Authors Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, & Linda Woodhead chat with Kat Tenbarge about their new book "Gen Z Explained" -- the product of a CASBS project -- which explores the values, perceptions, motivations, and habits of the generation that has never known a world without the internet.
"Gen Z Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age"
CASBS
CASBS project: Understanding the iGeneration
Social Science for a World in Crisis
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. Today on Human Centered. A conversation about Generation Z. Born after the mid-1990s, Gen Z has never known a world without the internet. And now, along with the rest of us, they confront strained or broken political and social institutions, most of which are the creations of industrial-era values that have been disrupted by profound technological changes. In the face of these digital transformations, which of our values and behaviors are worth sustaining and which may need reimagining. What are work and family in the 21st century? What does privacy mean when virtually everything about us is accessible online? And how do we situate ourselves to a never-ending stream of information? While they may have confounded many of their elders who dismiss them as youthfully naive, Gen Zers have grown up swimming in these digital trends, so perhaps they may have something worthwhile to say about such questions. In their new book, Gen Z Explained, today's panelists investigate the values, perceptions, motivations, and habits of this diverse generation. And importantly, they let Gen Zers speak for themselves. So let's listen in as they explore what Gen Z can teach us about the art of living in a digital age.
Kat Tenbarge: Welcome, everybody. My name is Kat Tembarch. I'm the moderator of today's event, and I'm 24 years old. Depending on who you ask, that's quite young and also it's kind of old. I was born in 1997, which makes me one of the oldest Gen Zers on the cusp between millennial and post-millennial. I can remember using VHS players and rewinding cassette tapes as a young child, but now I see my own baby cousins using iPads before they can even walk and talk. My age is particularly pertinent to today's event, which is the 19th episode of this webcast series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. Today, we'll be discussing my generation, the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. I'm honored to moderate this event for the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, which is possible thanks to the partners for this episode. I want to acknowledge the Knight Foundation, the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford, and the Social Media Lab at Stanford. Beyond being 24, I'm also a technology and culture reporter for NBC News in New York City. I'm Zooming in from Brooklyn today. You've already heard about our speakers from the event promo, which we'll link in the chat box along with resources for today's episode. I'll quickly introduce the co-authors of Gen Z Explained, the fascinating book about life in our digital age. Roberta Katz is a senior research scholar in anthropology at CASBS and was general counsel at Netscape. Sarah Gilvey is a senior research fellow in linguistics at the University of Oxford, and she was a 2017 CASBS fellow. Jane Shaw is a professor in the history of religion at the University of Oxford, as well as a former CASBS research affiliate. Linda Woodhead is the F.D. Morris Professor in Moral and Social Theology at King's College London. Before I let Roberta introduce the motivations behind the generational study of Generation Z, I'll let our attendees know that you can submit questions for our Q&A using Zoom's built-in Q&A feature. Please keep these questions concise and on topic. We may not be able to answer every question, but we will read all of them. Roberta, as you describe in the book, Gen Z culture is contradictory in nature and oftentimes features fleeting trends such as slang and memes, while also having long-lasting cultural impact such as digital democracy that allows allows anyone with a smartphone to have the potential to go viral. Would you say that Gen Z is fundamentally different from previous generations? And if so, is that part of the motivation to conduct this generational study?
Roberta Katz: Thanks, Kat. It is—the word fundamental is interesting there. I think every generation is partly defined by experiences that they have as a cohort growing up. So for Gen Z, the defining experience has been living in a vast vastly networked world. And what we have all experienced, young and old, in the last 25 years is this just immense speed, scale, and scope of what we deal with. Well, for the young people growing up, the Gen Zers, you and your friends, this was all you knew.
Kat Tenbarge: Yeah.
Roberta Katz: And so that has created some different behaviors, some different outlooks. And for the four of us, we came together as friends. We were having dinner one night and we started sharing anecdotes about the students that we were teaching and advising. And it became clear to us that something was quite different in the attitudes of these students. And we couldn't put our finger on exactly what it was. And because we came from four different disciplines, we said, you know, wouldn't it be interesting to bring our four disciplines together to, to, to try to figure out what is different. We didn't know what was different. And, um, and so we had the germ of an idea and it blossomed into a, a study that the Knight Foundation funded that CASBS sponsored, and then that has resulted in this book.
Kat Tenbarge: I think that's great, and I feel even though I am both a member of this generation and someone whose role as a reporter involves studying this generation at large, I definitely sense that there is something completely unique about the technology that is accessible now versus just at the turn of the century as I was born, because I do recall that significant shift in going from accessing the internet as something infrequent to being a part of natural life and just every daily part of your life involves the online world somehow. So I just feel as though this book really explored such a breadth of, possibilities that this generation has versus older generations. And from there, in terms of the way that you conducted this research and the pool of Gen Zers that were surveyed, I wanted to pose this question to the group at large and ask, you know, the demographic of the pool of Gen Zers that you looked at compared to what can be extrapolated with Gen Zers who may not go to college or pursue higher education. What do you view as sort of the ability to extrapolate that data.
Linda Woodhead: I mean, I'll deal with that, but, and also just to add on that generational discussion, we did find once we started the survey that another aspect of being a generation is that people have got a self-consciousness and will talk as a representative of that generation. And we did find that happening and also a very clear sense of we're different from millennials and we're different from our younger brothers and sisters as well. So, I mean, people often object to generational studies. Well, if you look at surveys, there's actually a lot of continuity. Of course there is, but having that self-conscious sense is really important as well, and we found that quite strongly. Your question about the study, we did a lot of interviews with people on college campuses, and we got a balance of campuses. We had a campus in the UK, and we had a couple of campuses different sorts of institutions in the US. But we also wanted to check out how— of course, those aren't representative samples, so we wanted to check out how representative those findings were. And we did surveys. We worked with YouGov, who are an online polling company. They constructed representative samples of Gen Zers, that age group, in both the UK and the US. And that was the whole age cohorts. So not just college-educated, not college-educated as well, so that we could look and see what we were finding on campuses, whether that was representative of the generation more widely, and particularly those who didn't go to higher college level. I mean, surprisingly, we did, we actually did the survey questions towards later on in the study deliberately so that we could test out what we were finding in the ethnographic and interview work. And it was useful for that. Surprise— one surprising thing was it was much less difference between the UK and the US than we would have guessed. And also that there was less difference on the big attitudinal questions we asked between the college and non-college educated than we would have guessed. We don't know why, maybe that is the influence of the internet being a common denominator between them, not sure. And then final point, and Sarah can say more, is that we also pushed the representative nature of the study further by Sarah, as a linguist, building a huge body of data that was scraped from social media sites that we found to be the most commonly used by that. And she can tell us a little bit about that.
