Gen Z refuses to be locked in
How teens invent workarounds against the worst parts of centralized tech
Editor’s note: Names of interviewees have been changed.
After creating an elaborate but ultimately unsuccessful slide presentation to convince her parents that she would be a responsible user of Snapchat, 14-year-old Arwen in Virginia recently decided she no longer really cared about being on the platform. She had found a mix of other apps to fulfill her needs: Apple iMessage and FaceTime to stay connected to her close friends, TikTok to enjoy cultural content (“enemies to lovers” tropes are her favorite), and YouTube to learn to play guitar. She realized, she told me, that it’s better to delay creating a more public presence on the internet.
Part of the work of being a young person in 2021 means making daily decisions about how to engage on various platforms—and at times, actively messing with the larger structural forces of an industry that desperately wants to expand its foothold in their lives. From Google’s pervasive presence in schools and entertainment, Amazon’s foothold in e-commerce and cloud computing, to Facebook’s race to be the next WeChat, Big Tech’s push to acquire and consolidate data, and eyeballs, and pocketbooks has never been stronger. And at no time is the pressure and expectation to be extremely online more intense than during adolescence. Pandemic-related lockdowns have only amplified that reality, and it doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.
Wanting to understand how young people are navigating social media amid Big Tech’s ongoing digital land grab, I reached out to a handful of teens from across the United States to talk over the last few weeks of summer. With my colleagues Monica Bulger and Kiley Sobel, I also conducted online focus group interviews with fifty tweens and teens as part of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s By/With/For Youth Project last fall. Across all of these conversations, the themes of decentralization, multiplicity, and digital diversity kept reappearing in the way youth described their preferred ways of socializing online. Far from accepting the kind of centralized vision of interaction that would be required to sustain the “metaverse” (the tech futurist fixation of the moment), youth are busy segmenting and compartmentalizing their social engagement across different platforms according to their own needs. They recognize both their vulnerability to an industry determined to monetize them, and their power to push back.
As with many cycles of technology, these practices aren’t entirely new; when I was studying youth and technology at the Pew Research Center, we wrote about the fluid nature of teens’ online identities and social lives as early as 2001. At the time, our team found that teens were leveraging the as-of-then entirely new affordances of digital media to experiment with multiple personas and layers of privacy and publicity in how they socialized online. It’s hard to overstate how radical this was at that moment; in the pre-internet world, those who assumed alternate identities or pseudonyms were seen as suspicious. But much of the exuberance for the freedoms of the early web was rooted in the ability to “try on” different identities. For the teens we interviewed, simply maintaining multiple email and instant messaging accounts was an early form of social decentralization that gave them the ability to be someone else—or many someone elses—online.
By 2013, our research at Pew found a new kind of fragmentation and decentralization happening; after several years of rapid adoption and fervent engagement by youth, many teens we spoke with were expressing waning enthusiasm for Facebook. They disliked the increasing number of adults on the site, got annoyed when their Facebook friends were sharing inane details, and were drained by the “drama” that they described as happening frequently on the site. The stress of needing to manage a more public reputation on Facebook also contributed to their lack of enthusiasm about sharing content. Nevertheless, even as Instagram and Snapchat became preferred platforms for youth, teens felt they still needed to maintain some presence on Facebook in order to keep up with news and updates from their other networks.
The practices of today’s youth are potentially more seismic. Contrary to the goals of Big Tech’s investments, young people are shifting their time, content, and data away from mainstream social apps to a much more fragmented and less public kaleidoscope of communications and communities. More than previous generations, young people are now explicitly and thoughtfully controlling their boundaries of in-groups and out-groups.
In some cases, they’re using multiple accounts (variously referred to as Finstas, burner accounts, and spam accounts, etc.). For their strong ties, they are largely socializing through interactions where there’s some shared trust framework and they can be at least partially shielded from whatever their current “public” is—whether that’s everyone at school, their extended family, or church group. This is sometimes done through social media and messaging apps—but sometimes it’s easier just to hang out on FaceTime for hours on end and avoid social media altogether.
