A fascinating Google study of how Generation Z consumes online news provides us an insight into how living online has altered the way humans think. Years of what is now termed memetic engineering, in social media feeds, has changed the way brains function, but it is possible that this process can be reversed.
Generation Z consists of people born after 1995 that are under 30 years of age. They came alive when the internet had already came to dominate society and matured when the cell phone succeeded into becoming an addictive device. They became teenagers as social media amplified that addiction.
A few years ago a series of studies came out showing that social media had a psychological toll on young people, causing depression and suicide, as they compared themselves to what they see in the feeds. Eating disorders proliferated. Studies showed that the more time people spend online the worse they feel.
As one article puts it: “A 2017 study of over half a million eighth through 12th graders found that the number exhibiting high levels of depressive symptoms increased by 33 percent between 2010 and 2015. In the same period, the suicide rate for girls in that age group increased by 65 percent.”
“Smartphones were introduced in 2007, and by 2015 fully 92 percent of teens and young adults owned a smartphone. The rise in depressive symptoms correlates with smartphone adoption during that period, even when matched year by year, observes the study’s lead author, San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge, PhD.”
For roughly two years such studies caused some outrage, serious investigative reporting, and talk of doing something in reaction. Congress held hearings. Here is a clip from one of them.
People like Mark Zuckerberg got shamed, but nothing happened and that story – and the worry – has now pretty much vanished.
The parents of Generation Z, I suppose decided that they themselves were too addicted to their phones and social media feeds to want to actually change anything, even if it all damaged their children, and likely themselves. If anything the apps and feeds have only gotten more addictive, with the rise in short-form video, Instagram, and TikTok.
The US government has said that TikTok is a national security threat and people just shrug, because they are too addicted to it to care.
There was a fear, too, too about “fake news” on the internet, that people wouldn’t be able to discern the difference between what was real and not real in their feeds. There was a real concern that Generation Z, in particular, would be vulnerable, as they had no experience of life before the internet, and almost none of them exist without it.
The Google study reveals, though, that something else has happened.
It found that Generation Z can discern the difference between what is fake, false, and the real.
But, it also found that they simply does not care about that.
They do not fact check.
Whereas older users, do, and sometimes express outrage over a fake story in their feed, Generation Z does not care.
It turns out that they look at their feeds and consume information differently than what was expected.
“Within a week of actual research, we just threw out the term information literacy,” said Yasmin Green, who was in charge of the study. They found that they are “not on a linear journey to evaluate the veracity of anything.” Instead, they’re engaged in what the researchers call “information sensibility,” defined as a “socially informed” practice that relies on “folk heuristics of credibility.”
In plain English, what they do is look at the headlines and then rush to read the comments to see how people react to them.
They look to see if the dominant reaction is in alignment with how they already feel about the story.
If they are in agreement with the majority reaction, they feel reassured, and then look down upon those reacting differently.
If they are in disagreement with that majority reaction, they may then decide to study the issue more, by looking for an expert online who will talk more about it, usually someone on Youtube, Tiktok, or some other social media site, or they will just scroll until they see a story or meme that agrees with them for a dose of reassurance.
As a Business Insider article, about this study put it, “Gen Zers approach most of their digital experience in what the researchers call ‘timepass’ mode, just looking to not be bored. If they want to answer a question or learn something new, they might turn to a search engine, but they’re acquiring new information mainly via their social feeds, which are algorithmically pruned to reflect what they care about and who they trust.”
I subscribe to several news industry publications and last year Pew did a study about how Generation Z gets its news. It advocated that news organizations focus on social media and predicted that short-form video would become the future of news. News outlets, even local news, would have to turn its reporters into social media influencers, was one argument made.
What is fascinating, and troubling, is how the Google Study reveals a dominate online mentality that is really focused on following a herd, instead of being focused on learning more information and the truth for the sake of it.
Before the internet, there was a time in which people worried about how television was impacting society and dumbing down the quality of information that people consume, in comparison to print and even radio.
Marshall McLuhan, the father of media studies, coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book Understanding the Media.
What the phrase means is that the form of the media should be seen as just as important as the content of its message.
As a Wikipedia entry puts it, “The main concept of McLuhan’s argument (later elaborated upon in The Medium Is the Massage) is that new technologies (such as alphabets, printing presses, and even speech) exert a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn, affects social organization: print technology changes our perceptual habits—”visual homogenizing of experience”—which in turn affects social interactions—”fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a…specialist outlook”. According to McLuhan, this advance of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism, and nationalism. For McLuhan, these trends all reverberate with print technology’s principle of “segmentation of actions and functions and principle of visual quantification.”
Think about the social media meme.
The meme is the declaration of a message visible to all of those seeing it.
You do not see a meme by yourself, but know that others, possibly tens of thousands, are also seeing it.
The meme by its very existence in the feed creates an us versus them dynamic.
Are you in support of the meme’s message or against it?
Memetic engineering is the application of memes to change the perceptions of the masses and the continual consumption of memes and social messages overtime locks the human brain into a style of thought. This is a serious business, with even the Pentagon running secret covert operations as experiments, using countries such as the Philippines as a playpen, to perfect their own processes in “information warfare.”
The Google study of Generation Z shows you this new reality.
We have seen the creation of a new mass man molded by groupthink and primed for an authoritarian order, what the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, 140 years ago, termed the “last man,” the passive nihilist, who seeks out and is content with constant amusement, but is incapable of self-actualization.
He causes no problems for big-brother, and is the perfect citizen as predicted by the character mogul Arthur Jenson in the movie 1976 Network, ruled over by their faceless global corporate rulers.
Television could not create the world of Arthur Jensen, but social media feeds did, some say.
Social media feeds are filled with drivel and trash that mold your mind into mush and cause you to waste your life away as you spend time looking at them.
One day you may wake up and realize how boring it actually is.
There is a big difference between reading published physical print works and social media feeds.
The social media feed is “instant.”
Something posted is constantly being displaced by a new post, so the feed has the appearance of being real time reality.
The “news cycle” has been sped up.
When you read a physical print work, privately, you are reading something that was published in the past.
This puts the reader in a position of judgement, all by themselves, over what they are reading.
To do that they have to engage in rational thought and can keep their thoughts to themself.
They come out of that process with more knowledge, or understanding, over the topic of what they read about.
Even if the work is a work of fiction they can learn emotionally from the story that they are reading.
Spending time reading published physical works leads one to have an open mind, eager to learn, bettering oneself and growing, while the social media feed is all a messaging of us versus them, causing one to feel stressed, anxious, but no choice but to scroll faster for more to get more stimulation, whether negative or positive, from the feed.
Or one can turn to it off and walkaway from it…and the longer one does that the better…
The impact that memetic engineering has had on your brain can be reversed by turning your social media feeds off.
Elon is wrong, those that own the social media feeds and “control the memes” do not rule the universe, much less the world, because only God does that.
What is more the feeds may be here today, but they are only fifteen years old, and are not going to exist forever. There was a time when people used telegrams to send messages to one another.
No one does that anymore.
Few still use typewriters too.
-Mike
