Why Aren’t Young People Uncool Anymore?
Photo: Yuyi John via i-D
The first iPhone was released in 2007. It was years still before smartphones were ubiquitous. Facebook was launched in 2004, and Instagram in 2010. That means that everyone born in or before 2000 got to live out most of their childhood without the omnipresence of social media.
I am an older member of Gen Z. I got my first cell phone for my eleventh birthday. It was white and blue and I could slide it open to text on a little keyboard, sticky little buttons that I used to furiously send out meaningless texts to my friends just because I could. I got my first iPod when I was thirteen, my first iPhone when I started high school.
I lived out my middle school years with no understanding at all of what was cool in the halls of the high school that I lived just a few blocks away from. I was deeply concerned with being cool, desperate to garner the approval of my fellow twelve and thirteen year olds. I watched YouTube makeup tutorials and Taylor Swift music videos that made me wish I was older, blonder, that I knew more about love. It was by no means a stressless existence, but it was its own little hormone-filled bubble. We were competing with each other, and even the coolest of us would certainly be seen as wholly uncool by kids just a couple of years older.
Image via Pinterest
Today elementary and middle school children regularly use Instagram and TikTok. There is one advantage that this access to so much knowledge and content gives young children; there is no more mystery as to what is ‘cool’. Middle schoolers no longer have to scrounge for information as to what is on trend, to create their own awkward markets of social capital. Today’s thirteen year olds won’t look back at photos of themselves in five or ten years and think “my god, what was I thinking?” Everyone knows what is on trend, and young people are no longer uncool.
But is that really worth the cost? There is much definitive evidence that increased use of social media is extremely harmful to the mental health and body image of teenagers (and people in general). Facebook is aware that Instagram makes body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls, but has done nothing to prevent this issue from continuing. About 6% of teen suicides in the U.S. have been traced back to Instagram. Generation Z is the most stressed out generation that has ever lived.
Photo: Hannah Yoon via The Wall Street Journal
On TikTok, face altering filters have made it almost impossible to know what someone really looks like. We assume that everyone we see has perfect skin, eyes, that they are more beautiful than we are. Social media is damaging to everyone, but it is especially impactful to young people whose understanding of the world and what they should look like is literally being formed through their content consumption.
Growing up in front of the camera distorts a person’s perspective of their identity. It strips away the carefree nature that so many of us took for granted in childhood and imbues in us an unshakeable anxiety, and the solution that is offered to us, by social media itself, is a consumer product that will solve our problems. At the end of the day, that is what it boils down to; Facebook doesn’t care that they are hurting young people because they are profiting off of it.