Molly, a 17-year-old who lives in San Antonio, Texas told me the ways in which she and her friends use Instagram and Snapchat differently depending on their goals and moods. She described crafting an Instagram post as a “much more detailed” process, and that she primarily uses Instagram when she wants to see what others have posted or when she wants to make a statement. Snapchat, on the other hand, was where she communicated with her tight circle of friends and felt more free to do so—until recently, when she began to feel she “hasn’t really seen a purpose” in spending all of that time on her phone and would rather “be in the moment.”
Kyle, a 16-year-old from New York, described the way he moves in and out of different platforms depending on who among his friends is using a given app. He sees certain rhythms across different apps during the school year versus the summer, when I spoke to him. “Our group chat for friends is on Snapchat. During the school year … people would use it for staying in touch during the day, but people aren’t really using it now.” Recently, he’s shifted the way he uses social media because he knows that college is on the horizon. He admitted to begrudgingly creating a Facebook profile because his older sister, who is already in college, said it would be a good way to show publicly that he’s involved in different clubs and sports. When I asked him about any trends he’d noticed, he mentioned the #MakeInstagramCasualAgain movement, which seeks to re-inject less filtered, less curated, and more lighthearted content into a platform where the pressure to post photos of gorgeous faces and places has taken the fun out of being social online.
They recognize both their vulnerability to an industry determined to monetize them, and their power to push back.
Some teens are opting to stay away from the pressures of posting altogether. Riley, a 16-year-old in Tampa, Florida, told me she has one Instagram account for following people from school and family, and another “private” account with 80 or 90 followers. She feels ambivalent about Snapchat: “I only got Snapchat because my friend has it. It’s like texting.” However, her favorite thing by far is just to “Facetime all day” with her best friends because they don’t go to the same school anymore. Otherwise, she spends a lot of time on TikTok, which she explained “is for entertainment, watching funny videos, but not really posting or talking.”
TikTok is especially fascinating as a site of youth experimentation with social media practices. As Data & Society researchers Ireti Akinrinade and Joan Mukogosi detailed in a recent essay for Points, young people creatively deploy “strategic knowledge” to challenge the dynamics of the platforms they inhabit and achieve a range of social and political goals. The authors cited a teen who curated a “spam account” to watch ultra-conservative TikToks, which allowed him to then publicly expose and disrupt a troubling trend where users who had tested positive for Covid-19 were intentionally going into public spaces to infect others.
Young people’s online behaviors shapeshift at a pace that’s perfectly appropriate for the rapid-fire evolution of adolescence, but wildly frenetic for anyone trying to understand where technology is headed. For instance, as scholar danah boyd noted in her book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, young people will go to extreme measures to achieve the level of privacy or publicity they desire on social media—preferences that can oscillate depending on the time of day, type of post or perceived audience. And this variation can radically alter the way these users appear to behave online, creating signals that are easily misinterpreted. One teen boyd interviewed who didn’t want to be visible to family members, but did want to communicate with friends, would delete her social media account altogether every night, only to reactivate it for brief periods to check in when she knew her family would be offline.
This youthful creativity can be a threat to centralized platforms, many of which depend on generating user bases with enough data coherence to be attractive to advertisers. As such, it’s inevitable that these companies will double down on lucrative industries like cross-device tracking, data brokers, and internet-connected devices to congeal young people’s diverse social lives into reconstituted data packages. It’s something that Deana, a 13-year-old from Rio Vista, California who calls herself “an aspiring activist,” already understands is happening. Though she depends on social media for learning about the issues she cares about, she understands the platforms are making money off of her engagement. “If the product is free, you are the product,” she said in one of our focus group conversations last fall.
The parents of these teens are already mired in a range of personal, financial and professional obligations that require relatively stable identities and leave them locked-in online. But members of Deana’s generation are likely to keep challenging the one-size-fits-all design of social media platforms. They are discovering their senses of selves—and in doing so, I believe, collectively laying the cultural groundwork for a more diversified social web: one that may genuinely put more power in people’s hands. If history is any guide, we should keep our eyes on the kids for signs of the next revolution. As Molly in Texas told me, “This is the age that [adults] have created. You get to evolve with it, why can’t we?” 🌳
Mary Madden is a veteran researcher, writer and nationally-recognized expert on privacy and technology, trends in social media use, and the impact of digital media on teens and parents. She is currently a Senior Fellow for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at the Sesame Workshop.
Design and photos by Josh Kramer.