What's your opinion of the Gen Zs? Have you ever stopped to think about all the things that didn’t exist when you were a kid but take for granted now? Or all the things that you’ve never used but your parents and grandparents take for granted? Boomers for example never knew a world without cars. GenX never knew a world without TV. Millennials grew up in a world where video game consoles and compact discs were common. GenZ, the zoomers, may well go their whole lives without ever putting a disc of any kind into a player. Why? Because they have never known a world without the internet.
When they were born, their GenX and Millennial parents were already getting most of their information and starting to do a large part of their shopping online from their laptops and early smartphones. Now, we just call them phones. GenZ doesn’t just shop and get their info online, they do everything there. They get their music, movies, books (for those fortunate few who still read) and the rest of their entertainment online. In the wake of COVID, most of their learning, from first grade to college is online. Even their social lives are either online or heavily influenced by it. They spend almost all their time in front of some sort of screen.
The tendency of GenZ to share literally every part of their lives has certainly been leading to some interesting and in some cases troubling, developments. In the old days, a person who had issues with bullies in their lives could get away when they went home from work or school. Now, if they are on social media at all, they can’t get away. The bully follows them everywhere. Sure, you can always just stay off of social media but since that’s where everyone is, most will think leaving it would wind up being even worse.
Bullies aside, there is the problem of the unrealistic picture that a clever person can paint with social media. A little knowledge of lighting, camera angles and how to pick the right words can make an ordinary life look extraordinary. Instagram is a perfect example. Just because someone takes a picture of themselves putting up a board over a broken window doesn’t prove they are doing anything to help. In fact, it’s pretty likely that it was just a photo-op and the board had already been up for hours if not days. There is even the phenomenon of Instagram couples, people who take pictures together for the purpose of getting more followers and likes but don’t even talk in real life. The relationship someone might be envying is nothing more than a business partnership. Yet, many will compare their own lives to whatever they see online and find themselves feeling inadequate. This has led to massive increases in teenage depression and suicide. So what to do about it?
One big thing is that people need to stop associating their identities and worth with what they see online. A good portion of it is fake, and even if it isn’t you’re mostly seeing the good stuff. Even a real Instagram couple has bad days. They just don’t share them. Be careful who you associate too closely with online as well, there are too many people who seem to thrive on pushing others’ buttons.
Also, direct your social media time to things you care about. Instead of what filter is popular on Snapchat taking up your time, you could learn about something, or work for a company or cause that you care about. Nature conservation, history, space explorations, there is a whole real world out there that the internet has made more accessible than ever.
TARTLE can help with that direction. Using our marketplace you can get your information protected and shared with whatever cause it is that most interests and concerns you. Start putting the internet to work for you. Instead of letting it dominate your life, you can use it as a tool to connect to the material world that exists outside of the digital. And with TARTLE you can work to make it better.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
GenZ, the zoomers, may well go their whole lives without ever putting a disc of any kind into a player. Why? Because they have never known a world without the internet.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path.
Alexander McCaig (00:24):
[Foreign language 00:00:24] our TARTLE people listening to TARTLE Cast. Welcome back again for another episode here in the new studio. Jason, I would like you to share with me this article we want to focus on here.
Jason Rigby (00:40):
This is from NBC News, it's Teens Are Bad. How many generations have considered teenagers to be bad?
Alexander McCaig (00:47):
All the time. They've always been blamed them.
Jason Rigby (00:49):
It's always teens and then some negative thing, right?
Alexander McCaig (00:51):
It started with the Beatles and then-
Jason Rigby (00:54):
Yeah, exactly.
Alexander McCaig (00:54):
I'm sure it was earlier before that.
Jason Rigby (00:56):
I think everybody's looked at the younger generation as being out of control. But I mean, that's part of growing up, it's part of who you are. It's transitioning from a child to adult.
Alexander McCaig (01:06):
It's an evolutive process, okay?
Jason Rigby (01:08):
Yeah. You have to have things and do things. For me, whenever I looked at myself as a teenager, I was really dumb.
Alexander McCaig (01:18):
No.
Jason Rigby (01:18):
Yeah, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (01:19):
You?
Jason Rigby (01:19):
Yeah, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (01:20):
Are you kidding me? I made just a ton of mistakes.
Jason Rigby (01:25):
I was passionate about basketball, so I just played basketball all the time, lifted weights and tried to go out with girls but I was really awkward.
Alexander McCaig (01:34):
Now look, you're all washed up.
Jason Rigby (01:36):
Yeah. My knees are busted, everything's... Never made it to the NBA.
Alexander McCaig (01:41):
Hanging out here with a freaking burnout.
Jason Rigby (01:45):
I know, it's so sad. My teenage years were my best years. No.