Sarah Ogilvie: Yeah, that was another way for us to sort of gauge people outside of universities and outside of our survey of interviewees. So what we did there, it was really based on the idea that language is the key to culture. So if we wanted to try and describe and, and access Gen Z culture, how could we do that via their language? So to do that, what we did is I teamed up with colleagues at the Natural Language Processing Lab at Stanford and with another colleague, Robert Fromont, at the University of Canterbury. And we wrote algorithms that went out onto different social media platforms and extracted the written data of people within the 16 to 25 age group. And we did that for gaming. So we took it from Twitch. We also went to 4chan, which is really known as like the asshole of the internet. 'Cause it's got all this really colorful, fantastic language there. And it's where all the trolls and sort of hackers hang out. We also scraped from Reddit and from Twitter. And we also investigated memes and took several hundred memes and also went to YouTube and timeline transcribed videos as well. So that gave us a really great opportunity to compare what we were finding in the language and the culture of our interviewees against the much broader population, and that corpus and collection of language equated to 70 million words. So it's a, it's a really good sample.
Kat Tenbarge: Yeah, that's fantastic. I feel as though when you talk about language with this generation, the tools that we have to communicate with one another and that sort of democratization of voice and platform that social media and the internet allows for has also transformed those tools into elements of language themselves. So I think of emojis, and I think of the ability to react to social media posts as building blocks of communication that are kind of in stark difference to just the ability to communicate that we've had in past generations. Would you say that that's true? Would you say that sort of those types of functions are something that's truly new?
Sarah Ogilvie: Oh, absolutely. And, you know, texting as well. So with emojis, memes are just like slang. Like they are like, memes are, you know, you know, more or less like a way of creating a community and creating an in-group versus an out-group. They are a counter-cultural device similar to slang. And then of course texting, there are new sort of codes of communicating which have been developed so that You can express your tone in writing by, you know, using capitals as sort of shouty, or using full stops, or changing the capitalization deliberately to sort of convey anger perhaps. So, um, that was all terrific, and we, we discussed that in the, in the book. But, you know, if you wanted to talk about that more later, I'm more than, more than happy to.
Roberta Katz: Can I just add that that part of the book has been one of the things that older generations tell us over and over again has been eye-opening for them and has changed a little bit how they communicate online or through social media and what they understand about communications that they're receiving from younger people.
Kat Tenbarge: Mm, that's fascinating. I feel like when I communicate with people online, it's very easy to tell whether you're speaking to someone who is more of a digital native versus somebody who is not a digital native. And you can see very unique characteristics of how those people both engage with these tools. And so like something as simple as a smiley face, I know the smiley face with the laughing tears emoji is often uncool among Gen Zers. It's thought of as almost ironic, but it's used very straight— in a very straightforward fashion, uh, when a lot of older individuals use that emoji.
Roberta Katz: Yeah, no, that we've heard from older people that that's been the most helpful part of the book to them.
Kat Tenbarge: Yes, I'm sure that makes a lot of sense. And I also wanted to sort of weave in some of the audience questions that relate to what we're on topic about. So we just had a question come in, uh, asking if the authors included TikTok or Instagram in the analysis. And I know there were many different social media platforms that were examined, so I'll throw that over to you guys.
Sarah Ogilvie: Yeah, we didn't do Instagram because that is really difficult to scrape, and TikTok actually, when we began our investigation, TikTok was Music— Musical.ly, and then it changed to TikTok. And what was really interesting is that our interviewees to begin with found Musical.ly very unfashionable. And they really said that, you know, most of their younger siblings were on Musical.ly. And then of course, by the end of our study, they were totally on TikTok. So we didn't include that either.
Linda Woodhead: No.
Roberta Katz: So I will say on Instagram, our interviewees talked a lot about Instagram and where they would have a Finsta Or, you know, the whole notion that you could have multiple Instagram accounts, some of which were more personal and private than others. So that was eye-opening for us too.
Sarah Ogilvie: Yeah.
Kat Tenbarge: Yeah.
Sarah Ogilvie: They spoke a lot about their finsta, their fake Instagram, or their ginsta, their gay Instagram. So that definitely entered the language and the culture analysis, yeah.
Roberta Katz: Mm-hmm.
Kat Tenbarge: It's really pervasive, I think, that different identities play out with the creation of accounts on different social media platforms. And the way you use those profiles, like Finsta, is deeply tied into psychology and the structure of friends and relationships that you have in real life. So I just think that is such a fascinating new tool. And on the topic of what Jane's research focuses on, because I haven't heard from Jane yet, but I wanted to talk about the tie-in with the concept of religion and identity in some of the issues that were talked about in the book. One thing that I'm curious about as someone who studies and reports on a lot of celebrity culture with Gen Zers is that the notion of community online has been incredibly transformative and pervasive among Gen Z individuals. I wanted to ask you if that could be a form of replacement or a transformative place for religious worship among members of this cohort.
Jane Shaw: Yes and no. Let me start by saying that we did ask the interviewees about religion, and for the most part, it's not that they're against it, it's just that it's not on their radar screen. You know, some said, oh well, you know, I have this particular background and I might explore it one day. But for the most part, it was a kind of just level of indifference. So I say yes and no about the question of celebrity and community because I think particularly from the interviews we did, we had a deep sense that your generation, Kat, is pretty clued in to celebrities and their authenticity or not. So authenticity is a huge thing for Gen Zers, and they can sniff out inauthenticity from a mile off. And that occurs, for example, with celebrities. If celebrities suddenly start saying things that don't ring true, that aren't relatable, or if celebrities appropriate other people's cultures, that's an absolute no, and they will get canceled, of course. So I think yes and no is the answer to that question about celebrities and whether they might have some interest in them. And in terms of community online, absolutely, they find, you know, this is also Linda's area and she might want to take up the baton in a minute. But the question of how, you know, we've talked already in this discussion a bit about rituals, right? The kinds of rituals of emojis and memes and going online. So of course all of that replaces, more traditional rituals, whatever they may be. Over to you, Linda, sociologist of religion.
Linda Woodhead: Well, religion covers lots of ground, and I think part of what we're seeing is religion being sort of unbundled and different components get used in different ways. And I mean, identity, as you know, Kat, is a really central theme that comes out of this book. So identity issues are so central for this generation. Identity and its expression becomes a value in itself. Like you say, there are lots of different platforms to express different facets of identity. But where religion is tied up with your identity, particularly if you're a member of, say, a minority group like Native American heritage, then we did have people talking about it. And then it would be something that's highly valued and respected, and people would see that they are representing their people, and that's a privilege and something that's very important to their identity. So in those ways, that aspect of religion comes up. Other things that religion traditionally has done, like relate you to higher powers, I think get hived off elsewhere, not under the bracket of religion. So, you know, things like the explosion of interest in astrology and apps like Co-Star and tarot and things that lend themselves to online. And people can say it's not religion, but it's not science, and it's just really kind of fun and interesting, but it's a bit spooky and it does connect you with something bigger than yourself. There's that going on. And then one final thing is I think that this generation is different from my generation that were really reacting against particularly churches and Christianity, and there was a lot of very vocal atheism. And I think this generation is more sort of generally respectful of religion, but it's not for me, and open to a bit of exploration, as Jane said. So as Christianity and the churches have become less culturally dominant, that's opening things up, and the much more diverse plural nature of our societies where you meet people from lots of different religious traditions is changing things. So it's a whole picture in flux.
Jane Shaw: Yeah, although we might want to add that— oh, sorry, Kat— that, I mean, the kind of skepticism of Gen Z about institutions does of course play into this.
