Originally written for a final project in a research capstone course for my minor in Science, Technology, Environment, and Public Policy
Spring 2020
From the Blackberry to the Kindle to the iPhone to the 3DS to the evolution of phone games, the timeline of twenty-first-century technological development is archived in our childhoods as a relatively slow expansion throughout the several years it took for these technologies to disseminate into our classrooms and friend circles, becoming normalized in our everyday lives. To those who had lived decades without personal devices and were still growing accustomed to the Internet’s increasingly ever-present nature, this progression and circulation of technology seemed rapid. The normalization of smartphones as a necessary component of daily life fed older generations generalizations about those of us who grew up during this uneven transition from desktop to mobile.
These generalizations erase the childhoods we had outside of smartphones, the Internet, and even our gaming consoles. They neglect the reality of low-income children during this period when these technologies were a mark of status and weren’t responsible for our collective entertainment and recreation. Reflected in Jean M. Twenge's quote to the right, these generalizations make it seem as though technology descended on our adolescence like a bomb, suddenly and completely. They conveniently overlook the fact that, while we engaged with social media and technology enthusiastically, the integration of smartphones into our generational identity was something that was largely forced on us and almost always with a judgmental tone. I’ve been in lectures with older professors who confidently and condescendingly proclaim that we all grew up with smartphones when many of us didn’t receive one until late middle school or early high school. We are all written off as the first to have lost the human experience detached from technology yet most remember when smartphones, iPads, and laptops weren’t necessary for daily life, but a luxury that could be taken away on a parent's whim. We grew up on cable TV, virus-prone Dell laptops, and old desktops at school when our first personal technological device was a DS or PlayStation Portable whose Internet capabilities extended to playing video games with kids in China and trash-talking friends from the comfort of our homes. This barrage of misconceptions and generalizations portrays our generation as shallow, screen-obsessed homebodies who would rather talk to strangers on social media than spend time with friends and family.
Misconceptions
Born between 1996 and 2010, Generation Z's childhoods are more variable than any generation before us. Sure, as the first ones born into a digitally interconnected world, our perception of humans' relationships with our communities and natural environment have been collectively colored by technological development and the accelerating pace at which it advances. However, it is this rapid change that makes the life I lived having been born in 1999 notably different from those led by current middle schoolers. When the older kids of Gen Z first used the Internet, we witnessed the first years of Youtube and helped popularize social media platforms dedicated to free expression. We listened to music on hand-me-down MP3 players and the first generations of the iPod. We grew up playing GameCube, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo 64 with our older siblings, welcoming the Wii and Nintendo DS as a new generation of gaming technology. From late elementary school to early middle school, we began getting "dumb" phones and registering on Facebook, where we starting shaping a meme culture that now informs the strategies of desperate PR teams on Twitter. Compared to the current cluster of AI-generated advertisements and political commentary interwoven with personal updates and trivial Buzzfeed quizzes, the Internet we grew up with was a place for creative expression and connection with others relatively unimpeded by the corporate exploitation of mass data collection that shadows our current Internet activity.
"Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet... iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010."
Jean M. Twenge, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
"Today’s young adults have grown up in an era of fierce competition and instability. They were in elementary school during the 2008 financial crisis, they have been subject to an unrelenting testing regime in school under No Child Left Behind and the country has been at war for their entire lives. Their hesitation to major in the humanities, their insistence on achieving concrete outcomes and their fear of failure are almost certainly due to the pressures of being assessed constantly and the climate of financial anxiety in which they came of age."
Miranda Sachs, Why fears over Generation Z are overblown
Hibernation
The past ten years have been this exhausting, slow-motion, self-fulfilling prophecy. Ever since we first touched a keyboard, controller, or screen we’ve been inundated with heavy foreshadowing and undeserved skepticism about who technology will collectively shape us to be. Between news articles, TV segments, and hypocritical Facebook posts, older generations have sat back and judged their children for rises in mental illness and stress while blaming it on our self-obsession and disconnect from the 'real world.' Many see something fundamentally wrong with the ways in which we’ve curated our social, professional, and academic lives around technology yet strive to understand our language and humor in order to replicate it for our attention. They are satisfied with the surface-level interpretation of our unique challenges as resulting from excessive social media use because it feeds the convenient impulse to assume the worst about a generation they cannot hope to understand.