Alexander McCaig (01:49):
Let's go to the live counseling session. This is an intervention. Do you want to come in?
Jason Rigby (01:54):
So, "Teens have never known a world without data sharing, and it's creating a false sense of security." That's the title. So data sharing and teens, Alex.
Alexander McCaig (02:05):
Why? They grew up with the internet. A lot of us grew up without the internet, and most of them have grown up with cell phones. All they do is share data. They've been on... Since the earliest days of their youth, they've had MySpace before there was Facebook. It's just like, bing, bang, boom. What do you expect? All they do is share all the time. All their communications, they're beyond just natural text messaging. Think about having them just use Snapchat to communicate. It's straight sharing constantly, all the time.
Jason Rigby (02:37):
All the time. And it's become a social norm. That's how they communicate.
Alexander McCaig (02:40):
That is how their communication works. It's not sending a text message. Text message is not sharing. They socially put all the stuff out there. They're story crazy.
Jason Rigby (02:48):
Yeah. I was watching somebody's teenager the other day, they were talking about their phone and stuff like that. So if I can get a teenager and they start talking to me, I always ask them, as a marketing standpoint, I'm always like, "What apps do you use? How do you use them? What's cool?" So I was talking to this guy, and it was really interesting. He goes straight to Snapchat right off the bat every time, and it's got the camera on there. And I was like, "Well, do you use your camera?" He goes, "No, I've never used my camera. I only use Snapchat."
Alexander McCaig (03:18):
No, they don't use their camera. They use the Snapchat one.
Jason Rigby (03:19):
Yeah, they use the Snapchat camera, which is what Snapchat wants, because they're a camera company.
Alexander McCaig (03:23):
Yeah, they're a camera company. It's only a world of sharing. That's all they know. Every time you do take a photo, something that essentially you own, they always want to share it. Whether it's a crap one or it's a really good one, it's getting shared regardless.
Jason Rigby (03:37):
Yeah. And when I think of everything online, I'm talking like from the hours that they spend on Netflix, to the hours that they're on video games, to the hours that all school now is done on laptops, if you really, really think about it, Alex, they're in front of a screen besides when they're sleeping.
Alexander McCaig (03:58):
Yeah, that's it. They've got some real big blue light. We've got these hot lamps over here on us, but they've got some blue light.
Jason Rigby (04:03):
Yeah. And generation Z, born in 1997 or later, which represents today's teenagers, they never knew a world where the internet not to exist as you had said. But what I thought was interesting was the level of anxiety, the level of depression, the level of bullying, the level of addiction, and then this. I know a lot of this Instagram type, I'm not blaming Instagram for this, but a lot of the Instagram type, fake... The magazines used to do that. Remember back in the day, the muscle fitness magazines and all those?
Alexander McCaig (04:35):
It's like an online social dysmorphia.
Jason Rigby (04:38):
Yeah, and it's created this feeling of inadequacy.
Alexander McCaig (04:42):
Why are all these young kids getting Botox? No joke.
Jason Rigby (04:49):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (04:49):
Back in the day, this is not the good old days, bullying is never good, but you met the bully at school or sometimes you'd find them across town whenever you were in town, and he'd club you up a couple of times. But now, you can geographically remove yourself from him, but once you're online, you've opened yourself up to all sorts of torment.
Jason Rigby (05:07):
Yeah. I know on girls especially, there's a lot of shaming.
Alexander McCaig (05:11):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Jason Rigby (05:12):
Where they'll put up, make a group of 20 girls and then send a horrible picture from another girl. I listened to a whole podcast on this and the guy was saying, suicides in teenage girls is up like 200%.
Alexander McCaig (05:30):
Yeah. And this is tough for law enforcement too because, now they are doing a lot of their tracking online.
Jason Rigby (05:35):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (05:35):
But what happens is, sharing is a double-edged sword. The more you share, the more you open yourself up. Because people are not very evolved at that stage, there's a lot of learning to be done. Still, even for people that are quite old, there's a lot of learning to be done. It's easy to attack someone especially behind the keyboard. You've seen it with trolls on YouTube, trolls on Facebook. Well, imagine if you had like an inner community circle of everyone in your school, it's only going to increase. These kids aren't going to stop sharing. It's what they do, right?
Jason Rigby (06:04):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (06:06):
When that leads to a feeling of inadequacy, it's like, you know that FOMO? So you've got FOMO because you're watching all these people do these things, and you think they're doing something incredible because they took one cool shot, but really, they're just posing up so they can make themselves feel better, because they saw someone else doing it. But in reality, the boyfriend and girlfriend, girlfriend and girlfriend, boyfriend and boyfriend are just screaming at each other after they took the shot up on the mountain. They're actually having a terrible day.
