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I think Zoomers need a generational divide in their generation, tbh. In my experience, older Zoomers are intelligent, capable, motivated, and largely leftist. For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide, and I can't point to any stats or evidence to support this belief, but anecdotally I have noticed this trend within my own life and spheres of influence.
For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide,
The online manosphere/tradtube spent the past 10-15 years raising these kids while their parents fucked off. That's what happened. These are the kids who made people like Andrew Tate famous, and made Joe Rogan way more relevant than he has any right to be. It's a great lesson in why people need to pay more attention to the media that their children consume.
That, and it's unsurprisingly connect to the piewdiepie fascist pipeline thing, Helldivers popular as fuck, Warhammer 40K having a renessaince, I see plenty of shorts about how boys want to die a heroic death, that's a fucking staple of fascism
This is such a good video on this stuff, how young kids get sucked into fascism layer by layer https://youtu.be/pnmRYRRDbuw
Most of the reasonably intelligent people playing Helldivers know full well that it is satire with a side of sick sarcasm.
If anything it’s antifascist indoctrination on a grand scale.
I think a lot of people meme too hard and you end up with a the_Donald situation where all of a sudden the people agreeing with your jokes aren't aware you're joking. I have seen multiple right wing review channels unironically praise the helldivers government.
I'M DOING MY PART!!!
lol no hope for zombie bootlickers I guess
Reasonably intelligent is already the minority
Yeah Pewdiepie was an entry point for kids. There were a ton of them back in the early 00s that did video games and other seemingly innocuous stuff on YouTube, but would slow-drip the racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry, while promoting the "heroic death" trope. I have two nephews who loved those TY channels, and luckily my brother caught on real quick to their game and made some changes. Now I have two full grown Leftist nephews.
I agree with this, but what made this different then our generation or early zoomers? I was raised online as a house with an internet-connected home PC in the early-to-mid 90s with two parents who worked until night; there were grifters and proto-manosphere groups then and I'm sure moreso for the early zoomers, so I have to assume there was either some change in the methodology behind the delivery in these messages or, more likely, some change in the parental oversight, but I can't identify exactly when or what
I think perhaps in tandem with education - parental or institutional - getting even worse/changing from what you or I might be used to. The shift from search to algorithm as the primary way to interact with the Internet is also a significant factor, the Internet might've changed significantly before I was really there, but it certainly changed 2008-2016 mostly in that shift from search to platform/algorithm.
And early zoomers might've started their online existence just around the start of that transition while late zoomers, basically only know the Plattform/App/Algorithm world we have today.
If you were to be really cynical about it : The powers at be started losing the control over the messaging specifically to the online world, and managed to grapple it back starting in the mid 2000s just as the size/power of the space became significant. Zoomers might be here or there depending on how and when their first online experiences played out.
I'm just on the very earliest of zoomers, and my cohort largely got hit with 2008 as we were just starting to grapple with politics, and with 2016 right around graduating high school. For me Search was the Internet starting point, Wiki, YT and forums all in service to my curiosity and also there for my entertainment/ placating.
perhaps for someone a bit later it's all just entertainment, no problem solving, no strange sub subculture, just whatever you desire to see or listen to or read imidiately there, without you even needing to think about it, so accurately getting your attention that it's perhaps more attractive than thinking, or making a decision.
The bad habit is there for me too, I think some younger people might not be able to even recognize it as such, maybe for them that's just how the world works.
Tik Tok
Even with millennials (1981 to 1996) there is a big difference when you where born.
If you are an early millennial you grew up with MS-DOS, so you had to learn the terminal to get anything done. You probably had your first smartphone after you where 25.
If you are a late millennial you grew up with Windows XP and probably had a smartphone as a teen.
Circa 1990 didn't get smartphones as teens. The iPhone launched on only AT&T in the US in 2007. We were all locked into 2 year contracts back then with LG Envys and Motorola Razrs.
Of course, it just seems to me like there's a more distinct mid-generation cultural shift rather than just technological in comparison to our generation, and I am curious about potential catalysts. But again, I can only speak from my experience and personal exposure, so there is the possibility of locality specificity as well as other variables, so everyone remember I am just a layman and weigh my experience anecdotally rather than definitively.
Smartphones came a little later. Early adulthood for most.
That sounds like gen alpha more than late zoomer. Perhaps they are simply too close in time to gen alpha.
That has not been my experience, no. I am speaking younger adults, not teenagers; I don't really have many interactions with teenagers or children these days so I don't have enough experience with alphas to have really any sort of opinion on them. As I understand it, Gen A starts after 2010, so any adult today would still be a Zoomer. Granted of course that "generations" are a loosely-defined concept so the years they are defined as may vary, but it is my understanding that the typical understanding of Zoomer goes as far as 2010 at least.
Boomers 1945-1960
Gen X 1960-1980
Millennials 1980-2000
Zoomers 2000-2020
Gen alpha 2020-2040If we're going to have a made up system with no rules, it might as well be well ordered.
Convenient as that potentially would be, that does not seem to be the popular understanding, and I see no reason not to use to the conventional understanding in a case where stubbornness is unlikely to shift said understanding.
Hopefully unnecessarily preemptive "if you don't like Wikipedia" invitation to websearch using the engine of your choice and observe the general response without hunting for a cherry-pickable example which defines them as such.edit: i noticed you were downvoted and feel compelled to mention that I did not downvote you; it's weird to downvote people for normal conversation.
15 year generations don't really make sense though, the whole concept of a generation is that they're the previous generation's kids.
I don't disagree, but unfortunately nobody granted me authority on the general consensus on this one. I will say though that lineagial generations feel like only one possible definition, and cultural generations defined by common cultural experience (as is the case we're discussing) feel like they have some validity for me as well.
That is not at all the case in this context.
As an old zoomer I've observed a sharp difference between 2001 zoomers and 2004 zoomers far beyond a simple 3 year maturity difference. Its jarring.
COVID happened. Splitting you right down the line as boz Skaggs says
I'm sure this had profound impact, but frankly we all lived through it so I find it hard to accept as the sole or majority-dominant reason alone, personally.
It’s not that we all experienced it but what stage of mental development we were at when we experienced it.
Not everyone experiences a shared experience the same way.
That's fair. This may be it then; as somebody who sort of "speed ran" childhood due to my circumstances it might just be hard for me to understand and relate to the normal developmental cycle and the impact of such things during it. Thanks for the perspective, cheers.
I was never a "main friend" in any of the groups I interacted with. I hung out with a lot of people on a very shallow level. When covid hit I stopped talking to all of them. it was nearly a year of me only seeing my parents and sibling because a family member is immunocompromised. I still struggle to make real connections after that and I was at the end of highschool. If that had hit in middleschool when I was still taking "cool" seeming peoples sord as gossiple I have known idea what it would have done to me.