Abuse of Generational Thinking

When I think about the idea of the abuse of generational thinking, my mind immediately goes to social media. Those in the Gen Z crowd tend to be MUCH more active on social media platforms than any other generation. We’ve literally grown up with it (although forms of social media were much simpler than they are now). We use it for anything and everything from just watching funny videos on TikTok to connecting with other people on Twitter or maybe even LinkedIn (if you would even consider that to be a form of social media). Personally for me, I am on Twitter almost all the time. If I’m not doing homework or at work, you’ll probably find me scrolling through Twitter. I’m not just endlessly scrolling though (okay, well maybe sometimes), but I’m actively interacting with other people and building connections – especially those that might help me later on in life such as people like software developers or meteorologists.

That being said, some other generations, especially the older ones tend to have a negative view on social media and even technology in general (but we won’t get into that topic here). What they don’t really seem to understand though, is that social media is how we communicate and make connections with other people now. We aren’t restricted to only people within our city or even our neighborhood anymore. We can connect with people all over the world. Many people even make a living off of social media simply because they are able to reach so many people. I feel like Generations above us tend to overlook that aspect sometimes and choose to just see the negatives of social media.

That’s not to say that everyone in older generations has this negative view point of social media. I know many 60-80 year olds that are going viral on TikTok. It just seems like overall there may be some sort of that abuse over our generation when we spend a good portion of our time online.