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The Guardian gets close, but doesn't quite manage to get to teh hart of the matter in this piece about teenagers that are reducing, foregoing, or not signing up for social media in their lives. And much of it is the article pinging in me the distinct sense that the frame for this piece ("The generation everyone assumed would be constantly online is cutting back! How did our assumptions turn out to be so wrong?!") is over-riding the thing that the pull quotes and the details are pointing at very, very strongly, namely that Generation Z (Brains!), through the consequence of always having been on someone's social media since they were very small, have intuited and had made explicit to them the nature of what social media is, and are making decisions accordingly.
It may again be personal bias, but I suspect the children and teens the Guardian article is treating with fascination might find more kinship with their just-a-bit-ahead predecessors who came up through childhood with BBSes and message boards than with the article writers and the older generations that the article notes have embraced social media in vast amounts and quantities.
Let's get that last paragraph set out of the way first - being off of social media is not becoming a renunciant, nor are those that do being transformed into wise sages that have resisted the siren call of the endless scroll. "Refuseniks" as a phrase has, at least to me, connotations of the same sort of movements that were covered in the "Beats, Hippies, Punks" class - people seen as taking a stand against something that everyone else seemed to go along with and marking their identity based on their shared counterculture. This is not that.
What the article seems to have missed, despite the pull quotes and the nearly parallel narrative going along with what the article wants to conclude, is that the refusal and reduction and not going on social media are deliberate, and not some sort of new trend or reaction to the always-on society they live in. The people making the decisions to cut back or cut off their social media presence use the language of curation and identity. Ammanuel says they were presenting a "dishonest version of mysself, on a platform where most people were presenting dishonest versions of themselves." Social media is a "competition", and a "game", the actual interviewees say, in betweeen paragraphs that talk about how their brains have apparently been conditioned on the dopamine hits of likes since they were very young and how they easily breezed into adoption of each new platform as it came along. The "digital natives" narrative is showing itself more and more to have been a terrible idea and assumption, and yet it continues to echo through pieces like these, that take "digital natives" as the base truth and that other things are framed in relation to. It is only if you assume that children are predisposed to be on all the digital platforms all at once that the idea that some of them might not be doing this becomes strange and newsworthy.
I think the closest the article gets to realizing the real narrative is when it talks about the sense of privacy that Generation Z has in relation to social media. They've grown up in a situation where things that used to be the province of family albums trotted out to embarass someone to their potential significant other(s) are now shared on a much grander scale by people who really don't understand the permanence of that act. They didn't before, either, as anyone who has been on the receiving end of an embarrasing story told by their caregivers to someone they might have an interest in knows, but they were at least mercifully limited by the telling and the people who were present. Now, someone could become friends with your caregivers online and scroll all the way back to those embarrassing things shared when you were younger and share them as well, with intent and possibly malice. They're much more aware, both explicitly (being told about the consequences of doing something terrible online) and implicitly (by watching those kinds of situations unfold in their lives, or worse, being the target or perpetrator of them) about visibility, about curating an image, and about making sure that eveyone you let inside the circle is someone you trust that far inside. The curation of image takes time and effort, and depending on how much of your safety is involved in the curation of that image, it has greater and lesser consequences. Sometimes the best way to deal with it is to cut the knot entirely and take a break or leave a platform. Those options become even more appealing if you know that what's going to happen is a firestorm of something getting called down on you, deservedly or otherwise.
Fear Of Missing Out isn't the driver the article wants to make it out as, at least not fear of missing out on the superficial, like parties and events and that. There may be a Fear of Missing Out on important things, however. The sort of things like "Alice posted friends-only that she hates this marginalized group you belong to" so that if you have class with Alice or a homework assignment with Alice, you know what to look out for. Or "Ben came out as trans and wants us to call him by his proper name and pronouns." Things that might be coded, or hidden in visible sight and that call for significant shifts in how you think and address the people around you. Or shifts that indicate a change in the safety and trust levels of the people around you. (Or that you may have to get your own house on standby to catch someone if they should be unceremoniously chucked from their own house because of a failure of security or a desire to live a life authentically before attaining the age of majority.)
This generation is the first generation that didn't get a chance to create themselves first and then step onto the stage. They have instead had to wrest control of themselves and their narratives from others who, through cruelty or indifference, have been cosntructing them for their own purposes and are insisting-to-gaslighting this generation that what's already been created for them is more real and true than anything they are creating for themselves. Social media is/not the place to express themselves authentically, to fight against the narrative that's already been created about them and for them. And it's exhausting fighting an enemy who has more resources and time than you do to push back against them.
Perhaps the next time someone wants to write about Millenians or Generation Z and their relationship to social media, they can acknowledge and work from these first principles: that these people have always known that they have to curate their image in all times, places, and spaces. That what they show you has been deliberated upon significantly and analyzed for as many possible angles as they can see and ultimately decided that it could go out and be part of their record. And that there's at least one faction, with more money, influence, followers, presence, and ability to make change that will take whatever they post and try to paint it in the most negative light they can manage. That the people who they trust completely are small to nonexistent, that they people they trust situationally are a slightly larger group, and that the rest of you get exactly as much trust as you've earned.