Linda Woodhead: Absolutely. So institutional religion is generally not looked on favorably.
Roberta Katz: But I do think, um, one thing that Kat pointed out is important, and that is that sense of community. One thing that we've stressed in the book is that we believe Gen Z is fighting hard to preserve the human side of life in the face of a push toward more and more technology. And so that connectedness that happens through social media, but also in real life, and we talk about that in the book, is very important. And that's one of those aspects of a spiritual or religious connectivity that we really did see And people find that surprising, Roberta, don't they?
Linda Woodhead: Because they expect this generation— older people think they'll love everything digital. You know, look at the pandemic, and in my university anyway, the students are absolutely clear they want to go back to in-person. And in our interviews, there was a lot of people saying it's different, in-person is different, and relationships in person are obviously more important in a way that I think quite surprises older people who think they're just going to love anything that's Well, we—
Roberta Katz: one of the interview questions, and we— this was over 120 interviews, and, and we asked what kind of technology do you prefer, thinking, you know, there would be texting and email and direct messaging and so on and so forth. And literally, with one exception, the answer always was face-to-face. That was shocking. Mm-hmm.
Kat Tenbarge: You know, one thing that I think is very interesting is that a lot of times the generalizations about Gen Z, when you actually begin to sort of parse apart the actual thoughts and feelings of individual members of Gen Zs, those generalizations kind of fall apart and oftentimes are exactly the opposite. So like you said, I think a lot of people have this preconceived notion that Gen Zers are on their phone more than anyone else. They love their phones more than anyone else. Like social media is their preferred form of communication, et cetera, et cetera. But then when you sort of immerse yourself in what Gen Zers actually want, on the surface, they may think that's true. They may think, well, yeah, I do value my online self, and I do value my online communities. But then when you kind of unpack those desires and the innate ways of socialization that come forward, you realize that a lot of people feel very lonely because of how immersed they are in their digital lives. And the kind of benefits and takeaways you can get from online spaces are good, but not the same as what you get from real-life interaction with others. And so I think those competing impulses, it's something that we're only beginning to recognize exists, let alone study the implications of.
Linda Woodhead: And one of the differences, um, yeah, I talked about a sense of difference from millennials, was there was— whether it's true or not— Gen Z had a sense that millennials were over-optimistic about technology. They were naive about technology is gonna— the internet's gonna connect everyone, we're all gonna love each other, there'll be no more war. And they were naive about, you know, corporate interests and all the rest of it. And this generation is not naive, it's very critical about those things.
Kat Tenbarge: Yes, I think that is a really interesting point of view to come from Gen Zers themselves, because I feel like when you take more of a bird's eye view of how we consider generations, there's oftentimes this sense of kids these days will get older and evolve and take on characteristics that are more like generations of the past. So you kind of get this undercurrent of feeling that that youth, since it's a state of change, you will, by definition, evolve into your adult self. When we look at youth, I feel like a lot of people who are more skeptical of sort of generational studies think of it as a snapshot of an individual's life that doesn't show you that full evolution. So I was curious from your, from the co-authors' perspectives, do you think that Generation Z as it grows may begin to take on attributes that are more reminiscent of the baby boomers and Gen X and even millennials?
Roberta Katz: So I'll start, but I think we all have an opinion on this. Um, the, the thing that, uh, I like to talk about as an anthropologist who studied social change, I like to remind people that if you had— were living in pre-industrial England in a rural setting there's no way you could have envisioned the way we live today. So many institutions changed. The notion of public school, the notion of all the things that we— the court system, everything that we came to appreciate during the Industrial Age did not exist, or it existed in a very different form. We are at that place right now because the fact that we have these powerful, powerful new digital tools and the network that is all about communication and all human endeavor is, or most human endeavor is about communication. We can't foresee what's ahead. It's one of the reasons we're all feeling very, there's a lot of instability we feel right now. And so one of the reasons we wanted to look at your generation, Cat, was that you all were in many ways ahead of the curve. You had grown up learning to use these tools, and so the behaviors, the attitudes, the outlooks that you developed because you were acquiring a facility with the tools might give us a clue to how institutions might change, what might be ahead. So, you know, the answer to your question is really yes and no. People grow and they change. They have children, they have jobs, and they experience both positives and negatives in their lives that will change them. But the, the society itself is, in my opinion, undergoing very fundamental— to use that word you used—
Linda Woodhead: change.
Roberta Katz: And we don't, we don't know yet where it's going to end up.
Jane Shaw: I would say that one of the really key things is that this is a generation, perhaps the first generation, that could not learn about what was happening that was new from their parents or grandparents, right? They couldn't ask their parents or grandparents about the older generations about technology. They were learning it, and of course they often explain it to older generations. So that seems to me such a huge shift in mentality that the idea that what, what someone calls of life cycle effects, that they'll grow out of it. Seems to me to be messed up by that, in that alone. But Linda and Sarah may think something different.
Sarah Ogilvie: I agree. I think that the fact that this is the first generation to never know the world without the internet makes them fundamentally different. And as Jane said, the fact that actually parents are coming to them for guidance, I don't think that's ever happened before throughout history where parents are coming to their children to learn from them. It's usually the other way around. So yeah, Yes, as Roberta said, they are sure to change slightly as they age, but I think that it's so fundamentally different. They are so, so fundamentally different. And we are seeing it in their attention to mental health, in their fluidity and flexibility with respect to gender and sexuality. I mean, there are just so many dimensions to Gen Zers that are so fundamentally different from their elders. And I can't see that changing. Over, over time?
Linda Woodhead: I think it's interesting to test this question by looking at what difference they have made on, in colleges, for example, and it is a generation that is pushing for a lot of change on college campuses in all sorts of ways, in terms of greater support for mental health, in terms of less hierarchical arrangements, in terms of more collaborative working. So there are these very significant changes that their universities are having to adapt to that. And now in the workplace, is that going to be sustained? Is it going to lead to these fundamental changes where people, um, older generations in charge have to fundamentally rethink what the workplace looks like? That's where it would be interesting to look next. Yes.
Kat Tenbarge: I feel as though, um, with children instructing their parents, there's a really interesting phenomenon where you have members of Gen Z being considered authority figures, not only by the population of Gen Zers themselves, who oftentimes within youth culture, you see youth identify with people their own age as they are beginning to conceptualize their own identities. They're drawn to people who are like them. But you're now seeing adults and institutions that are more mature beyond youth, beyond youth culture, looking toward members of Gen Z for education, for inspiration, in a way that does feel like a new phenomenon that is only coming about because of the technology that's available there. So I think that is extremely interesting. And another question we got from the audience: You mentioned that Gen Zers can sniff out inauthenticity. Do they appreciate those of us who try to communicate with them their way, or do they see that as inauthentic? I'll let you guys answer, and then I also have some insight on that to add as well.
Jane Shaw: Kat, I feel you should answer that as the Gen Zer.
Sarah Ogilvie: I do too.
Kat Tenbarge: All right.
Sarah Ogilvie: Okay.