Jason Rigby (06:32):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (06:32):
But all you see is that one still frame, that one moment, and now you're judging them on a like and all these other things, depending on that.
Jason Rigby (06:39):
Yeah. I was talking to somebody the other day and they were talking about their boyfriend, and they're like, "We just do it for Instagram." So they don't even have... They're not like a real boyfriend girlfriend. They're just doing it because both of them look good, look physically good, and they can post really well to get the likes, and shares, and stuff like that.
Alexander McCaig (06:58):
What does that actually mean though? So when you talk about inadequacy, what you're finding is that this generation, with all the sharing, with all this data, it's not giving them anything of any weight. There's nothing to hold on to with it. There's really no growth that is happening with that type of sharing. What is there? It's almost like it's flattery, it's smoke and mirrors. It's this false perception of what's really going on.
Jason Rigby (07:19):
Yeah. Before we get into this next part, this was interesting too. I was talking to the same person, because every time I see a young person, I'm going to ask, just because I'm curious, we have our big seven and everybody can see that up on the board up there, Share Data Earn Money Change Your World, we'll have them up there. We're going to have seven slides with all of them.
Alexander McCaig (07:38):
Yeah, we'll make some nice artwork to go with it.
Jason Rigby (07:40):
So you guys can look at that. But I asked this person, what's their number one thing, and they've done studies on this, and it was funny. So far, the people I've asked, it's been right. The study has been right, and that's climate change.
Alexander McCaig (07:52):
Really?
Jason Rigby (07:52):
Yeah. Every young person that I talk to and ask, they always go, "Number one, climate change."
Alexander McCaig (07:57):
Yeah, because they're like, "That's my future."
Jason Rigby (07:59):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (07:59):
More so than worrying about corporate transparency, I'm freaking worried about like an ocean rising up, things drying up and me going into another ice age.
Jason Rigby (08:08):
Yeah. We have employees in the Philippines now, and just thinking, 40, 70 years from now, that could be gone.
Alexander McCaig (08:13):
Yeah. Like 50% of the island's gone.
Jason Rigby (08:14):
110 million people.
Alexander McCaig (08:16):
Where are they going to go?
Jason Rigby (08:16):
50 million displaced.
Alexander McCaig (08:18):
What happens when you displace people? We saw what happened when people got displaced from like Libya and all those other places, trying to go across the Mediterranean, Algiers, whatever-
Jason Rigby (08:26):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (08:27):
... Into Europe. What do you do? Where do they go? It's too many people, too little landmass, and then you start displacing them, it's a problem. Maybe we're getting away from that-
Jason Rigby (08:35):
Yeah, but the similar dangers posed are unethical data use, and it talks about it in this article, privacy, violations and algorithmic bias. What it talks about is how unaware we are of this potential risk, and then how, especially teenagers with these online applications, social media platforms and other base services that are heavily reliant on data accumulation.
Alexander McCaig (09:02):
Yeah, it's all that data accumulation. So, if this generation is really setting a foundation for generating all that data, it needs to be respected properly. And on top of that, if they're finding that their current sharing on their social media is lacking value, there's a place where they can go to actually find great worth in sharing, something tangible they can hold onto, that can benefit their future in a financial way, and a socio-economic political climate based way if they want to. That's by using the marketplace, the TARTLE Marketplace.
Alexander McCaig (09:38):
Now, if I'm so used to sharing, well it's like, "Great. Share and get paid to share, and you can put it towards the climate stability that you're trying to fix." That's what you want. You want stabilization of your climate. That's number one for you, for your whole generation. You guys love to share? This tool was designed for you. So this generation, what is it? Gen Z?
Jason Rigby (09:55):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Alexander McCaig (09:56):
Gen Z, you're at the end of the alphabet, but you're first in our mind because, you're going to be the ones that have your children take over the positions of power and resources that this world has so wonderfully crafted in our world of capitalism. It's time for you to step up and make that change.
Jason Rigby (10:15):
Well, you also have to... Gen Z also unfortunately, they're going to be old when we're fucked. And I'm using that word because I wanted to make sure that-
Alexander McCaig (10:25):
It actually resonates well. Yeah, that's the word.
Jason Rigby (10:27):
And then number two, their children could possibly be extinct.
Alexander McCaig (10:33):
Double fucked.
Jason Rigby (10:34):
Yes, yes, exactly. So, it gets real when you think about that. Gen Z is screwed.
Alexander McCaig (10:41):
For older generations that are phasing out, and they've got all the material wealth and everything, they're not looking behind.
Jason Rigby (10:47):
Mm-mm (negative).
Alexander McCaig (10:48):
Whatever. We're lucky that the generation before millennials is doing their thing. Shout out to some people like Elon Musk, people that are in that flavor of entrepreneurialism.
