CHAPTER 10 Y the Social Media Mania?
Charlie Caruso
There has been a fundamental shift in the way we communicate over the past five years. Though members of Y have largely generated this trend, members of all generations have embraced it.
The way I distinguish between a Y and a member of another generation is very simple: if you had a mobile phone in high school (and a Nokia brick still counts), then you're a Y. But if you had Facebook in high school, then you are a Z. My methods of classification might be questionable, but it seems these two social developments have carved out very different cohorts of youth.
Of course, Y also embraced social media — but we did so in our twenties, and without the worry of cyberbullying. Social media isn't just for Gen Y — it's a new tool that the whole world is using to communicate. Consider, however, that Mr Youth's report ‘Meet the Class of 2015’, researching the attitudes of 18 year olds, found that 76 per cent of Gen Y spends over an hour on Facebook every day.
Social media acts as a platform for Millennials to efficiently engage, share and participate in a conversation about the things that are relevant in our lives — anything from having a bad experience at a restaurant to what we think of Miley Cyrus's latest antics.
Gen Y has embraced social media because it ticks all our boxes: it's efficient, ...
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