Kat Tenbarge: Well, I'm happy to answer with my perspective. So in terms of how Gen Zers view elder figures adopting sort of like the language and customs of Gen Z, it really depends in my opinion. So I've observed for a long time a lot of discourse around the idea of advertising and platform moderators who are viewed as others. So for example, on Tumblr, which is a microblogging website that a lot of Gen Zers and millennials used to sort of have meta discourse about the internet itself. And I remember there being a lot of conversations sort of like mocking and poking fun at the idea that adults and these advertising and platform figures were just trying to like copy essentially Gen Z language, Gen Z memes, Gen Z slang without really understanding what about it is funny, what about it is truly relatable. And there was even fascinating breakdowns showing the difference between just copying and pasting a Gen Z meme, but like adding a company logo or some sort of branding to it. Versus the more preferred style of Gen Z humor, which is deeply rooted in absurdism. So someone was like, is this funny? Is it funny when IHOP just like takes an established meme format? Or is it funny when I like post the contents of my file on my desktop with a bunch of just like random letters and numbers over different funny pictures? Like obviously the one on the right is funnier because it just has this sense of authenticity that the brand and the company cannot replicate. So all of that being said, while I think that Gen Zers do view that as inauthentic, there are also a lot of cases of people who are not Gen Zers who are highly regarded as authentic and as particularly native to technology in the eyes of Gen Zers. There are plenty of adults who are celebrities, who are influencers in these communities. I think about John and Hank Green as two of the early YouTubers who really set the tone for a lot of the space in years to come. John Green was a very successful young adult fiction author, and his brother Hank is now also doing young adult fiction, and the two of them have had immensely popular, immensely influential YouTube personas, but they're not members of Gen Z, but they inspire and educate and work with Gen Z in a way feels very authentic to them as well.
Roberta Katz: I think it's sort of form and substance. You know, people who just look at the form are going to miss the mark. People who really are trying to understand what these big differences are will, will get it no matter what their age is. But it, but it is really form and substance.
Kat Tenbarge: I agree with that. Definitely. Does anyone else have any thoughts on sort of the concept of inauthenticity as it applies to communication between younger and older generations?
Jane Shaw: Well, just that there's nothing more embarrassing than older people trying to speak and behave like younger people, right?
Linda Woodhead: So—
Kat Tenbarge: This does also— this is a good transition to a question that I had related to the concept of authenticity. And one of the major sort of news topics and beats that has emerged in the technology field is the concept of misinformation and disinformation. So the difference between the two, misinformation is mistaken false information that spreads, and disinformation is targeted false information that is basically put on the internet on purpose to mislead people. And so my question in terms of Generation Z and authenticity is that a lot of mis- and disinformation comes from members of Generation Z. There are a lot of people who are young who have become very adept at hacking, scamming, manipulating online communities. You know, there has been a lot of examples of very young people committing sort of cybercrime and impersonating false people online, catfishing, like phenomenons of these natures in which young people are being completely inauthentic and sort of using their native knowledge of these platforms against other members of Gen Z. So when we look at the Gen Z population as a whole, I think there's an emphasis toward people desiring authenticity, but I was curious how that stacks up when you look at Gen Zers who are more focused on sowing disinformation and division.
Linda Woodhead: In a way, you can see it as everything becomes visible suddenly because everyone's got a platform. So it's not that weren't people in the past who had racist attitudes, who are incredibly sexist, who spread massive misinformation, who are fantasists. But now it's all out there, you can see it, and it's horrific to see the extent of it. But in a way, people can't deny anymore, and they can't say, well, you're making a fuss about nothing, and these aren't really widespread attitudes. And so all the dirty linen, if you like, is out there for people to see. So I'm not sure that you kind of— maybe I'm not You were implying that people are sort of learning these really bad behaviors. Maybe it's just that we, we can just see them and defend against them too.
Roberta Katz: I do think it goes beyond that a little bit. So the technology is a tool. Young people are very adept at using the tool. And by the way, I think some of the behavior is not limited to Gen Zers. As people become more adept at using these tools, But this is a facet of what I was talking about of a society in change. As we, as the tools become more and more the underpinning for everything we do, we have to come together as a society of humans and say, okay, what are the values that we want to make sure we keep and promote going forward? We're going to have to have some new understandings of what's acceptable behavior and what is not. So this is part of that process of going from one technological age to another with the, then the social changes that always follow. And we know that a lot of our existing institutions are not strong, they're not working, there's hypocrisy, there's inauthenticity. We have to figure out what the institutions going forward are gonna look like. And it's a lot of trial and error. And I think we're going through that right now. And Gen Z is right at the front of it again.
Linda Woodhead: I'll just give a tiny little illustration of that. One of the areas where you see that shift is that because this is online, it means that things like verbal offense, we're getting much more, I think we're understanding better how serious it is, how damaging it can be. So we don't say sticks and stones break your bones, but words won't hurt you. The kinds of online abuse that can happen the effects of them, what coercive control means, that all these things are suddenly coming up in visibility and we're taking them much more seriously.
Kat Tenbarge: Uh, we got another question from the audience that goes along with what we're talking about right now, uh, which is that, uh, in addition to being digital natives and perhaps despite that, uh, have the panelists noticed a lack of media literacy and the ability to navigate today's media landscape regarding misinformation and disinformation. So I feel as though shifting the lens from authenticity, which is a perception, a sort of subjective interpretation of online content, and moving toward literacy, which is a more objective form of, do you understand where the content is coming from? Do you understand the motivations behind the poster? Sort of concepts like that. And I know personally, I feel as though there is a gap with media literacy with members of Gen Z. And to me, the way that I see this manifesting is a lot of times when members of Gen Z are passively consuming content. So for example, on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and the like, a lot of times you're not primed to try and suss out whether somebody is lying to you. When you're passively consuming content, you're not in a mindset of looking for red flags necessarily. You may just be looking at the content you're consuming as a form of entertainment that's that doesn't even require that kind of skepticism. So I do think that especially on social media platforms, especially when you're dealing with a lot of fast-paced audiovisual content like on TikTok, I think members of Gen Z are just as susceptible to media illiteracy as earlier generations. But I'm curious what you guys think and what you've sort of observed.
Sarah Ogilvie: Yeah, Kat, so I observed that there was this tension there between being totally savvy and absolutely understanding that the commodification of one's attention on the internet. So lots of the interviewees spoke about the fact that they knew that they had a power when they're searching the net because their attention and their time equated to money, right? But then when it comes to, teaching students within the classroom and realizing that they really do struggle to look at the provenance of a lot of the data that they are getting on the internet. So the— and I mean, one of the first things that I train my students in is looking at the provenance of any information which you are getting, and that did surprise me. So I do find that there is definitely a difference in age between the sort of skepticism about the provenance of data for older people as opposed to Gen Zers, but I'd love to hear what others think as well.
Linda Woodhead: I think it's important to remember that, you know, the culture wars went online as well, and so that's another dimension of this, that a lot of things gets refracted through which side of that culture war you're on, and there's just a lot of confirmation bias. You know, if you've got very strong opinions one way or the other, you want to see stuff that is telling you that all these liberals are ghastly or that all these the other way around are racist or whatever. So to some extent, people want to consume what they already believe and reinforce their views, and that's always been the case. But the internet gives it, as Gerda would say, scale and scope and algorithms that push it further down that road.
