Generation Z

What It's Like to Grow up in the Age of Likes, LOLs and Longing

The Washington Post

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781682308882
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Social Aspects in Computer Science
• Index: Technology & Engineering

An in-depth profile of the digital native generation from the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper.
 
For the generation after Millennials, technology has been the only way of life since birth. These children are the first group to have their formative moments chronicled on Facebook, to grow up surrounded by the ubiquity of smartphones, and most important, to navigate a social landscape ruled by the internet. With this lifestyle comes a host of issues that prior generations never dealt with, including cyberbullying, alienation from peers with greater access to technology, and an increasing vulnerability to online sexual predators.
 
This series of articles from the  Washington Post delves into the everyday lives of American kids and teenagers. With its exploration of the unique pressures and complications of living an online life (and most of life online), this collection is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of Generation Z.

13, right now

This is what it's like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing

Story by Jessica Contrera
Photos by Victoria Milko

She slides into the car, and even before she buckles her seat belt, her phone is alight in her hands. A 13-year-old girl after a day of eighth grade.

She says hello. Her au pair asks, “Ready to go?”

She doesn’t respond, her thumb on Instagram. A Barbara Walters meme is on the screen. She scrolls, and another meme appears. Then another meme, and she closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed. There’s a story about Florida Gov. Rick Scott, which she scrolls past to get to a story about Janet Jackson, then “28 Things You’ll Understand If You’re Both British and American.” She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They’re home. Twelve minutes have passed.

Katherine Pommerening in the front seat of her family’s station wagon. Katherine was born in 2002, meaning she is a member of what’s being called Generation Z.

Katherine Pommerening’s iPhone is the place where all of her friends are always hanging out. So it’s the place where she is, too. She’s on it after it rings to wake her up in the mornings. She’s on it at school, when she can sneak it. She’s on it while her 8-year-old sister, Lila, is building crafts out of beads. She sets it down to play basketball, to skateboard, to watch PG-13 comedies and sometimes to eat dinner, but when she picks it back up, she might have 64 unread messages.

Now she’s on it in the living room of her big house in McLean, Va., while she explains what it’s like to be a 13-year-old today.

“Over 100 likes is good, for me. And comments. You just comment to make a joke or tag someone.”

The best thing is the little notification box, which means someone liked, tagged or followed her on Instagram. She has 604 followers. There are only 25 photos on her page because she deletes most of what she posts. The ones that don’t get enough likes, don’t have good enough lighting or don’t show the coolest moments in her life must be deleted.

“I decide the pictures that look good,” she says. “Ones with my friends, ones that are a really nice-looking picture.”

Somewhere, maybe at this very moment, neurologists are trying to figure out what all this screen time is doing to the still-forming brains of people Katherine’s age, members of what’s known as Generation Z. Educators are trying to teach them that not all answers are Googleable. Counselors are prying them out of Internet addictions. Parents are trying to catch up by friending their kids on Facebook. (P.S. Facebook is obsolete.) Sociologists, advertisers, stock market analysts – everyone wants to know what happens when the generation born glued to screens has to look up and interact with the world.

Katherine at her house, playing Xbox (top left), in the kitchen with her au pair Rachel and 8-year-old sister, Lila, (top right) and outside with her skateboard (bottom.) Katherine got her first phone in the fifth grade.

Right now, Katherine is still looking down.

“See this girl,” she says, “she gets so many likes on her pictures because she’s posted over nine pictures saying, ‘Like all my pictures for a tbh, comment when done.’ So everyone will like her pictures, and she’ll just give them a simple tbh.”

A tbh is a compliment. It stands for “to be heard” or “to be honest.”

Katherine tosses her long brown hair behind her shoulder and ignores her black lab, Lucy, who is barking to be let out.

“It kind of, almost, promotes you as a good person. If someone says, ‘tbh you’re nice and pretty,’ that kind of, like, validates you in the comments. Then people can look at it and say ‘Oh, she’s nice and pretty.’ ”

Tbh, Katherine is both nice and pretty. She has the cheeks of a middle schooler and the vocabulary of a high schooler. She has light brown eyes, which she only paints with makeup for dances, where there are boys from other schools. Her family is wealthier than most and has seen more sorrow. She is 5-foot-1 but will have a growth spurt soon, or so said her dad, Dave, in a very awkward talk he had with her about puberty even after she told him, “Please, don’t.” She is not sure how Converse shoes became cool, but it’s what happened, so she is almost always wearing them. Black leggings, too, except at her private school, where she has to wear uncomfortable dress pants.

School is where she thrives: She is beloved by her teachers, will soon star as young Simba in the eighth-grade performance of “The Lion King” musical, and gets straight A’s. Her school doesn’t offer a math course challenging enough for her, so she takes honors algebra online through Johns Hopkins University.

Now she’s on her own page, checking the comments beneath a photo of her friend Aisha, which she posted for Aisha’s birthday.

“Happy birthday posts are a pretty big deal,” she says. “It really shows who cares enough to put you on their page.”

Katherine is the point guard on her basketball team.

Rachel, Katherine’s au pair, comes into the room and tells her it’s time to get ready for basketball practice. Katherine nods, scrolling a few more times, her thumb like a high-speed pendulum. She watches Vines — six-second video clips — of NCAA basketball games while climbing the stairs to her room, which is painted cobalt blue. Blue is her favorite color. She describes most of her favorite things using “we,” meaning they are approved by both she and her friends: Jennifer Lawrence, Gigi Hadid, Sprite, quesadillas from Chipotle filled only with cheese.

Her floor is a tangle of clothes, and her bed is a tangle of cords. One for her phone, one for an iPod, one for her school laptop, and one for the laptop that used to belong to her mom, Alicia.

A pink blanket with Alicia’s name on it lies across her comforter. A black and white photo of her mom on her wedding day sits on her desk. In a frame on her nightstand, handprint art they made together one Mother’s Day. Now, Katherine’s handprints are almost as big as her mom’s were.

The breast cancer appeared right after Katherine was born. It went away, then came back when Katherine was in third grade. In fifth grade, Alicia and Dave bought Katherine a cellphone, in case things took a turn. She was one of the first in her class to own one.

She signed up for Snapchat and Instagram, Twitter and VSCO. She stopped inviting friends to the house, because her mom was there, sick.

Last year, on a cloudy Thursday in March, Alicia died. Katherine won’t talk about it, today or any day. Not talking about it means she doesn’t need to think about it, except when the house is quiet and the thinking just seeps in. She doesn’t tell her friends how it feels. When she’s asked about it, she crumples. Her shoulders hunch, her eyes well, but no tears fall on her cheeks. Please, she would say if she were reading this, go back to talking about her phone.

A photo of Katherine and her mom, Alicia, that sits in the Pommerenings’ living room. Alicia died after a long battle with breast cancer in March 2015, when Katherine was in seventh grade.

Lila can’t find her tap shoes, Rachel is sick, the dogs are waiting for breakfast, and Katherine is heading straight to the garage.

“Don’t you think you should eat something?” her dad asks, rummaging through a cabinet. “A breakfast bar?”

Katherine’s arms are crossed with her pastel pink phone case in her hand.

“I feel like you should eat something before —”

“I’m fine,” she says.

Lila comes down the stairs, wearing shorts and complaining she’s cold.

“It’s 45 degrees out,” her dad tells he...

Table of contents

• Generation Z
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 13, right now
• Who are these kids?
• And everyone saw it.
• ‘They call it bunny hunting’
• The Disconnected
• ‘What’s a tbh?’
• More from The Washington Post…
• Connect with Diversion Books