not the t*othp*ste fl*g on my dash

“On Becoming a Medium: Gen Z Individuals as Modern Communicators”

Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. YouTube. Google.

If you are au courant with technology, you may have used these at least once in your life.

The world is changing at a rapid pace. Modifications, transformations, and advancements in all fields are constantly happening around the world. For instance, a few decades ago, the words 'social media' and the 'internet' are still unknown. Nevertheless, these soon played pivotal roles in revolutionizing and modernizing the society that we know of nowadays. People likewise attune and habituate themselves to various changes, hereby adapting to the new and evolved manner of living and communicating with others. The youth in the 21st century is no different. Individuals who were born alongside this expeditious technological and scientific progression are collectively referred to as Gen Z, and they might become the prominent catalysts of change in this modern era.

What year were you born? If you were born after 1997, then you belong to Generation Z (Gen Z).

Generation Z, often shortened as Gen Z or iGeneration, is a demographic cohort for those who were born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, succeeding the Millennials. Despite labeling them to the last letter of the English alphabet, they contrarily have a lot of firsts compared to the previous generations. To name a few, they are considered the pioneering generation of digital natives; they can now reshape the power of technology for the betterment of themselves and others. Moreover, they are also the first generation that was raised in the era of smartphones and the internet. Since Generation Z was born together with the rise of digital technologies, they are more oriented and used to having widely available information anytime anywhere. According to Katie Young of GWI, it has been estimated that Gen Z typically spends around 3 hours and 38 minutes online, 50% higher than an average mobile user. Internet became a fundamental part of today’s society, and it is inherent to Gen Z as well. Their use of the internet on a daily basis has influenced their interactions and patterns of communication with others, both positively and negatively.

Having been accustomed to the technology we have nowadays, it is unquestionable that this generation is considered 'tech-savvy'. Come to think of it, they have not experienced a world without these technologies. They can quickly create documents, presentations, and journals with ease, especially with sufficient internet speed and fine gadgets, like laptops and phones. Additionally, they can share it with their friends, classmates, teachers, or coworkers, making it systematic and efficient. These increase their overall productivity and connectivity with one another, allowing them to multitask on various activities within a short period of time.

More than half of the internet users across the globe are under the age of 24. Additionally, this group of people tends to spend roughly 70 hours a week on their devices (Metafacts, 2018).

Whatever they want to learn, it's readily accessible for them to read and practice. This gears Gen Z towards excellence and discipline, and the earlier these are practiced, the better it is for the maturity and growth of an individual.

The integration of technology into the lives of Generation Z is indeed highly powerful. Before, millennials use SMS and voice calls to connect, and prior to the invention of any telecommunication device, mailing a letter is the only way of communicating with others from afar. Unlike the previous generations, online and digital communication through various social media applications has become the predominant means of communication among Gen Z individuals. It doesn't matter where they are, they are all connected virtually, may it be a virtual conference call or a simple text message. Moreover, as technology made its way to almost everything, collaboration with one another is a crucial aspect that Gen Z individuals would prefer to have. Using popular messaging applications like Messenger and Discord, many of them can keep in touch with one another and easily collaborate on projects, tasks, or any activities.

Over the recent years, communication among people has transformed and changed. Aside from the technological advancements, the way we communicate with others both digitally and personally is now different compared to the previous generations before us. We now commonly see abbreviations and slang in chat messages and comments online. This is often used in casual conversations among friends and family. However, this is also a piece of evidence on how our language adapts and evolves to the changes we create over time.

These are the most common slang and abbreviations used in social media. How many of these have you used?

Despite the rise of messaging apps and virtual calls, face-to-face or personal communication is still the widely preferred form of communication among Gen Z individuals.

With the frequent use of social media and the internet, Gen Z individuals tend to acquire a lot of ideas and information from others. YouTube and TikTok trends are great examples of this. As a result, they become more creative and imaginative when performing or doing something, especially when it strikes their interest. Besides, they can also create content to share with their audience. It may be for entertainment, education, information, and many more.