Jane Shaw: Yes, so I think, you know, older generations have been brought up to think of journalists as people who are, for the most part, earnestly seeking to tell the truth of the situation. And of course, we all read our news, or most of us read our news online now, but it probably is different if you grew up reading an actual physical newspaper and you knew that was a different thing than something that's just coming through your feed with everything else, right? So I think this is one of those cases where there is genuinely a generational difference simply because of how those of us who knew the world before the internet received our news before those who didn't know a world without the internet. So that, I think that's just a fact that, well, I don't know whether you can say it's just a fact, but I do think that's a generational difference.
Roberta Katz: So this is also a good place to, uh, to talk about the trial and error aspect of what we are experiencing because now increasingly there are programs being introduced introduced in as early as, you know, maybe pre-K, but elementary schools about more sophisticated digital literacy. And those programs, they're relatively new, but that's the kind of thing that will develop as we see a societal need. And then society will get better at, at understanding these issues online, provenance and everything else.
Kat Tenbarge: Uh, absolutely. And there's one more area that I sort of wanted to go back to before we shift toward taking more audience questions, um, and it kind of ties into the language that was analyzed during this study as well. And that is when we look at identity and how members of Gen Z are differentiating themselves from previous generations in how they describe their sexual and gender identities. We've seen the emergence of a lot of vocabulary that is either has not been in use before Gen Z or has sort of transformed in how Gen Z uses the terminology, or just Gen Z in some cases has taken very underutilized words and made them become more common and popular forms of identity. And so one of the most popular, and I think commonly understood, uh, identities is to be non-binary. And so there are many Gen Zers who are coming out as non-binary, in which they do not identify with either the male or female gender identity. And I was really curious about this from the research that you guys have done and the Gen Zers who you've talked to. Is this understanding of gender fitting into neither category, something new that Gen Zers are experiencing as truly different from what previous generations have experienced before?
Sarah Ogilvie: Shall I take this, this one? So, so, Kat, um, how this whole project started for me is I was teaching a class at Stanford on language, and I wanted the students to be aware of what was being said around them. And so I said, look, just for the next week, take a pen and paper around with you and make a note when you go out onto campus of every word which you think is new. And so the following Monday they came back, and I thought that they'd come with 30 or 40 words, and they came back with 350. And these were words that, that really revealed the emergence of a new culture. So, you know, there were words to do with new concepts of time and attention. Um, there were words to do with, um, collaboration and authenticity, which, which we've spoken about. But really, the most tangible one was to do with new genders and sexuality. So there were words that I had never heard, heard of, like scoliosexual, aromantic, biromantic, demigirl, demiboy, juxera, um, intersex. You know, there just so many. And what, what this really seemed to be saying is that there, there was this shift from us inheriting our identity markers, such as what, what we've been talking about— religion, family, class, um, what your work is, what, what, what your nationality is— towards this far more flexible, self-identifying, self-creating, personalized identity. And this was really evident in the, um, in the challenging of the binary of male and female and moving towards more of a continuum and being flexible about that and saying, you know, what I identify as today, in one year I may not, even in 3 months I may not, even next week I may not. And that was— that, I think, is different, absolutely, and it's facilitated by the internet. So it means that anyone who thinks that they might be a tribe of one in, in, in their identity can actually go out and find others and, and form communities. And I'm sure that Linda can sort of speak to the finely grained identity and the modular notion of, of this better than I can. Yeah.
Jane Shaw: Can I just jump in for a minute? Because I just want to add a little historical note to that in a way. Um, probably two historical notes. The first is that, you know, if you were growing up gay in a rural region in the 1950s, you got yourself to a city as fast as you could, right? And you found people like you. And you— that there would be the development of language that was entirely a sort of in-group language and it would remain an in-group language. Others outside it wouldn't understand it, right? But now it feels like with the internet, this, and the speed, scale, and scope of the internet, as Roberta said when we first opened this conversation, that language is spread and is much more open, right? Any language about sexual difference and sexuality is just much more available to a wider crowd. The other historical note is a much longer picture because I just want to say that it's really in the Enlightenment that the notion of sexual difference as the key differentiating factor emerges. Before that, you know, in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, there's a greater fluidity about gender identity, actually. So that kind of binary thing is a very, I think, is a kind of heralding of the modern period. Historians differ about this, but I would be willing to stand by that. That. So we're seeing an opening up again.
Linda Woodhead: And just to pick up on Sarah's point, I think of course this generation is very individualistic, and that's often said, highly individualised. So you find a unique identity that is unique to you and no one else. Of course that's about the individual. But as Sarah also said, you find people like you, you look for your people, and people don't understand that dimension of it. So it's strongly individual and strongly social, and that's really interesting.
Kat Tenbarge: I love this discussion. Um, I can relate it really heavily to sort of the dominant types of conversations and things that I feel like I was exposed to on the internet versus in real life, uh, growing up especially. And one thing that I actually think is really heartening about Gen Z that I see so much on social media then and now is this understanding of that flexibility when it comes to understanding your own identity. So for example, I know, again, going back to Tumblr, that was a website where I, through this social platform, I learned about the entire spectrum of gender and sexuality beyond, you know, being straight, being gay. I learned about bisexuality, asexuality, and I just remember taking, it was like puzzle pieces and being like, oh, well, maybe I feel like this now. And then in a couple of years, I actually feel more like this. And when you look at that experience versus even just a few decades ago, the types of trials and tribulations that individuals who were not straight and cisgender went through then and now, but at least now there's this accessible pool of information and spaces where people will allow you to try things on and try other things on. And I just think that that I think that is a great facet, a very positive facet of Gen Z that people oftentimes overlook because it's easy to catastrophize about Gen Z and catastrophize about social media. And so—
Roberta Katz: Sorry, Kat, I was just going to say flexibility is one of those values that we really highlighted in the book. It is an important value for your generation.
Kat Tenbarge: Yes, absolutely. And I think that that's something that I see older generations, there's surprise, and there's a little bit of a cultural misunderstanding there, because there's just some confusion around how you could be so open to being flexible about something that is viewed as innate as gender or sexuality. And so that's a really interesting dynamic that emerges. And so, in the remaining time, I know we have a lot of audience questions. So I want to try to get to as many of these as possible. It's hard not to spiral off into a million different avenues of thought when talking about subjects as complex and layered as this. But a few people asked this question, which is, can you say something about contrasts across cultures, across countries, and contrast between developed and developing world? So I will pass that to you guys first.
Jane Shaw: I think we're super conscious that what we studied was Gen Z in the US and UK, and we wouldn't claim to have done anything else. And we We hope that other people will take, you know, maybe some of the interdisciplinary methodologies we developed and apply them in other areas. That would be great. So that's the first statement. Having said that, the other part of this, of course, is the internet is global. And so there is a great sharing of cultures as well as a great particularity of cultures.
