O generation Z came of age swimming in a confusing mess of digital content. Every day they browse memes, photos, social media, conversations with friends, video highlights, influencers, news articles from a million places on the web. How do teens and young adults sort through all this digitized mass to determine what is important, useful, or true?
Many people would like to know. Social networks want new users. The media wants subscribers. Politicians want votes. Teachers want to know why their students don’t read books. It seems like everyone is interested in understanding kids these days.
How young people “metabolize” what they see online
In the last two years, researchers at Jigsaw, a Google subsidiary that focuses on online politics and polarizationstudy how members of Generation Z digest and metabolize what they see online. The researchers hoped that their work would provide one of the first in-depth ethnographic studies of Generation Z’s “information literacy.” But as soon as they began, their most fundamental assumption about the nature of digital information collapsed.
“In a week of actual research, we dropped the term information literacy,” says Yasmin Green, chief executive of Jigsaw. It turns out that Gen Z is “not on a linear journey to evaluate the sincerity of anything.” Instead, they deal with what researchers call “information sensitivity” – a “socially informed” practice based on “popularly reliable findings”. In other words, Gen Z knows the difference between solid news and AI-generated memes. They just don’t care.
Fast forward to comments
Jigsaw’s findings offer a revealing look at the digital mindset of Generation Z. While older generations struggle to verify information and cite sources, Gen Z doesn’t even bother. They just read the headlines and then quickly scan the comments, to see what everyone is saying. They delegate the determination of truth and meaning to trusted, like-minded influencers. And if an article is too long, they just ignore it. They don’t want to see things that might make them think too much or that upset them emotionally. If they have a goal, Jigsaw discovered, it’s to learn what they need to know to remain calm and conversational in their chosen social groups.
“The old guard says, ‘Yes, but at the end of the day you have to be interested in the truth,’” says Green. “The Gen Z point of view is, ‘You can tell me your truth and what’s important to you.’” What determines the meaning of a statement is not an established notion of authority. AND social signals they receive from their peers.
Generation Z’s “filters”
Jigsaw research is not intended to be statistically significant. They didn’t survey a large group of Gen Z users about your digital habits. Instead, they trusted intensive interviews with a group of young people aged 13 to 24 from a representative range of demographics, classes and genders. They did what anthropologists do in the field – they looked for qualitative depth rather than quantitative data.
What they heard surprised them. Young people basically say they see no difference between looking for news online and interacting socially. Gen Z youth approach most of their digital experience in what researchers call time passage mode, just watching so they don’t get bored. If they want to answer a question or learn something new, they can turn to a search engine, but they obtain new information mainly through their social networks, which are algorithmically adjusted to reflect what interests them and who they trust. In short, they created the your own filters to process a flood of digitized information. Only the important things appear, and if something appears, it must be important.
They don’t read long articles. And they don’t trust anything with ads, paywalls or pop-ups asking for donations or subscriptions. “If you use clickbait, you will not have confidence in your content”, one person told investigators. “And news sources – even CNN and the New York Times – are engaging in clickbait. I am throwing these articles away immediately.”
The role of influencers
For Gen Z, the online world feels like the tiered dining room in a 1980s teen movie. Instead of listening to stuffy old masters like CNN and the Times, they follow advice from online influencers – the queen bees and the quarterback brothers at the top of the social hierarchy. Influencers’ personal experience makes them authentic and speak the language of Gen Z.
“Gen Z will have a favorite influencer or set of influencers that they essentially trust the trust “They are incredibly loyal to what the influencer says,” says Beth Goldberg, head of research at Jigsaw. “It becomes extremely expensive to break out of the influencer pool because they get all their information from them.”
None of this is to say that Generation Z is less intelligent or diligent than other generations.. They know how to probe deeper. They usually don’t want to. “They use these critical literacy skills in a very small percentage of the time they spend online,” says Goldberg. If they are preparing for an argument they know they will have, or when they have to make big life decisions about schools or investments, they are willing to go through the drudgery of fact-finding. And when it comes to things like nutrition or wellness, Gen Z will simply try it on their bodies and see if it works. They perceive this as a safe way to do their own research, especially since they are not harming anyone. If that new diet or exercise program “works” in their own bodies, that is more credible than data showing its effects on an entire population.
If they can get into Gen Z’s feeds, things that seem like facts – allegations about what constitutes a healthy diet or what Trump would do as president or whether Ukraine or Russia are to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – chances are they’ll go straight to the comments. In part, this is because they know that digital audiences will quickly debunk any fake news. But it’s also because they’re worried that the news — or a specific reaction to it — could end up being potential cancellation content.
Cancel culture
“Cancel culture (cancel culture) it became an event as they grew up. They were trained and observed how to act and not act, to avoid this,” says Goldberg. “They get reliable information from chats in closed groups or from followers with private broadcasts, so they can interpret that they belong to a group and can attribute specific social signals.” For Gen Z, checking out what others are saying in the comments isn’t superficial. It’s a matter of social life or death.
If this sounds like a generation that will believe every hoax they come across and will never subscribe to a newspaper, then Jigsaw researchers are worried about that too. But the good news is that Gen Z doesn’t see as many deliberate lies as you might think. Research shows that most misinformation is created and consumed by a small minority of users who seek it out, rather than through the algorithmically sprayed eyes of gullible teenagers surfing the web. “It’s highly unlikely that the occasional consumption of silly TikToks will lead someone into a dark corner of hate or misinformation,” says David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research who studies online behavior. “It’s very likely that if they get there, they chose to get there.”
Nowadays, we all consume less formal news content, such as television or newspapers. And like Gen Z, We all rely more and more on our social networks to let us know what’s going on. A recent Pew Research Center study found that most Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok users frequently encounter news. In X, these come most often from the media and journalists who actually produced the news. On Facebook and Instagram, they come through family and friends whose opinions, for better or worse, you already know. But on TikTok — with its disproportionately younger user base — the source is often influencers. They aggregate, meta-analyze, and pre-analyze what other sources say. Perhaps this is why TikTok users, compared to other platforms, say they are unlikely to become “worn out” by the news they see. Someone has already done the hard work – they get it.
Source: Business Insider
Editor: Maria Georgakopoulou