On top of that, Gen Z is also considered the most diverse generation, as they openly accept and embrace diversity and differences of everyone. No matter where you came from and what you define yourself, you are accepted by this generation. They are generally open-minded to the issues and taboos we commonly avoid to discuss. Moreover, they enthusiastically engage in various activities that support equality and transparency, and actively protest against racism, discrimination, hatred, and corruption which have long plagued our society. These actions, together with the rising influence of social media, may pave the way for the young generation’s voices to resonate around the world, making an impact to the society in the process.

Furthermore, these social media platforms gave them the chance to become more knowledgeable and updated on what is happening locally and internationally. They can be easily informed of any recent events by simply browsing the web or opening any social media app. Social media applications like Facebook and Twitter are the common avenues for this up to date information. However, remember that some of these may be false information, especially if the author or account who posted it is not a verified media outlet. Fact checking and verifying the sources of the articles seen in these platforms are easy and common ways to affirm their legitimacy.

Additionally, these social media applications also allow them to share their thoughts and comments regarding different posts, not to mention that may post something as well, provided that it is credible, verified, and factual. This consequently enriches their vocabulary and skills in writing, speaking, and debating, especially when involved in topics that are deemed controversial. As opposed to the millennials and previous generations, Gen Z is more open to voicing out their opinions, ideas, and thoughts to the world, candidly expressing their freedom of speech to everyone. 

They don’t want to continue being a follower, they want to lead. They want to make change.

Twitter and its tagline, "What's happening?", describing the purpose of the social media platform, to connect people and to allow them to share their thoughts with a public audience.

However, it is worth noting that knowing how to navigate the internet and media does not necessarily mean that you are already digitally literate. It is essential that as users of media and spreaders of information, we know what are the proper things to do online. Intently spreading disinformation is just plainly wrong, no matter what the reason is. It does not only cause confusion but also panic and hysteria, especially when that false information is an alarming threat to security and lives. In general, we need to be responsible and disciplined all the time. You may think it is harmless, but it may actually be harmful and damaging to others. Remember, think before you click.

Communication has always been an integral part of being a human. It is the sole reason why we progressed into the civilization that we live in right now. As we reach the digital age of our civilization, the new generation of digital natives, Generation Z, will soon become the contemporary modern communicators of this society. This generation is a vocal and active group that can be a great catalyst for change. Their fervent principles, philosophical beliefs, and prudent judgments may serve importance later on as the world progresses. However, to express these to the world, we need to become a good communicator — an effective and influential communicator. And to do that, we need to be genial, compassionate, and rational to others who wants to become a communicator as well. Let them speak and let them be heard. That way, you too will be heard by others.

Generation Z is a unique generation on its own, and with their power to become a powerful communicator, they can become a medium — a medium with a potential to spark change to the society we live in.

As digital natives and users of social media, we need to be responsible for using the technology given to us. Do not make it a place for false information and hatred. Instead, use it as a platform for various purposes that everyone can benefit, learn, and enjoy.

References:

Seymour, E. (2019). Gen Z: Born to be digital. Retrieved from https://www.voanews.com/a/student-union_gen-z-born-be-digital/6174519.html.

Rapacon, S. (2019). How Gen Z is redefining their world through technology. Retrieved from https://garage.hp.com/us/en/modern-life/generation-z-redefining-the-world.html.

NDMU. (2019). The evolution of communication across generations. Retrieved from https://online.ndm.edu/news/communication/evolution-of-communication/.

Belinne, J. (2019). Gen Z - The communication generation. Retrieved from https://community.naceweb.org/blogs/jamie-belinne/2019/07/23/gen-z-the-communication-generation.

Barcelon, B. (2010). The life of Generation Z. Retrieved from https://teenlife.blogs.pressdemocrat.com/10220/the-life-of-generation-z/.