Roberta Katz: I was just going to say what Jane said and echoing what Linda said before, that when we had people looking at the survey results from the US and the UK, that they didn't I didn't expect so much congruity. And so it will be interesting to see if the internet is creating something of a common meeting space to give people similar views of the world.
Jane Shaw: I was on a panel at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford 2 or 3 years ago with someone who was writing for The New Yorker about the activists in Hong Kong at the time. And there were many similarities between the kinds of things discovering about activism amongst Gen Z in the US and UK and what the Hong Kong activists were doing. So, you know, there are, there are great similarities, but we should never ever forget the cultural and societal particularities. They're always important.
Kat Tenbarge: I could definitely say from my perspective with some of the reporting that I've done, especially in recent weeks, I've been reporting on the use of TikTok in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And that has unearthed a lot of really fascinating cross-cultural comparisons with the way that social media is used in times of war. And so, for example, the world on TikTok may be united around a common topic. Lots of people everywhere are talking about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and people everywhere have opinions and are trying to make content to share their view, to, uh, get attention from the situation, whether that's for positive reasons, negative, or a mix of both. Uh, but one thing that I really noticed is certain trends and ways of responding to the conflict and making content about the conflict were being located in specific regions. So the example that I'll use is, in terms of when we talk about misinformation and disinformation, there were several people that I observed livestreaming from areas in Eastern Europe that were not Russia or Ukraine, but countries around them, places like Romania. And users in those countries, in some cases, were pretending that they were in Ukraine. In Ukraine. So they were making livestreams basically soliciting donations, soliciting likes, soliciting follows and engagement by using their accents and using their surroundings to say, like, well, there are probably Americans watching this who don't know the difference between a Romanian accent and a Ukrainian accent. So I'm going to use that to my advantage. And so I feel like that was a really fascinating interesting look at how different cultural interplay can come into effect. But then also going back to how Gen Z is so aware of authenticity, you would then open the comment section and see people who were actually advocating for Ukrainians, people who were Ukrainian themselves, people who were Russian, and Gen Zers basically warning each other like, this is real or this is not real, and advising one another how to to understand the situation. So I think that when you examine sort of Gen Zers across borders, the role of technology brings all of these differences and similarities to the table in a really fascinating interplay. So another question that a couple of people asked, what does your research have to say about the pronounced uptick of mental health issues, as well as awareness of those issues in Gen Z?
Linda Woodhead: A lot.
Sarah Ogilvie: There's a, there's a whole chapter about that. So it's like, okay, who, who wants to do a soundbite?
Roberta Katz: Well, I just will start by saying one part of it, um, that we, you know, there's a lot of focus on mental health with Gen Z, and I just like to make sure that people remember there's a lot of focus on mental health in general, the opioid epidemic, and there is a lot of instability in our lives now, no matter how old you are. And that is a factor. It's not the only factor, but I just like to remind people this is not a Gen Z issue alone. And I'll pass the baton. Sarah, you might want to talk about the struggle bus.
Sarah Ogilvie: Yeah, sure. So at the beginning of our, of our study, through the language, there was a popular phrase called the duck syndrome. So a lot of our students were saying that, that like, like a duck swims along, they were sort of rapidly trying to stay abreast and stay well and not too depressed underneath the surface. No, sorry, but above the surface they were pretending that they were fine, but underneath they were really, really struggling. And then by the end of our study, just within those couple of the years, the discourse had really changed. And they, and they were using the expression struggle, struggle bus. They were saying, you know, I am on the struggle bus today, I can't go, go to class. Um, you know, you, you know, how's, how's this, um, how's the struggle bus going? So, so there was an owning of, of your mental health and your mental state. And certainly as someone within the academic world, I'm very aware now that it's not unusual whatsoever for students to come and say, I am going to take a mental health day, I'm not going to hand in my essay on time because I need some self-care. So people now are absolutely owning it, and I certainly, from my experience, 10 years ago, I would never have had students say things like that.
Jane Shaw: And I think, you know, a very clear articulation of the factors in society that exacerbate mental health issues. So very clear statement from a lot of the students we interviewed that, you know, racism is an exacerbating factor in mental health, right? And that's really important that Gen Zers are articulating all of that.
Roberta Katz: And climate change and war and institutions that are feeling unstable. And this is also a generation that was raised with much more openness about mental health issues, you know, diagnoses of ADHD and prescriptions of drugs for young people. And society in general has become more open talking about mental health issues. So it comes very naturally for your generation and of course it's a big thing online, to sort of, to create connection in some ways. You know, if you're depressed, we had interviewees talk about when they were depressed, they could find friends online who could help them. That's all new.
Linda Woodhead: So it's partly an aspect of identity, it's part of your identity, and therefore why wouldn't you bring it with you? And it's also an aspect of the changing attitude to institutions. So whereas we might have had mental health issues, but we'd have never mentioned it because you had to put it to one side because you had to do your duty in your role in relation to whatever institution you were in, whether the workplace or the university. This generation is not prepared to do that. They're bringing their whole selves into that situation and they're going to tell you what that whole self is feeling like today.
Roberta Katz: Which is not to say that there are not very important issues that are being looked at in terms of mental health and social media. The— and this is another facet of the trial and error. We, we don't know the problem until it surfaces, and then we have to figure out how to address it because these are all new kinds of problems coming from new technologies.
Linda Woodhead: And one thing a lot of people mention, of course, is that, that pressure to be perfect, the idealization of lifestyles online, and always comparing yourself against that.
Kat Tenbarge: That brings me to, uh, something I sort of wanted to piggyback off of that question, which is a lot of times when I tell people about what I do for work and what I report on, I feel like there's a lot of panic around the effects of using the technology and using social media itself on people's mental health, on younger people's mental health. And some of the research done here and a lot of the conversations here, I feel like, touch on that. Um, the pressure to be perfect is definitely one thing that I feel like comes up frequently when I look at issues of esteem, self-esteem, and body issue and identity online. And that, of course, affects behaviors both online and offline. I was curious, were there any things that stood out to you in particular about what Gen Zers said were maybe the negative consequences of our digital lifestyle?
Roberta Katz: What came out of the interviews was a very pragmatic understanding of technology and the pros and the cons, the things they worried about with artificial intelligence and some of the genetic engineering and so on, but also a sense that this is part of life now and it will continue to be part of life. And life is built around it now. So it was not, it was not, it was pretty realistic, I guess you would say, among the people we interviewed.
Linda Woodhead: There were quite a few people in interviews who talked about taking time out from the digital and trying to have even a whole semester where you didn't look at things, and quite a few people were experimenting with the amount of use they had and reporting interestingly on the results of that.
Roberta Katz: But clearly, I mean, there's a lot of research now and there's a big debate going on among psychologists as to, you know, is it harmful? Should there be interventions? What should we be doing? So I think the questions are not settled and this is part of the experimentation. That we are doing as a society.
