wtf happened to gen z?
For a long time I've noticed this sort of divide within Gen Z. With this, divide you have 2 camps. One half resonates more with the upbringing of Millennials, the other resonates more of the upbringing of Gen Alpha. I look at even how much more differently my wife and I are compared to my wife's sibling who is a couple years younger than her, but still in the same generation.
I think there are 2 factors that led to this generational schism. The iPhone and the Pandemic.
You are basically 1 of 2 people, old enough to have witnessed and remembered the launch of the first iPhone and seeing what a big deal that was, or you weren't. That distinction alone I think makes a big difference. If you were old enough to have remembered when the iPhone launched, you remember and lived a period of time where the internet was a physical space, you weren't hyper-connected at all times, and you hung out with your friends outside of school.
bAcK wHeN i WaS a BoY, smartphones were reserved for the bougie fucks who could keep up with all the new trends. So, even seeing a smartphone in the wild was an oddity. You could count the Blackberry as a smartphone, I guess, but it wasn't NEARLY to the functionality of the iPhone when it launched.
It wasn't until I was in middle school that iPod touches were becoming a thing, where you and your friends would download novelty apps like iGun, the zippo lighter app, the app where you could pretend to drink beer, etc. Internet speeds sucked back then, and social media was in its infancy. So people weren't constantly on their iPod Touches at all times. Pretty much everyone had dumbphones, or hell no phone at all. This wasn't just some rural midwestern culture either. I grew up in California where trends practically always began here.
It wasn't until about the early 2010s where Gen Z was entering high school that smartphones became more prominent. My first smartphone was a LG Optimus (I think either an L5 or 2X) around 2011-2012-ish? And this was when I was noticing other kids my age were also getting smartphones, with some of them being iPhones (i think the iPhone 5 was the first one I remember seeing for anyone my age). Despite this I never really saw anyone on their phones much. That didn't come around until I was in high school, THAT'S when the shift happened.
It's kinda the stereotype for teenagers to always be on their phones. Hell even back to the days of the landline this was a thing. Well, now it's teenagers that had a phone, social media, the web, and a handheld game console all in their pocket. People were on their phones a lot, but if they were with friends, the phone wasn't in sight. This was before the time of the "influencer", so people didn't put much stake into their following nearly as much as we do now. Social media just felt different back then, too. People who didn't have social media, or at least an active presence, were still pretty much the norm.
So taking all this into account, you have roughly most of early Gen Z who spent the first half of their formative years on "dumb" devices. Simple phones that were basically designated so that parents could call you when it was time for dinner. So for most of early Gen Z, they had an upbringing not too dissimilar to Millennials. Especially since when early Gen Z was coming of age to be on the internet, the culture was being shaped by Millennials.
This changes the later into the Gen Z span you get. Now more kids are getting introduced to smartphones at a younger age. Late Gen Z were basically the first iPad babies. Social media, and all issues with it, were getting introduced younger and younger. Now you have Gen Z kids that only remember the new age of technology. I can only theorize that this lead to significant differences in development and culture.
Early Gen Z would hear the Amanda Todd story and remember it being a HUGE deal. Now you have late Gen Z who hear the Amanda Todd story and think nothing of it.
The second factor in the schism, the pandemic. You are in either 1 of 2 camps. You were in school during the pandemic, or you weren't. You now have an entire section of children who grew up spending a significant portion of their formative years essentially chronically online. What else was there to do? You couldn't see your friends, everything was virtual, and you couldn't really go anywhere.
So now you take the aforementioned kids who were getting exposed to the hyperconnectivity of the modern age of technology, now crank that exposure up to 10 where that essentially became their entire world. This is the section of the generation who had their social skills completely stunted and their attachment to their smartphones basically at a max.
This of course isn't a hard science, I don't really have data to back up my observations. However I know I'm not alone in this observation. I actually just looked for something as of writing this paragraph and found this link where this exact observation I'm speaking of was pointed out a year ago and even made the same connections I'm talking about now.
Clavicular is the poster child for the younger Gen Z. While obviously not all younger Gen Z are like him, he could have only existed within the upbringing of the younger Gen Z.
My hope is there will be a shift again when older Gen Z start becoming parents. Mindfulness and limiting of technology for their kids. We're already seeing this counter-culture movement of people going back to dumb phones. Hell, I've got Gen X relatives who are wanting to shift their younger kids away from smartphones and towards dumbphones. I can't help but think that parents who are at least sympathetic to this idea of disconnecting from the hyper-connection will result in a shift for these kids.
Only time will tell I suppose.
Reply via email: me@absurdpirate.com
as of writing this...
I must've slept weird, because my upper back/lower neck are killing me right now. I didn't sleep super great last night, I can always tell when my sleep is lackluster because my tolerance for light goes down. I spent my commute up to work listening to Ninja Sex Party's discography, left off at the midway point of Strawberries and Cream. I downloaded a few hundred songs onto my iPod last night, and so I'm trying to listen to all of them. Added some 80s synthpop, hair metal, and some more alternative metal like Evanescence.