about youth engagement in particular is that one of the ways we need to engage youth at an early stage in science and technology is not only in the promotion of science and technology in order to stimulate them to possibly take up careers in those fields--that's very important--but we also need to start engaging them as citizens whose voices matter on important questions like science and technology. I think we need to start building critical literacies around science and technological issues when they are very young, so that when they move into positions where they are ready to be politically engaged, they have developed the habit of thinking critically about scientific and technological issues.
As you say, youth, perhaps more than people of our generation, live much more directly in a technologically saturated environment every day. They live in networked environments as if it were the air around them, so they're already very engaged, not with technology as a means of socializing, but they think very deeply about issues surrounding, for example, the development and regulation and governance of network technology. That bears on their everyday social practices in a direct way.
If we can identify scientific and technological issues that matter to their everyday lives and come up with processes where their voices matter on those questions, I think they will be engaged. And using new technologies they're already quite immersed in might be one road toward doing that.
I still think you need an institution to configure those exercises well, but I think--