I was listening to the recent episode of the Ezra Klein Show when something Klein’s guest Emily Jashinsky said caused me to pause and google. Jashinsky claims about Gen Z’ers who are tired of social media and smart phones, who may want to give them up (starting at about 15:34):
“Do you know what Gen Z is binging hours of on YouTube? Its camcorder videos from the 1980s and 1990s of high schoolers. It’s the most boring camcorder videos on your old Sony that you could possibly imagine of people just at their lockers. No phones, just living in the moment and Gen Z is binging these hard, and it goes beyond just the curiosity of these historical artifacts. I think actually, if you asked a 22-year old that question and its through the lens of what your every day life would look like, and not just explicitly economic, I actually think a lot of them would take the deal. Not all of them, but the level of exhaustion with smartphones and social media…”
As she continues, she makes the case that younger conservatives, with whom she identifies, have a problem with modernity and that they would like to be free of some of its constraints, especially the dominance of technology and social media. I recommend listening to the episode yourself (embedded below) to hear her argument in its entirety, and I appreciate Klein, himself a progressive, hosting a conversation about the internal diversity of America’s conservative movement. I’m learning a lot as I listen but that’s not what I want to address. I want to address this claim about Gen Z’s nostalgia.
Unfortunately, I can’t find any information about Gen Z binging camcorder videos. I’m not doubting the claim, per se, just saying I can’t link to any study or news article on the topic. If someone out there finds something, feel free to share in the comments and I’ll update this post! I want to know if this is true because it would be eye opening, for one, but also affirming of the pedagogy I’ve implemented in my classroom.
What do I mean by this? Well, I share some of the concerns Jashinsky expressed about the Internet and social media. Obviously. In the past several weeks, I’ve written about how much better things seem at the school where I work since we’ve banned smartphones and smartwatches during school hours (see “Anecdotal evidence about phones in the classroom”). I’m skeptical of Artificial Intelligence’s ability to contribute to my students’ education (see “AI in the/my classroom”). Instead, I encourage my students to handwrite almost everything at this stage (see “Handwriting is good for the brain”). I have zero interest in engaging with trendy social media platforms like Snapchat and TikTok, as evidenced by the fact that I’m blogging like it’s 2010 (see “Why do I blog?”). This means that almost no one hears my views on topics like this one, and I’m fine with that! It’s freeing to do this sort of thing mostly for myself, to process my own thoughts in writing, to help me become clearer about my reasoning. I mean, I confess: I despise what algorithms are doing to us and I’m happy to pretend like the Internet is something else; something freer than what it’s become:
But most importantly: is Jashinsky’s claim true that many Gen Z’ers wish they could have the lives we had in the 80s and 90s? Would they trade social media and smart phones for camcorders, landline phones, and getting your sports scores either on cable TV or through tomorrow’s newspaper?
I don’t think I’d make a 1-for-1 trade but I do think there’s a lot about present modernity that we need to rethink, especially with regard to smartphone use, the Internet, and social media…especially for young, developing minds. To clarify, I was raised (partially) in fringe religious circles. The Internet provided me with information but also dialogue partners that made it impossible that I would continue in that religious movement once I became an adult. I imagine that pre-Internet, when your community was mostly people you know only in “real” life, I may have been more prone to settle for the sense of belonging that extreme religious groups can provide. But like the man being led out of Plato’s cave, the Internet gave me a map to freedom.
That being said, the Internet has also provided many people with a map into the cave. The conspiratorial thinking of QAnon is an Internet reality. Heaven’s Gate is famous for its use of the Internet to gain adherents and notoriety at the very beginning of the Internet Era. So the Internet has been used for variegated purposes since the beginning. It’s neither good nor bad in itself, nor are smart phones or social media.
But if Gen Z does have pre-Internet nostalgia, then we should pay attention to what it is that they wish they had from the eras of our childhoods. (I’m an older Millennial, or a “Xennial” as we who were born in the early 1980s are called, so by “our” I mean the childhoods of the 80s and 90s.) It may tell us what our young people need, including Gen Alpha who arrives in my classroom soon.
A final side note: I don’t remember being nostalgic for my parent’s youth. I had my own ups and downs as a kid and adolescent but I enjoyed my era. I liked some of the music from my parents era but I didn’t want to trade places. If even a sizable percentage of Gen Z does want to trade places with Millennials, or at least wishes that they had some of what made our childhoods unique, then this seems to be telling us a lot about what’s gone wrong over the past two decades. It may give our collective culture a guide for how to course correct. We should pay attention.
The blog of Brian LePort 