I’m always a bit cautious when it comes to giving too much weight to surveys. Why? Because I have participated in them myself. I’m not even sure how much I trust myself to answer the questions in a reliable or relevant fashion. I’m also very aware that no single survey can say much on its own. Which is why serious researchers look at a cross section of data over time and using different methods and look at a wide cross section of cultures and contexts when they study any given trend.
But one can still accept that they are able to say something of interest, enough so to merit noted discussion. This past week one such survey made the headlines, funded by Thriftbooks and available through Talker Research using a process verfied through the Transparency Initiative through the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR).
The central focus of the survey was gauging peoples awareness of and feelings about the time they spend online. If you look through the quesitons (35 of them if I am correct), they are intentionally drawing a distinctive between analogue and digital choices, framing it in multiple choice options that seek to gain some sense of the ways those surveyed tend to see their realtionship to the online world.
The clickbait headlines are quite clear about what we are supposed to see as the most shocking takeaway- Gen Z is leading the way in unplugging. Now, I suspect there could be a larger historical trend at play here. It at least seems to be true to say that every younger generation leads the way in rejecting the world they’ve been handed. I have to think this plays a role.
Likewise, survey’s like this, particularly when it comes to younger voices, do get tricky as those younger voices are far more prone to following trends and adopting rhetoric than the more established lives of those who are older. Thus it probably shouldn’t be as shocking or suprsing as it looks to record the answers that they got.
Further, it would also be true too to say that the older the cross section gets (in this case it is 2000 responses being divided up) the more likely it is that people have already made this choice (in a generalizing sense, not a totalizing sense). Thus they are far less likely to be saying they need to do this (disconnect).
And as it is with anything and everything, the shape of generations/persons and the shape of society/culture are interconnected in ways that cannot reduce the conversation to matters of mere choice. Given all of this I think its reasonable to use caution when rushing to label any generation, and these headlines seem to indicate more of a predisposed need to justify Gen Z against conceptions that they are often looked down upon.
What I do think such conversations can open up though is thinking about matters of agency, which is very different from tendencies to use character and actions as a measure for what deems a generation good or bad. On that front, there are a couple interesting things to pull from it in my mind. And to be clear, this information is reflective of the whole, not just Gen Z.
First are the three key words that define the why or the percieved motivation for this desire to disconnect from the online world: productive, present, aware. If you look at the questions these words are intentional laden into the direction one can choose. So again, not surprising that people would be picking the words that would give a positive perception rather than a negative one. But they are strong words none the less, and if nothing else indicate that they have been put into the conversation by anyone filling the survey out. Questions I might have:
- Is the value more production? In what way do they perceive being productive?
- in what ways are they being present with other people? To what end are they actually doing so without their phones?
- Does acknowledging or checking off a feeling lead to awareness? How might they articulate and define the problem?
The second thought would be the thing I might say I am most interested in, as trends do have an impact on culture, what the present cultural imprint or cultural voice tells us. According to the survey, of all the things people are gravitating towards notebooks and books are leading the way, with paper calendars and board games close behind. In other words, reverting to manual and physical ways of doing life and work.
It does seem that we are seeing a positive trend in the book selling world once you dig behind those statistics (important to note this doesn’t necessarily translate uniformly to an increase in sales, but rather visible shfits in specific areas, which I think is what we see in things like the previous years success of the romantisy genre, and even this years shift towards shorter books).
In maybe the most pointed statement, 77 percent stated that the older they get the more they are becoming aware about the importance of spending time in the real world. There could be all sorts of influencing factors at play here, one of the most obvious and prominant being people’s fears and anxieties over the age of AI. What is real and what is not has become a distinguishing part of the modern rhetoric (a far cry from the post modern age of my young adulthood).
Here I will add a couple of my own notes as well coming back to the suggested “shocking headline” regarding Gen Z leading the way with the highest percentages of those disconnecting. First, what would be interesting to me is understanding the relationship between people’s feelings about being online and the present face of big corporations that so much of the online world is attached to (Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple, Facebook, ect).
It’s been well documented for a while now how Gen Z has grown up without the institutions that Gen X deconstructed and worked to dismantle. The language of institution simply isn’t part of the rhetoric in the same way that it once was. This applies to government systems as much as it does to business/corporations and the church. In my experience (so take that for what it is), when I talk to someone from the Gen Z generation or even younger (which is generally intersecting with our son, his friends, the youth at our church, the students at the school in which I work), they have very little sense of what belongs on the left and what belongs on the right. They don’t really use that language.