And then, perhaps, the article can focus on what's actually interesting: the ways in which this generation, despite all of those things working against them, still manage to find the spaces to be themselves, to organize, to express their opinions, make it all the way into the majority, and then eventually wrest control of the narrative and the structures to support the narrative away for themselves.
It may again be personal bias, but I suspect the children and teens the Guardian article is treating with fascination might find more kinship with their just-a-bit-ahead predecessors who came up through childhood with BBSes and message boards than with the article writers and the older generations that the article notes have embraced social media in vast amounts and quantities.
Let's get that last paragraph set out of the way first - being off of social media is not becoming a renunciant, nor are those that do being transformed into wise sages that have resisted the siren call of the endless scroll. "Refuseniks" as a phrase has, at least to me, connotations of the same sort of movements that were covered in the "Beats, Hippies, Punks" class - people seen as taking a stand against something that everyone else seemed to go along with and marking their identity based on their shared counterculture. This is not that.
What the article seems to have missed, despite the pull quotes and the nearly parallel narrative going along with what the article wants to conclude, is that the refusal and reduction and not going on social media are deliberate, and not some sort of new trend or reaction to the always-on society they live in. The people making the decisions to cut back or cut off their social media presence use the language of curation and identity. Ammanuel says they were presenting a "dishonest version of mysself, on a platform where most people were presenting dishonest versions of themselves." Social media is a "competition", and a "game", the actual interviewees say, in betweeen paragraphs that talk about how their brains have apparently been conditioned on the dopamine hits of likes since they were very young and how they easily breezed into adoption of each new platform as it came along. The "digital natives" narrative is showing itself more and more to have been a terrible idea and assumption, and yet it continues to echo through pieces like these, that take "digital natives" as the base truth and that other things are framed in relation to. It is only if you assume that children are predisposed to be on all the digital platforms all at once that the idea that some of them might not be doing this becomes strange and newsworthy.
I think the closest the article gets to realizing the real narrative is when it talks about the sense of privacy that Generation Z has in relation to social media. They've grown up in a situation where things that used to be the province of family albums trotted out to embarass someone to their potential significant other(s) are now shared on a much grander scale by people who really don't understand the permanence of that act. They didn't before, either, as anyone who has been on the receiving end of an embarrasing story told by their caregivers to someone they might have an interest in knows, but they were at least mercifully limited by the telling and the people who were present. Now, someone could become friends with your caregivers online and scroll all the way back to those embarrassing things shared when you were younger and share them as well, with intent and possibly malice. They're much more aware, both explicitly (being told about the consequences of doing something terrible online) and implicitly (by watching those kinds of situations unfold in their lives, or worse, being the target or perpetrator of them) about visibility, about curating an image, and about making sure that eveyone you let inside the circle is someone you trust that far inside. The curation of image takes time and effort, and depending on how much of your safety is involved in the curation of that image, it has greater and lesser consequences. Sometimes the best way to deal with it is to cut the knot entirely and take a break or leave a platform. Those options become even more appealing if you know that what's going to happen is a firestorm of something getting called down on you, deservedly or otherwise.
Fear Of Missing Out isn't the driver the article wants to make it out as, at least not fear of missing out on the superficial, like parties and events and that. There may be a Fear of Missing Out on important things, however. The sort of things like "Alice posted friends-only that she hates this marginalized group you belong to" so that if you have class with Alice or a homework assignment with Alice, you know what to look out for. Or "Ben came out as trans and wants us to call him by his proper name and pronouns." Things that might be coded, or hidden in visible sight and that call for significant shifts in how you think and address the people around you. Or shifts that indicate a change in the safety and trust levels of the people around you. (Or that you may have to get your own house on standby to catch someone if they should be unceremoniously chucked from their own house because of a failure of security or a desire to live a life authentically before attaining the age of majority.)
This generation is the first generation that didn't get a chance to create themselves first and then step onto the stage. They have instead had to wrest control of themselves and their narratives from others who, through cruelty or indifference, have been cosntructing them for their own purposes and are insisting-to-gaslighting this generation that what's already been created for them is more real and true than anything they are creating for themselves. Social media is/not the place to express themselves authentically, to fight against the narrative that's already been created about them and for them. And it's exhausting fighting an enemy who has more resources and time than you do to push back against them.
Perhaps the next time someone wants to write about Millenians or Generation Z and their relationship to social media, they can acknowledge and work from these first principles: that these people have always known that they have to curate their image in all times, places, and spaces. That what they show you has been deliberated upon significantly and analyzed for as many possible angles as they can see and ultimately decided that it could go out and be part of their record. And that there's at least one faction, with more money, influence, followers, presence, and ability to make change that will take whatever they post and try to paint it in the most negative light they can manage. That the people who they trust completely are small to nonexistent, that they people they trust situationally are a slightly larger group, and that the rest of you get exactly as much trust as you've earned.
And then, perhaps, the article can focus on what's actually interesting: the ways in which this generation, despite all of those things working against them, still manage to find the spaces to be themselves, to organize, to express their opinions, make it all the way into the majority, and then eventually wrest control of the narrative and the structures to support the narrative away for themselves.