I think these frustrated discrepancies probably come from older individuals’ genuine drive to understand a generation who became politically aware in an America shaped by post-9/11 anxiety, shuddered by the 2008 financial crisis, and fatigued by wars that have stretched through our entire lifetimes. The political-economic environment in which we were raised has been documented almost as thoroughly as our higher rates of mental illness, often blamed on stress and insecurity introduced by social media. Though not all members of older generations see us this way, exemplified by Miranda Sachs' insights on the left. Many recognize our psychologically abnormal conception of “normal” having been born into a world of uncertainty, watching our Millennial older siblings stagger under the weight of student loans and an undependable job market. For years, educational and psychological professionals have sought awareness for the dramatic rise in academic competition ranging from college admissions to standardized testing to extracurriculars. As we grew up watching our communities bitterly wave goodbye to jobs that had been moved overseas, they recognized we were raised alongside the hyper-partisan sentiments that culminated in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. They study the adverse mental implications of latently fearing a school shooting while being de-sensitized to a victim count that only grew as we did. These perspectives on Generation Z commend us for our resilience and scoff at those who write us off as disconnected, unmotivated, self-obsessed, and disappointing. They understand their generations failed to build a system that can provide the support we need transitioning into adulthood within a period of greater turbulence than the one we were raised in. After decades of watching the climate change argument contentiously unravel in presidential debates, op-eds, and news media, they are left worried about the world they will pass down to us and terrified about the world we will bring their grandchildren into.
Stewards
I’m not even sure we understand us. I’m pretty sure we don’t comprehend what it has meant to grow up in the world we did. Even the children of the Cold War era, who contemplated their imminent, violent death at a young age, cannot be used as a comparison for a generation witnessing the world simultaneously collapse and expand as we learn about it. The rapid pace at which globalization has liberated our lives and given us the tools to leverage our digital identities is shadowed by the constant, fatiguing reality of the natural world degrading around us. All of the stressful economic, social, and political events we've grown up with are eclipsed by the environmental deterioration we've observed throughout our childhoods like the longest, most depressing Planet Earth episode ever made. It has always been the backlight that has colored the way we perceive ourselves as stewards of the natural world, illuminating the gravity of the task through oil spills, hurricanes, rising temperatures, rising emissions, rising sea levels, and myriad natural disasters from a young age.
​
This isn’t to say we are alone in carrying the mental burdens of the twenty-first century, or even that we all experience this unique climate anxiety to a significant degree. Rather, I think my younger self noticing fireflies disappear, fewer tree frogs dotting my backyard, the chorus of birds growing steadily quieter, and the local lakes’ algae fields becoming harder to avoid has unmistakably burdened my worldview.
​
There hasn't been a time in my life that I wasn't aware that the Earth is dying. I think we were introduced to existential helplessness when we were too young to process it, rendering us desensitized to the environmental carnage that has unfolded without our full recognition. The narratives we heard in classes and on the news described a world with catastrophic species loss, careless industrial waste practices, and a shrinking ozone layer, yet the world we observed was one where environmentalists were seen as alarmists and treated as punchlines, one where lessons about the importance of nature echoed relentlessly in our classrooms but the adult world merely treated them as tasteless dinner conversation. Whether the phrases ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ were thrown around our households with disdained disbelief or genuine concern may determine how seriously we take these issues in adulthood, it does nothing to change the reality that the children who have watched the Earth deteriorate cannot comprehend what we have lost and how it has affected us.
“I feel like in my peer group, you just go right from talking about polar bears dying to ‘Did you see what Maya posted on Snapchat?’ Nobody has a filter to adjust,” Niles says. “It’s like, the ice caps are melting and my hypothetical children will never see them, but also I have a calculus test tomorrow.”
Sarah Niles, 18 y.o. from Alabama
“It’s like there’s a paradigm shift, like when you learn that Santa Claus isn’t real. Everything we teach them, that science is a tool for understanding the world, that adults are protecting you, falls apart. There’s nothing to prepare them for this enormous problem that we simply haven’t solved.”
Park Guthrie, 6th grade teacher from California
All photography for this project was captured on my Samsung A20's profoundly unexceptional camera
According to the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, the common denominator of psychological trauma is a feeling of “intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation” (quoted in Herman, 1992, p. 33). Because of unprecedented anthropogenically induced levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the heating of the oceans, the melting of the ice caps, and the continuing plunder of minerals, forests, and fisheries by an exponentially expanding human population, there is no question that the entire biosphere has come under a sustained assault, a kind of global holocaust unfolding in slow motion.
Zhiwa Woodbury, Climate Trauma: Toward a New Taxonomy of Trauma