They do seem to have a sense of what they are experiencing, again in my lone opinion formulated from my experience, but by and large I find they don’t filter that through the systems and its rhetoric that older generations do. Instead they speak the language of influencers. Which for me has been a really interesting dynamic to dissect and explore, especially when it comes to speaking across what is a cross-cultural reality, across the language of our very different symbols.
In fact, in my honest interactions I find myself constantly surprised by some of the views I see them accepting and endorsing and some of the directions I see their philosophies taking them on a number of levels. They don’t question spirituality in the same way my generation did. AT the same time they aren’t really familiar with the church. They don’t realy know political colours. They belong to some of the first generations that have little to no connection with people involved in the past world wars. Their world has been shaped more narrowly by specific events, such 9/11 and Covid. They have largely grown up outside of family structures in educational systems where authority figures are generally non-existent. The scope of influencers aren’t so much polarizing within their antithetical opinions as returning us to an age of cult like fanaticism. The globalized world has in fact shrunk the world they occupy in some strange ways (for someone of my generation). A generation that would be seeking physical, shared spaces in an environment that has made the idea of the storefront obsolete.
I have often remarked, sometimes it feels like I’m talking to a generation that has somehow reverted to the era of my grandparents, simply without the same recognition of institutional awareness or backdrop of war. Thus, I might describe it as a very disordered version of what I hold in my memory of growing up looking across the table at those same figures.
An additional note on this front. I don’t know how much this is in the consciousness of Gen Z, but I do know it is very present for Gen X, and that is seeing an intentional shift in certain areas relating to how we engage culture, such as getting rid of kindles and switching to Kobo, a company that has made a name for itsself as the anti-Amazon brand and who supports the authors and the art (and thus is for the reader). Or doing away with audible in favour of Libro.fm, an audiobook platform that directly supports independent bookstores, that ensures you own the ebook you’ve bought, and gives money directly to the authors. We see this as well in areas such as travel, sadly in ways where the entire industry of travel has been challenging businesses in the same way that spotify has challenged musicians.
Now, this is simply a theory, but I wonder if Gen Z has the same awareness of what these kinds of shifts represent. It’s more likely that they never got in on the audible or kindle craze to begin with, as they have grown up with tiktok, youtube and netflix, two companies that have taught entire generations to see art as this singular thing called content you don’t invest in, rather its something you just consume. It’s not that they are unaware that movies exist (hello Minecraft), its that such things are not viewed as indistinguishable from antyhing else. It’s simply part of a whole. It’s not that music doesn’t exist, its that the album not a comprehensible concept, and certainly paying for any of this stuff would be completely foreign.
Thus, the importance of something like Kobo or Libro wouldn’t translate in the same way. Nor would the notion of seeing something like the movie theater as an important part of that “disconnecting.” What I seem to be picking up on in this survey is more an act of comparmentalizing, at least where it concerns the ways in which Gen Z might be answering these questions in the same way but with very different understandings of what it means. Thus it makes sense why they would pick up a physical book, or go outside, or write in a notebook. This is the avaialable analogue option that directly contrasts with the perception of the digital. Kobo? Libro? Movie theaters? These things wouldn’t provide that contrast while they certaintly do for those in my generation.
Equally so when I subscribe to something like Mubi and disconnect from Netflix, for example. Why? Because I am of the generation who’s primary act of rebellion was going after institutions. That’s what we did. Thus that is what it means to disconnect. We battle against the Amazons and the Netflix’s of the world, the monopolizing enttities driven by billionairies. For my generation we inhereted the online world as a place where we repositioned all our real world, physical hobbies into this new mode of collecting. Not initially at their expense, but as a way of documenting it. It was a wonderful time, for a moment. And then it started to consume us. And we handed that world to the next generation. And then it became an obsession and an addiction. We know this. We’ve been battling back against it long before Gen Z. Just in our own way. Gen Z has a digital world without the same noted enemies. Thus to disconnect means something very different.
Some of my thoughts anyways. As with anything, surveys like this tend to tap into two essential things- the particular shape of the present culture and world, and universal truths that one would think is inherent to any and every cultural moment. Reconnecting with the physical world seems intuitively attached to the latter. If nothing else (and for the record, and a completely anecdotal observation, my son, part of the Gen Z generation, laughed at the survey results and said there is no way that’s honest), it has the potential to open up healthy and helpful conversation. At least once we get past the headlines.
The Stories of my Life 