Diary of a Gen Z Student: How social media shaped my generation

Jane Cowan: "The reality is this is a generation that received most of their sex education online." Picture: Moya Nolan

I was recently informed that every time a video is played, it has to be rewound before it can be played again. I’m saying this to describe the extent to which I have no concept of a world without ubiquitous technology and social media.

I was in primary school when I got my first phone, and I was in primary school when I made my first Snapchat and Instagram accounts. For my generation, that’s nothing unusual. Gen Z grew up on social media.

We probably understand the risks of technology more than anyone else. We lived those risks. Consumed the harmful content. Had our world view shaped by technology. Now that I’ve gotten a little older, I’ve got the critical distance from that time to be able to view it more wholly. It was the end of my childhood. It was probably in 2015 that I got my first phone. So, things like Instagram and Snapchat were new.

Our parents didn’t understand exactly what they were giving us, when they gave us phones, but they were giving us access to the adult world, long before we needed it.

Today, we look back on the 90s and early 2000s and see the damage inflicted by a diet industry that glamorised disordered eating. We see a fashion industry that lauds thinness at any cost. Tabloids that picked apart celebrities’ every ‘flaw’. Things have certainly changed in the way that the media discusses beauty today.

However, on social media, glamourised content around disordered eating, perpetuating notions like ‘thin is in’, or content discussing how to starve yourself until you have a flat stomach, is everywhere.

We have all seen it. I would struggle to find a girl my age whose perception of herself hasn’t been tainted by her social media consumption. 

Being perpetually consumed by the desire to shrink your body is not born in a void.

It’s a culture that has been given another outlet through which it can be expressed. But social media idealises more than an ‘ideal’ weight. It’s also about whether your nose is the right shape, your eyebrows are perfectly groomed, or your lips are plump enough.

Walking through Dublin and noticing the number of young girls with lip filler highlights the ubiquity of these ideas.

But it’s not just girls that are impacted by this. Young men have also been fed unhealthy standards around having the perfect gym physique, no matter the sacrifices.

Those ideas are harmful at any age, but if you’re bombarded by them when you are young, experiencing puberty and a changing body, it’s no wonder so many people of my generation are so consumed by their physical appearance. A consumption that does little more than foster self-loathing.

But that’s just one issue that arises from uncontrolled technology usage. There’s also the reality that so many parents weren’t talking to their children about what they might see online or checking their phones to see what they’ve been consuming. 

Most young people first saw pornography because someone showed it to them on their phone. The reality is this is a generation that received most of their sex education online. It’s naïve to believe that hasn’t had real-life implications. 

For young people, and young men in particular, actual intimacy has been occluded by pornography, by often harmful images and videos. No one considers that when they give a 10-year-old a phone.

In so many ways, actual experience was yielded to technology. I think that has been the real tragedy of growing up on social media. You’re denied so many opportunities to learn about yourself, or connect with your peers, or to experience the world around you. I feel like my adolescence was sacrificed to my phone.

Friendships were confined to Snapchat. If something wasn’t posted to Instagram, it didn’t really count.

Even now, I don’t know that parents fully understand just how much we were molded by our social media consumption. I think you have to live it to know that. There’s one thing I know for certain about technology: I will avoid giving it to my future children for as long as possible.

That probably says it all. Coming of age is difficult enough to navigate, without the added pressure of technology. I was constantly told what to think, how to look, who to believe. In the chaos of all that was just a kid trying to carve out some space in the world.

What a loss it is, that an entire generation has had to do that through the filter of social media.