Kat Tenbarge: I feel like that also calls back to, again, the contradictory nature of not only Gen Z and technology, but our perception of Gen Z and technology, where we view Gen Z as being hopelessly addicted to technology, but oftentimes it's members of Gen Z who are experimenting with this idea of not using technology for a semester at a time, not using social media for periods of time, time. I know for me, social media is what I do for my job. It's my career. But sometimes to increase productivity in my career, especially over long periods of time where I will get burnt out and exhausted and frustrated with the nature of what I'm consuming, sometimes it's good to log out of even just one specific website for a month or a couple weeks. And it's really wild how radically that can change your perspective. So I see a lot more, uh, I imagine that there will be many social movements within my lifetime that sort of reexamine our relationship to technology and how it has changed, especially during the pandemic. And then, so a lot of questions have come in related to Gen Z and work and Gen Z in the workplace. So one of those is, what do Gen Zers want most from work and from life? Which work and lifestyle norms are they most likely to adopt? Likely to change. So I feel like this is very subjective, but I'll pass that to you guys. Well, I'll start, but we're all going to have an opinion.
Roberta Katz: You know, and the book goes into this in detail. Collaboration is something that they have experienced from the time they— you, your generation, Kat, has experienced from the time they were in elementary school with group projects or Wikipedia GoFundMe, and there is an expectation of collaboration in work. We also— the research also showed a disinclination towards strict hierarchy. It wasn't that hierarchy always was bad, but it was based on need. It was kind of like servant leadership. And then also the attitude of self-agency. If they— if your generation is needing to know something, you know where to go and so you don't necessarily want to be told by someone else, this is the way we do it. So I've been, I've been doing a lot of speaking since the book was published, and this question comes up, you know, what should we be doing? And I keep saying, have mutually respectful conversations in the workplace, because younger people don't always know what they don't know, and they need to hear it, but they also need to be heard because they may have better ways ways of doing things. So it comes down to ultimately mutual respect. And that's really why we wrote the book, to help people understand and not stereotype so much about, oh, these guys are snowflakes, you know, they don't know what they're doing, they're addicted to technology. Because it's much more, as you've been saying, Kat, throughout, it's much more nuanced.
Jane Shaw: I think one of us said earlier, perhaps Linda, that, you know, we've yet quite to see how all this will play out in the work workplace. So I find myself not quite able to answer that question because I don't want to do a bit of crystal ball gazing really. But perhaps you can speak to your experience in the workplace.
Kat Tenbarge: So I— this also brings me to another train of thought that I wanted to touch on, which is involving the conditions of the pandemic. But from my own personal experience, I graduated college in the summer of 2019. And so I had about a year before the nature of the workplace changed due to the pandemic. So before the pandemic, in that short period of time when I could experience moving to a big city, New York, going into the office on a daily basis, it felt even then as though members of the office who were my age viewed their work experiences as very individual. And so what I mean by that is, um, I'm sure every adult who has worked in their life has encountered experiences in the workplace that feel unfair and that feel wrong and that feel unfairly out of your control. You're denied a promotion, you find out that some of the men at the office make more money than some of the women, You think that your boss doesn't have the right qualifications and that someone else is more qualified than him or her. And so my perspective on Gen Zers is that when these very common occurrences happen, members of Gen Z are more likely to want to make that change, even if it's a normal experience. So how that plays out, for example, you may think like, well, it's common to not make as much money as you really deserve when you're in your first job. But I think the Gen Zer mindset is like, well, this is my 'This is my job and this is my life, and just because it's the normal thing doesn't mean I'm gonna settle for that.' And so because of those sort of independent attitudes and those sort of attitudes that, you know, regardless of other people's circumstances, I'm gonna do what's right for me and for my colleagues, you see a shift toward more younger people being interested in unions. So even before the pandemic, for example, my workplace, which was predominantly people under the age of 30, we were gearing up to hopefully start a union. And as the pandemic took hold and took effect, we eventually did complete that union drive successfully. And my last workplace was unionized at the time when I left. And I feel like the experience that I saw and the sort of drive to want to band together and make our circumstances better, even if they were quote unquote normal, I think that's pretty indicative of a lot of how Gen Zers view work. And I think that what a lot of older generations will be confronted with and will need to adapt to is this idea that Gen Zers are not going to abide by what's traditional just because it's traditional. They're going to want to do what's just and what's fair and what is right. And I feel like that was reflected in a lot of the research that came out through the book. I feel like that's representative of a lot of the conversations that the Gen Zers you surveyed had as well.
Roberta Katz: I think that's well said, Kat.
Linda Woodhead: Yeah, and I think that two things are happening at the same time. So this generation is coming in with different attitudes, but also the nature of work is changing. So for a long time, you know, a lot of professions were about a stable job for most of your life, and you sort of did a trade-off, you know, you would not ask for too much in order to get up that ladder and all the rest of it. Young people today don't see work like that. It's more flexible. You're not going to have that long-term thing, things like pensions you're going to be responsible for, and therefore therefore people are going to move if it's, if it's not fitting what they want to see in the workplace. Definitely.
Kat Tenbarge: And then another question we had about work in Gen Z is, with Gen Z preference for face-to-face communication, what does that look like in a work environment that is moving more remote? That swing back to a stronger desire for on-site work, or do Zoom meetings meet the need to face-to-face communication?
Linda Woodhead: Not with students, they really don't like it. They've had much too much of it and they absolutely want to go back to face-to-face, means face-to-face in real life, and that's certainly the view from the university. It really, really strongly felt we've had enough of this, thanks very much. It's the older generations who are like, oh, this is really great, we like working from home, but certainly not our students.
Jane Shaw: But the backdrop to all of that is, I think, that, you know, Gen Z is, is online and offline very seamlessly in a way that older generations aren't. So they say they want face-to-face with the backdrop that they seamlessly are on and offline all the time. Whereas older generations like, well, I prefer— some of them are saying, I prefer face-to-face. And that I think means they think they can abandon the Zoom meetings, right? But we're all becoming more adept at being a little bit integrated in these things.
Kat Tenbarge: For sure. And I think that two things that I've noticed in terms of face-to-face communication in a post-COVID world, on one hand, it feels as though many Gen Zers and also slightly older people in the workforce have that desire to have in-real-life communication, whether that's going into the office a few days of the week or having free frequent meetings with your team, like after work, doing outings, things like that. But what I've also noticed that I'm sure you guys have noticed as well is a shift toward members of Gen Z wanting to work for themselves and not have this traditional office environment whatsoever. And how I see that manifesting is really in the explosive growth of the creator economy and the idea that there are so many different types of monetization online. You can do whatever suits you. So there's been an explosion in people who run their own OnlyFans accounts and who sell either explicit or just like non-explicit but not safe for work content. There's been a huge rise in that in my generation, especially because of the pandemic. There's also been a huge rise in micro-influencing and not creating content for micro— for celebrity, but rather creating content that appeals to a certain a niche, or that has, you know, a very like faceless sort of routine style of content that you can repeat over and over again and monetize. There have been people who work at paint stores who have gone viral on TikTok for mixing paint and putting videos of that on the app, and then they can form a career that just involves them sitting there and mixing paint for different paint companies. There are people who have turned to comedy and found ways to monetize their comedy online during the obviously older generations are engaging in that as well, but I feel like when we talk about Gen Z and work, you have to have that consideration that a lot of Gen Zers are not interested in the traditional workforce whatsoever and would rather create their own career that's never been done before rather than ever go into that 9-to-5 position. And on that note, I was curious, with the conversations and the research for Gen Z Explained, did you see that kind of individualized shift toward having a career that you create on your own terms versus more of a traditional career?