Jason Rigby (11:00):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (11:01):
But we have a limited time as these generations continue to crop up, and so we've got to make sure that we set up proper, healthy foundation for them to continue to evolve.
Jason Rigby (11:14):
I think one of the things, and he talks about this in the article and I think it's so important, is this Personal Identifiable Information, PII, the behavioral data, the preferential data, the usage data, and all of these activities just constantly getting accessed and analyzed, and used to retain and attract users on these social media sites, and then keep engagers, users, longer so that they can monetize that engagement.
Alexander McCaig (11:37):
You're attracting people to something that's not delivering them any sort of substantial value, and you're the only one reaping a benefit from it because you can advertise to them. But at what cost to humanity?
Jason Rigby (11:49):
That's the question that needs to be asked.
Alexander McCaig (11:51):
Yeah. At what cost?
Jason Rigby (11:52):
At what cost to humanity? We're not saying... Everybody thinks that we're... I've had a couple of comments that are like, "Well, you guys are down on Instagram or Facebook or Google."
Alexander McCaig (12:01):
No.
Jason Rigby (12:01):
No. We're asking them to look into their consciousness and say... Because, could you think about that? We would love it if Google and Facebook teamed up with us and said, "Hey, let's all work. Let's figure out these big seven. There's something we can all agree on."
Alexander McCaig (12:19):
We wouldn't have to have TARTLE.
Jason Rigby (12:21):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (12:21):
Guess what? They haven't done it. No matter how much people scream, shout, walk in the streets, talk about it, no matter how many unethical things they do, no one did anything. So that's why we're doing something. Does that make sense?
Jason Rigby (12:32):
Yeah, that makes total sense.
Alexander McCaig (12:33):
We wouldn't have to be here if they would do... We're not bashing on them. They just won't wake up and smell the coffee.
Jason Rigby (12:37):
Yeah-
Alexander McCaig (12:38):
We do. We've got two cups of it right here.
Jason Rigby (12:40):
We've got two cups-
Alexander McCaig (12:41):
Yeah, two cups of coffee.
Jason Rigby (12:42):
... For you today.
Alexander McCaig (12:43):
If you want a TARTLE mug, I'll throw it on the website. Maybe you can purchase one.
Jason Rigby (12:47):
We're going to do some hidden URLs, like links with Easter eggs. It's like an Easter egg hunt. No. But have you ever seen this?
Alexander McCaig (12:56):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (12:56):
So, you just do a URL and a little thing, and we can put them on Instagram and stuff like that, Facebook or whatever. Then, you've get to figure out the trail and then it finds it. And then on that website, it's just a landing page and you put your information in.
Alexander McCaig (13:10):
I think that's great.
Jason Rigby (13:11):
Yeah. Let's see who catches onto that.
Alexander McCaig (13:13):
Who's the first one on the breadcrumb? Who's going on the Hansel and Gretel thing? There's no witch at the end.
Jason Rigby (13:18):
Who's going on the flock?
Alexander McCaig (13:19):
Yeah. Who's going to use the flock? Who calls it a flock?When I think of flock, I think of hunting and like-
Jason Rigby (13:26):
Yeah. What's the thing where they flock you or something like that? What is that?
Alexander McCaig (13:32):
No, flog.
Jason Rigby (13:33):
Flog. That's the one I'm thinking of.
Alexander McCaig (13:34):
Yeah you get whipped with a thing on your back.
Jason Rigby (13:36):
Whipped yeah, like Game of Thrones style.
Alexander McCaig (13:37):
Yeah, Game of Thrones. Now flocking is like, people flock to a geese flock.
Jason Rigby (13:40):
Well, don't they do it... Don't you do that with your tree, if you want to paint it white or whatever?
Alexander McCaig (13:44):
Flock a tree?
Jason Rigby (13:45):
Yeah. You know the white stuff that you spray on the tree?
Alexander McCaig (13:49):
Flock a tree.
Jason Rigby (13:50):
I think it's... Is it flock?
Alexander McCaig (13:51):
I don't know if it's called flock. I typed in flock a tree. Yeah, how to flock a tree, with a K at the end. Flock a tree two ways. Thank you. Thank you Better Homes and Gardens.
Jason Rigby (14:00):
Oh, awesome. We're out. Get the flock out of here.
Alexander McCaig (14:04):
Get the flock out. I'm flocking out of here right now. Flock this. Flock this podcast.
Jason Rigby (14:11):
Flock the TV. Flock the lights.
Alexander McCaig (14:14):
Flock it all.
Jason Rigby (14:15):
We're trying to do this podcast, there are people out there-
Alexander McCaig (14:19):
Flock that camera.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
[crosstalk 00:14:20] source data defines the path. What's your data worth?
Speaker 1 (14:27):
(silence)
