Those Damn Kids!
The only thing different between this headline and one of 30, 40, 50, hell – 100 years ago is that the word “damn” would have been controversial. Otherwise, any given generation has been subjected to the stereotype of being the scourge of the Earth. But to be a millennial in today’s your bad-hair-day will be a viral meme before day’s end world is a new level of scrutiny that past generations have never had to navigate. We see it in real time with Hollywood and TV personalities who are under a microscope - Taylor, Justin, Brittney, Pete – just to name a handful. They are having to air their very personal difficulties – mental health, marital issues, and more – almost as it happens without any semblance of privacy. One might say that’s what you get for being famous. But rewind 25 years, and this kind of instant information just wasn’t available. There was no Facebook or Twitter. The Internet was in its infancy and so we had to rely on the supermarket tabloids or the occasional entertainment television program for this kind of boorish report. “So what,” you say? The average millennial is not on the cover of US Weekly and doesn’t have 10k followers on YouTube. But rest assured, their personal lives are no longer the biography of those lived by the generations that came before them.
It’s an Instagram-Facebook-Twitter-Snapchat world now. By the beginning of 2018, a whopping 90% of 18-29 years old’s were using social media. And that’s not all of the millennials. They are also part of the group comprising 30-49 year old’s which tapped out at 82% use. Nearly all who we’d call middle-aged adults were habitually using social media. What’s more, 69% of the 50+ soon to be retirees, likely their parents, were there watching every move the millennials made. Millennials’s grandparents 65+ were there as well with 40% of this age group using social media (Pew Research Center, 2020). And so how do these things actually connect? How does social media affect our perception of our younger generations?
Its not so much that social media causes the problem but magnifies it. It is the availability of information of what people do on a minute to minute basis that is new. We now stream and share every plate of food we prepare, every dinner date, every family event, and every small moment in our lives. There are few filters for important versus trivial when it comes to social media. While a distant friend or neighbor would never know what you ate for dinner on a particular Tuesday in 1985, they now know every minute detail from what you ate to how it was prepared and from where the ingredients were sourced. They know where you get your coffee, the barista’s name, and if you think that barista is tip-worthy. They know your cat prefers one brand of food over another and when your dog has been naughty. They hear your complaints about the mundane while proclaiming to crusade for social justice. They see the social-media-person who most likely is only half the depth of the real McCoy.
“We defy anyone who goes about with his eyes open to deny that there is, as never before, an attitude on the part of young folk which is best described as grossly thoughtless, rude, and utterly selfish” - The Conduct of Young People, Hull Daily Mail, Circa 1925 (historyhustle.com, 2020).As far back as we have written record, older generations have complained of the generations that came after. We can surmise that with old age comes wisdom or perhaps even petulance. Either way you slice it, the older generations have always demonized the younger ones. Social media amplifies this times a million. Expect that to get worse as our lives become more and more public on the web.
Note: for some more fun quotes from old coots trashing their younger generations, visit https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-about-the-younger-generation/
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