Roberta Katz: It's sort of both/and. So again, this is a— this is part of this change. The new technology makes all this possible. Just like, you know, pre-industrial, you didn't have factories. Then during the industrial period, they developed factories. Well, now we have this technological change that is going to make it possible to have a career selling stuff online. And so what we saw in the research was this, what I've talked about before, that notion of self-agency. If I need something, I can go do it because I have these powerful tools that give me a market, an audience. And so it's not surprising.
Linda Woodhead: It was an interesting finding in one of the surveys which quite surprised us. We asked people about where they were on a spectrum of whether they wanted flexibility or stability, and stability is a very, very high desire as well as flexibility. So it's how you hold those two together, I think, that's the conundrum that Gen Z are trying to solve for themselves.
Kat Tenbarge: Um, so the last question on education as it relates to work that I wanted to ask, and we have a few more minutes here, so as we wind down I feel like this would be a good opportunity to sort of get everyone's perspective on this question, and at the same time, if you have any overarching final statements that you wanted to add to the conversation, this would be a good place to do that as well. So the question is, what are the implications for post-Second— oh wait, this might be a better final question. How has doing research for the book and writing the book itself changed your teaching? Are there lessons that you wish your colleagues would incorporate into theirs?
Jane Shaw: Well, I'll start by saying that I think it changed how we all worked together because we deliberately did this as a collaborative project and we wrote the book as one voice and we were influenced by Gen Z in that, frankly.
Sarah Ogilvie: Yeah.
Linda Woodhead: I'll give you a very concrete example because I've been teaching a new course on ethics this term and I just rewrote the whole thing, but it's actually applied ethics and applied ethics has generally been about things like abortion and euthanasia and, and I've And I just thought, why? You know, why are we picking these topics that aren't really relevant to people at all? And so the experience of seeing what was relevant to Gen Z, so I've done much more on things around identity and offense and canceling and culture wars and things that came absolutely out of our research. And it's, I think it's gone pretty well.
Roberta Katz: Sarah, do you want to go next?
Sarah Ogilvie: Yeah, so for me, just absolutely more discussion, more collaboration, more smart small group work rather than individual group work. And for me as a teacher to listen to my students certainly more than I have ever, ever before.
Linda Woodhead: Absolutely, yeah, that's really important as well. You're asking, do you want this kind of assessment? When do you want it? What's happening? And co-creating a bit more in that way.
Roberta Katz: You know, for me, I mean, it just, it created, it goes with this listening. I just have a lot more respect for your generation, a lot more understanding, and a lot more appreciation of what it means to be on the cutting edge of, of building the future.
Kat Tenbarge: And then kind of a natural part 2 to that, uh, that I'll have you all answer as well. Um, do you see a movement away from traditional college and a movement toward alternative paths that allow members of Gen Z, uh, to prepare for professional careers in less time at a lower cost?
Jane Shaw: Can I answer that to start with? And I wanna start at the other end of the lifespan because I wanna talk about longevity. We're all gonna apparently live for much longer. You know, people have written books like called things like "The Hundred Year Life." So that's one reason I think that higher education will change anyway. If you are working out your life plan, Why would you cram all your education in the years 18 to 22? Doesn't make a lot of sense. So you might end up going and doing exactly what you just said, Kat, to prepare, but then you haven't, you know, you want to retrain, you need to retrain. So you might go and get some education a bit later, or, you know, you think, oh God, I'm gonna live to be 95 probably. I'm having an existential crisis. I need to go and get my education now, age 55 or whatever it is. So I think I think that the things we've been talking about today, plus a longer lifespan, are gonna change all this anyway. And, you know, I think one of the things that colleges and universities need to think about is the barrier or prejudice of age. I think we're just gonna think very differently about that in terms of higher education.
Sarah Ogilvie: Yeah, and also to that, just to dovetail what Jane said, is the whole notion of AI and how AI is going to be replacing a lot of particular jobs. So yeah, I think that that absolutely speaks to the fact that there are a lot of factors going on here.
Kat Tenbarge: Yeah.
Roberta Katz: I'll go next. So recently I was talking to the campus architect at Stanford, and because I've been asked to talk about the book to a lot of the different departments at Stanford, and the campus architect, I was talking about flexibility and the desire to have flexible flexible spaces. And the campus architect said that in focus groups with students now, they don't want to see new fancy buildings. They want to see flexible spaces. So, these values are translating into different needs and different wants.
Linda Woodhead: And I think you— I think it will be harder for higher education. I think it will have to rethink thing. I mean, the level of debt, people making the calculation, is it really going to be worth it? We've lived through the massification of higher education where vastly increased numbers are going into higher education. In my lifetime in Britain, 5% when I was at university, it's now near 50%. And I think people are starting to get a bit skeptical about that and think, was that the right direction? It certainly started stopped, will it reverse a bit? It's quite possible. And there's skepticism about universities being run as big businesses.
Kat Tenbarge: Yeah, I think that this is just like all of the discussions that we've had thus far, a place where there's a lot of nuance and a lot of diversity of opinion among Gen Zers themselves. I know I went the traditional route of getting a 4-year degree, and many of my closest peers have since gone on to post-secondary options and went to law school and plan on going to grad school and other degrees of that nature. But at the same time, I have friends who dropped out of their higher education opportunities to pursue careers online that started flourishing while they were undergraduates. And I've seen people in my generation who have expressed the desire to be lifelong learners, whatever that may look like for them. And if there is one positive thing to pull away from all of this, it's that for those of us who are interested in learning, there are more opportunities than ever to connect with people in academic settings through these online tools. In non-academic settings, there's so much to learn from online. And that's probably the most exciting thing about Gen Z is being able to have lifetime's worth of content at our easy disposal. So with all of that being said, I wanted to thank our fabulous co-authors for joining us today for this insightful panel. These conversations are not only important but are extremely necessary as we continue to embark in our digital future and as more and more members of Generation Z enter colleges, classrooms, and the workforce. Again, I wanted to thank this event's co-sponsors, the Knight Foundation, the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford, and the Social Media Lab at Stanford. And a heads up to our attendees, uh, details on how to learn more about CASBS's series Social Science for a World in Crisis, as well as view previous episodes in the series, will be coming onto your screen in just a few seconds. Thanks again to the panel, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. There are plenty of ways to reach out to us if you have any additional questions. Thank you for those who participated, and have a great rest of your day. Your day.
Narrator: That was Roberta Katz, Linda Woodhead, Sarah Ogilvie, and Jane Shaw discussing their book Gen Z Explained with Kat Tembarger. You can learn more about this episode by checking out the show notes, and you can learn more about the center, including the recent announcement of the 2022-23 fellows class, by checking out the website casbs.stanford.edu. Or you can always join the conversation live on Twitter. We're @CASBSStanford. We've got more interviews and panels coming to the Human-Centered feed. So be sure you're following us in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human-Centered team, thanks for listening.