Image & GIF Sources:

https://www.social-babies.com/post/2017/01/27/5-social-media-platforms-to-explore-in-2017

https://www.thedailybeast.com/generation-z-is-already-bored-by-the-internet

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https://giphy.com/explore/online-safety

May 20, 2021

By Barrett Swanson 

LOS ANGELES (Harper’s Magazine) -- It’s noon in Los Angeles toward the end of the Plague Year, and I’m lounging on the patio of a swanky three-floor mansion, watching a scrum of teenage boys perform trending TikTok dances. Arranged in a tidy delta formation near the jacuzzi and pool, the five boys smile into the glare of a ring light, at the center of which is affixed a smartphone recording their moves. These boys possess a teenybopper cuteness and, because they’re between the ages of eighteen and twenty, they have noisomely strong metabolisms and thus go shirtless pretty much all of the time, displaying either the ectomorphic thinness of trees or greyhounds or, in one boy’s case especially, the sharply delineated musculature of a really big insect. They bite their lower lips, and their expressions are—I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe them—precoital.

Dances that go viral on TikTok, the video-sharing service that has become the most popular app on the planet, tend to be easily replicable, so the choreography is pretty simple and—no offense to the boys here but—kind of cheesy and lame. It’s as if the entire art form were based off the hand jive or the Macarena. For example, when the vocalist sings “throat bay-bee!” each boy makes a cradle with his hands, as though shushing a recalcitrant infant. And then during the next lyric—“I’m tryna bust all on ya”—each turns to the side and humps the air with the gracelessness of a jackrabbit. Wearing a motley assemblage of billowing hoodies and prestige sneakers, these boys are residents of something called Clubhouse FTB—or Clubhouse For the Boys—one of the most popular collab houses that have sprouted up in Los Angeles.

Also known as content houses or TikTok mansions, collab houses are grotesquely lavish abodes where teens and early twentysomethings live and work together, trying to achieve viral fame on a variety of media platforms. Sometime last spring, when most of us were making bread or watching videos of singing Italians, the houses began to proliferate in impressive if not mind-boggling numbers, to the point where it became difficult for a casual observer even to keep track of them. There was Hype House and Drip House and a house called Girls in the Valley. There was FaZe House (for gamers) and Alt Haus (for outcasts) and one called Byte House, the first of its kind in the U.K. Perhaps the most recognizable was the Sway House, tenanted by a cohort of shaggy-haired bros whose content consisted mostly of lifting weights and pretending to have sex with their smartphone cameras. Essentially, they were the Brat Pack of Gen Z, replete with bad-boy antics and dangling, cross-bearing earrings.

For the past twenty-four hours, I’ve been dwelling among the influencers at Clubhouse FTB, enduring bouts of dick jokes and long glugs of White Claw, the sort of chaffing male camaraderie you’re apt to find in frat houses or hunting lodges...

... For a moment, I cannot remember who I am or why I am sitting here amid this sea of beautiful young people, all of them desperate for recognition, their whole lives ahead of them, empty at the absolute center. TikTok is a sign of the future, which already feels like a thing of the past. It is the clock counting down our fifteen seconds of fame, the sound the world makes as time is running out.

Part 2: Witnessing Conflict

Young people are increasingly getting their news through the lens of social media, which makes it that much more essential to understand the way different platforms refract information. For as long as people have used social media, the content posted has reflected current events more generally, something that is becoming especially acute as time passes. Tumblr users bore witness to several conflicts that unfolded across the world in the year 2014, something Rosemary Pennington chronicled in her article in the International Communication Gazette, “Witnessing the 2014 Gaza War in Tumblr”, through which she explores how several Muslim Tumblr users interacted with and witnessed the violence occurring towards Palestinians during the 2014 Gaza War. She writes in her introduction, “Traditionally, it has been witnessing that can make us feel close to those suffering through the violence we see in media as well as others we imagine are in the audience witnessing the event with us,” (Pennington). Tumblr as a platform provides both a means to witness the violence, as well as a community of fellow witnesses, inspiring feelings of closeness that would heighten emotions. In the case of the Gaza War, the bloggers take note of the fact that the mainstream media centers the experiences of Israelis and largely neglects Palestinian suffering in the construction of their narrative (Pennington). Through the usage of Tumblr, Palestinians can share photos and narratives that reflect their experiences, which can then be disseminated by bloggers elsewhere in the world, such as those who were the subject of Pennington’s research. The platform provides the space to construct an Oppositional Gaze, in the words of bell hooks. hooks writes of the oppositional gaze, “By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: ‘Not only will I stare, I want my look to change reality.’ Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency,” (hooks 116). Palestinians are able to control their gaze in a way that stares back at those who are oppressing them, counteracting the narrative that they are the sole aggressors and thus giving them agency. Tumblr elevated the narratives of Palestinians to the point where they could be held in conversation with and in contradiction to those pushed by wealthy media conglomerates. Communities centered around sending aid can also be formed on the platform which is only possible through the shared experience of witnessing. Pennington posits with her research that Tumblr was a crucial piece in raising global awareness of the situation in Gaza, a lasting impact of the platform.

