“It made me feel really cool,” Poisson says of using the app. “When I traveled somewhere like New York City, I always had to post a picture of the window on the plane.” While millennials also grew up with social media, they did not have 24/7 access to them on their phones as children, and the platforms that were popular in the early 2000s (Bebo, MySpace, MSN and AIM) are almost disappeared and takes with it frightening memories. Snapchat, on the other hand, easily feeds users with their memories from previous years.
“I think we look back and think, ‘Who allowed us to post these things?'” Says Poisson. “We also just laugh at ourselves because the internet has changed so much and things that were once normal to post are now considered ‘crooked’.”
Mille Glue, a 19-year-old from Liverpool, England, cringes as she looks back on the conspicuous consumption of her childhood. In a Snap she recently shared on TikTok, a 13-year-old Glue had presented her Christmas presents, including a laptop, advanced makeup and banknotes for £ 10 and £ 20.
“I’m definitely more confident now and would not need to flash my Christmas money,” says Glue; she now thinks the record was “insensitive and privileged.” Looking back on her Snaps has made Glue “nostalgic and sad for my younger self”; she admits she was “attention seeking” as a young person online and would create posts targeting friends who made her sad.
“I was certainly very easily influenced by my peers,” Glue says. If friends would post pictures of themselves out eating, she would too. She found it strange to present her gifts, but “took it with her” because it “was just something that everyone used to post.” Both she and Lewington say they wanted to appear “adult” when using Snapchat.
There is, of course, a darker side. Another TikTok trend people watch videos with the caption “unlimited internet access as a child” before referring to the disturbing things they saw online. “There were definitely things that I saw involuntarily on the internet that I probably shouldn’t have,” Poisson says. On YouTube, which prefers deeper analysis, Gen Z creators have made videos such asImplications of growing up with the Internet on Gen Z“, which offers discussions on Internet addiction, online sensationalism and fraud syndromes.
As they enter adulthood, Generation Z is able to assess the strange ways the Internet made them act – from decanting Dr Pepper to bragging about bedtime. But Glue says it’s kids today she cares about. “I think kids are being exposed to social media in a way that is more intense than I was,” she says. “I think it just ruins young teenagers’ outlook on life because they do not live in the moment and are more bothered by posting their photo dump on Instagram. It must be so exhausting and bad for their self-esteem because they have only ever compared their lives to people on social media, which is a structured narrative. ” Who knows in 10 years’ time how these kids – or for that matter Lewington, Poisson and Glue – will reflect?