
This is what it's like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing - zavulon
https://www.washingtonpost.com/g00//sf/style/wp/2016/05/25/2016/05/25/13-right-now-this-is-what-its-like-to-grow-up-in-the-age-of-likes-lols-and-longing/
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coffeevradar
This article is quite touching, but so much of it is about one girl processing
her grief for her mother. I was left wondering what sorts of things she would
have used to occupy her time if she had been born in a different era and
experienced the same loss.

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TheLilHipster
Insightful enough, but not all too surprising.

I'd be really interested in how these internet-centric lifestyles develop
later on. I've always thought Gen Z has the potential to be the most
intelligent generation alive simply due to the infinite access and more
advanced aggregation of information. But does this come at the cost of
dysfunction due to the bombardment of consumerism, narcissism and emotional
isolation?

The feeling I get from this story is the daughter is very involved, nearly
consumed by the game of social media. Does the infinite access to information
provide them the wisdom they need to mature past it? or will it continue to
consume them?

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sievebrain
Being glued to a phone makes it more visible and potentially harder to escape,
but I wonder if it really changes much.

Girls have always treated high school as a popularity contest far more than
boys. If anything, I suspect systematising it might even help, as it would
replace "I am afraid that I am not really cool enough" with "I can see that
I'm not and I have a plan to fix it". The latter might _seem_ scary, but is it
worse than silent angst and worrying? At least this girl is taking charge of
her own popularity and learning how to shape her appearance from her peers,
which in the absence of a mother might be the next best way to learn. I guess
her dad isn't going to teach her much about female beauty techniques.

When I was a teenager I spent nearly all my free time on the computer, and
when we got it, on the internet. It was only the fact that it tied up the
phone line (and endless amounts of homework) that stopped me using it all the
time. And of course my mother worried. She had very little visibility into
what I was doing, it seemed to consume infinite amounts of time, and it was
nothing like what kids in her day did. Plus back then there was a lot of
fearmongering in the press about the (then new) internet.

You know what? I turned out fine. Nowadays she looks back on that period and
realises she worried herself for nothing, heck she says she's actually
embarrassed to tell other parents what her children are getting up to because
it sounds like boasting.

The reason I spent so much time on the computer was simply that I lived in a
very wet and rainy place far from parks, so playing outside wasn't really
feasible, most of my friends lived too far away to just drop in on, and - the
biggest reason - no matter how fondly adults today may remember them,
traditional childs play activities were _boring_. There's only so much time
you can spend on football even if you're sports mad.

In contrast the world of the computer had an almost limitless list of things
to do, and many of them were very constructive.

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sbardle
Generation Z? That's a new one to me. Does this mean the apocalypse is just
around the corner, or do we go back to Generation A?

The Like button has a strange, understated power, that's for sure.

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gumby
> Generation Z? That's a new one to me. Does this mean the apocalypse is just
> around the corner, or do we go back to Generation A?

Perhaps this book would help answer your question:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Beyond_Zebra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Beyond_Zebra)!

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doctorshady
I'm going to have my Bill Gates moment here, and say I seriously hope this
turns out to be a fad. Doesn't seem healthy to depend on such a small
concentration of companies for everything. Or a single device for that matter.