Six years later, the world is no less familiar with incredible amounts of violence and suffering, especially as we live through the COVID-19 pandemic. Relegated to our houses, many Americans turned to TikTok for entertainment but found within it a well of resources for activists as the nation erupted in protests this summer in response to the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans. TikTok, like Tumblr, allowed the average citizen to both bear witness to violence and share their narrative of the situation without it being refracted through the lens of a mainstream media source. TikTok, however, is still plagued by the same issues endemic to the platform; All content distribution is of course driven by the algorithm, which incentivizes outrageous or highly emotional content, raising the stakes to a point that may desensitize viewers after a certain amount of information. The algorithm can also end up prioritizing only a few voices, typically those who already have a platform. This in turn creates its own hierarchy which, although independent from traditional news networks, is still exclusionary. A lot of the information viewed is not controlled, as the primary interface on the app is the For You Page; if the average user is not putting in effort to control the type of information and content they are viewing, it’s not likely that they will put in effort to ensure that it is accurate or unbiased. 

TikTok and Tumblr users alike are fond of their image-based communities and continue to source them on the same platform that they source their news, the unintended consequence of which being the fascist aestheticization of politics as theorized by Benjamin in his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. He writes, “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war,” and later continues, “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic,” (Benjamin 19-20) In the context of 2020 civil unrest, on TikTok, the juxtaposition of violent oppression with daily vlogs from teens in thrifted clothes dancing around big cities has led to both being subsumed into a dominant identity that holds “activism” as a core component. To truly be a member of the alt-TikTok community, one should be a self-identified leftist and activist. Both are noble ideas, and pushing for more accessible leftist literature is not a bad thing, but the issue arises when those looking for membership in the community are not willing or unable to do the work. The process of unlearning carceral understandings of justice and the subtle ways in which racism is intertwined in our everyday lives is a conscious, long, and oftentimes difficult process, that teens are undertaking with the ultimate goal being membership in a community of which the spokespeople are predominantly white and wealthy. The shortcut has become adding “BLM” and “ACAB” to a user’s bio, signaling to other users that they are socially aware. Memes that consisted of a cartoon character, such as Hello Kitty, saying “ACAB” were added to profiles, repositioning the acronym with long traditions in anti-racist and leftist activism as an aestheticized trend. The acronym is not entirely devoid of meaning, because leftist circles extend far beyond the teenage communities on TikTok, but to this new generation, adding ACAB to a bio means less a radical resistance to the carceral state and more a display of performative activism. This practice has led to the acronym being reappropriated into the pejorative term “Emily ACAB”, which typically refers to a wealthy, white teenage girl attempting to be performatively woke without renouncing any of her privileges. Emily ACAB is the rebellious teen daughter of the Karen who uses a movement meant to protect the lives of systematically marginalized groups as a way to separate herself from her family that “just does not understand” but ultimately won’t take too strong of a stance if it means sacrificing something of importance to her. The aestheticization of politics neutralizes the message, something that Benjamin knew all too well, and that TikTok teenagers, many of whom are well-meaning, now find themselves falling victim to. 

Despite being only separated by six years, teens in 2020 find themselves living and comprehending current events in a dramatically different world. No generation comes of age without a tremendous amount of hardship, personal and interpersonal, but Gen-Z is the first to have that hardship published on the internet. Social media has revolutionized organizing in many ways for the better, but as with all developments, it is one that requires active participation and checking of power. TikTok and Tumblr have made positive contributions to activism, but the nature of social media’s democratization of information requires we all pay attention to ensure neither platform does more harm than good.