BBC Radio 4 - Radio 4 in Four - Generation Z: we taught ourselves how to navigate a digital world (2024)

The children born around the turn of the millennium came into a digital world and had to find out for themselves how to navigate it.

In Generation Z and the Art of Self-Maintenance, six wise school-leavers from Huddersfield talk us through their digital adolescence – from friendship to flirting, to memes and messaging – and share the lessons they had to learn along the way.

Today, we all live with social media at our fingertips. But not all of us were formed by it. Simone and her friends recognise that they are unique in that they grew up and “evolved” as the world made the transition from flip-up mobiles to the smart phone age.

“Some adults like to call us Generation Z,” says Simone. “You can call us what you like but we know what makes us different to others. When we became teenagers, the online world was growing so fast the adults couldn’t keep up. We had no choice but to teach ourselves.”

They couldn’t ask the adults around them for advice or guidance. “Our parents are starting to get social media now, but when we just started high school, when we were trying to work out who we were, we had to navigate that ourselves.” They had to learn from their mistakes as they made them, because they didn’t know what those mistakes were at the time. It has shaped them as people and shaped the way they learn.

When she was thirteen, Simone discovered Helena Bonham Carter through the Harry Potter films. She was drawn to her individuality.

“When I first became inspired by her, I joined Instagram,” says Simone. This was when she found accounts by other people who were inspired by her too – a whole new online experience. “It’s like you can find people who think exactly the same,” says Simone. “Joining Instagram was like joining a universe of fandoms. It was like tumbling down the rabbit hole.”

After finding this community, she made her own account and many online friendships. Although these online connections were unique in some ways, they were also the same as any other friendship. “Obviously you can’t spend time with them physically,” says Simone, but “you’ve got someone to confide in, you can speak your mind to them, I think you can connect mentally in the same way and the friendship does blossom.”

The other fans she met online were predominantly between 14 and 16 years old: young people perhaps looking for community because, in their real lives, they felt slightly on the outside. Social media gave Simone and the people she met a new kind of freedom. “There was no one who knew you apart from how you wanted to portray yourself,” she says.

Simone is mixed-race, which sometimes made growing up in Yorkshire a challenge.

There wasn’t racism, in her view, but there could be a lack of understanding. For instance, everyone was always fascinated by her afro hair. But online, nationality, ethnicity and race all disappeared. “No one could see my hair,” says Simone. “No one could reach out and ask me why it’s oily!” Suddenly, being mixed-race in a predominantly white town wasn’t an issue.

Growing up in Generation Z was about learning how to make friends online, but there were also challenges when it came to navigating face-to-face friendships too.

Snapchat had an algorithm which created a person’s “best friends” list based on who they had been chatting to the most within the app. This created arguments and tensions amongst groups. What if someone’s boyfriend had another girl in his best friends list? “Friendships could be made or broken, just over social media,” says Tina.

It wasn’t always easy to work out whether you had annoyed a friend. Should their message be interpreted in one way or another? And they couldn’t rely on adults to give them the advice they needed. “It was tricky to talk to your parents,” says Simone. “If there was a problem in the playground your mum knew how to deal with it. But online it was new for both of you.”

Cyber bullying was rife. People would take videos of each other and post them online. Alice remembers a group of girls looking at a picture of her and her friends on Instagram, then zooming in on her face and laughing.

In Year 7 or 8, Tina was pulled into her Head of Year’s office and accused of sending nasty messages to one of her good friends via Blackberry Messenger. But she hadn’t been on BBM for weeks. “I really wanted to prove that it wasn’t me but all evidence showed that it was,” says Tina. “Somebody had replicated my BBM profile.”

Eventually, her mum was able to verify that it wasn’t her and she was let off the hook but, even though she was innocent, the friendship in question faltered and they drifted apart. The experience has stayed with her: “To this day, still don’t know who did it. Still don’t know what the reasons or the motives were.”

Before, if you were interested in someone you asked for their number. “Now, it’s ‘can I add you on Snapchat?’” says Simone.

For Generation Z, starting a relationship with someone starts online.

First comes online flirting and following each other on social media. The “casual like” of one of their posts that is far enough back that they know you’ve looked through their account. Next comes the stage where you talk online, and this can be hard to navigate. A delay between replies can result in panic and insecurity.

When she was 15, Simone started an online relationship with a girl in Germany who she met through the fandom community. They would go to sleep on a FaceTime call so they would feel like they were together. And Simone’s friends wanted to get to know her girlfriend too so they would do group chats en masse.

Ultimately, however, the relationship became too intense and they broke up. They drifted apart because of who they were, says Simone, but also because the online element became too much: “I felt like I could never turn my phone off.”

Now, she doesn’t talk to people online like she used to. She doesn’t want to get carried away and tries to live more in the moment. But she’s sure about one thing: “Love is love and that applies online as well.”