How is Generation Alpha dealing with digital connectivity?

Maybe it was fear after listening to the phenomenal podcast Sold a Story, or recalling how many in my English class in secondary school were not confident readers, but I wanted to take some time to check in on younger Gen-Z.

The impetus for this was the realisation that soon Gen-Alpha births will end and that the youngest Zoomers are 14. It crashed over me, perhaps because it set in that I am an adult, having believed when I was a child it would feel very different.

I spoke with a friend, a high school teacher here in Canada who I — somewhat worriedly — questioned how the kids are these days. Can they even read, or are their brains fried from all the social media? Aren’t they all addicted to pink bubble gum-flavoured vapes?

And this teacher looked me square in the face and said, “The kids are alright.”

Aside from the fact that I fell into the same trap as the generations before me, I had it laid out to me that kids aren’t any different now than they were before. “They’re ditching social media or their phones entirely,” he said.

I laid out my reasons for believing the opposite, that the connectivity of social media has made everyone hyper-aware of the horrors of the world. Instead of debating with me, he just laid out the data.

In spite of the fact that I suck at spreadsheets, well-defined data has always comforted me; graphs and charts are like a roller coaster I can enjoy amid chaos. “Kids aren’t reading more or less, and [teenagers] don’t care about social media.”

“They use it as intended.”

Coupled with an increase in support from previous generations, the Boomers who remember winning, the post-2008 Gen-Xers, and the apathetic Millennials, Gen-Z might be aligned going forward.

On every topic I’ve talked about, that sort of generational solidarity will be important to addressing the problems the world faces. Artificial intelligence (AI) bringing about a new age of malinformation, climate change, rising wealth and gender inequality, and a genocide unfolding with most of the Global West supporting it — but perhaps, it won’t be so hard to build consensus.

The world was made smaller by the internet, and it is getting smaller every day. Justice and progress are being found beyond the institutions built in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and they are functioning as they should.