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The Impact of Internet on Younger Generations

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Gen Z are not ‘coddled.’ They are highly collaborative, self-reliant and pragmatic, according to new Stanford-affiliated research

Generation Z, the first generation never to know the world without the internet, value diversity and finding their own unique identities, says Stanford scholar Roberta Katz.

Generation Z – also known as Gen Z, iGen or postmillennial – are a highly collaborative cohort that cares deeply about others and have a pragmatic attitude about how to address a set of inherited issues like climate change, according to research by Roberta Katz, a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) .

Roberta Katz (Image credit: Charles Katz)

Since 2017, Katz, along with her co-authors, Sarah Ogilvie, a linguist at the University of Oxford and formerly at Stanford; Jane Shaw, a historian who is the principal of Harris Manchester College at Oxford and was previously dean for Religious Life at Stanford; and Linda Woodhead, a sociologist at King’s College London, collaborated as part of a multi-year CASBS research project to better understand a generation who, born between the mid-1990s to around 2010, grew up with digital tools always at their fingertips.

Their findings are based on some 120 interviews gathered on three college campuses – Stanford University; Foothill College, a community college in Los Altos Hills, California; and Lancaster University, a research university in Lancaster, England. A set of focus groups and two surveys in the U.S. and the U.K. were administered to a representative sample of over 2,000 adults aged between 18 and 25 years old.

Contributing further to the scholar’s understanding of Gen Z was the creation of the “ iGen corpus ,” a 70 million item digital repository of spoken and written language of people aged 16 to 25 years that included transcripts from the researchers’ interviews and focus groups, as well as public data from the social media platforms Twitter, Reddit, Twitch, 4chan and YouTube, as well as memes and copypastas from Facebook and Instagram. Ogilvie, the principal investigator on the corpus research team, along with a team of Stanford student research assistants, applied machine learning algorithms to discover the many ways in which young people today express themselves.

Taken together, the scholars’ research offers a snapshot of who Gen Zers really are, what matters to them and why. Findings from Katz’s and her co-authors’ research are detailed in a new book, Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Here, Katz discusses some of what she and her colleagues learned from their extensive research into how Gen Zers, the most diverse generation yet , experience and understand the world.

Based on your research, can you briefly describe the typical Gen Zer?

In summary, a typical Gen Zer is a self-driver who deeply cares about others, strives for a diverse community, is highly collaborative and social, values flexibility, relevance, authenticity and non-hierarchical leadership, and, while dismayed about inherited issues like climate change, has a pragmatic attitude about the work that has to be done to address those issues.

How has growing up in an internet-connected society shaped how Gen Zers see and experience the world and everyday life?

Internet-related technologies have dramatically changed the speed, scale and scope of human communications, resulting in significant changes in how people work, play, shop, find friends and learn about other people. For Gen Zers living in the United States and Britain (the two places we studied), the “norm” they experienced as children was a world that operated at speed, scale and scope. They developed an early facility with powerful digital tools that allowed them to be self-reliant as well as collaborative. Similarly, because they could learn about people and cultures around the globe from an early age, they developed a greater appreciation for diversity and the importance of finding their own unique identities.

What do people most misunderstand or get wrong about Gen Zers?

For quite a while, people were critical of what they saw as a generation that was too coddled and “soft.” Gen Zers were called “snowflakes” and “unwilling to grow up.” But much of that negative judgment came from a misunderstanding of what it is like to grow up in today’s world when compared with how their elders grew up. As an example, Gen Zers have been criticized as lazy because they don’t have after-school or summer jobs. But many Gen Zers have been earning significant dollars online through a variety of activities, even including product placements on fashion-advice sites. Another example concerns drivers’ licenses: older people, for whom getting a driver’s license was a rite of passage toward adulthood, have criticized Gen Zers who do not rush to take their driver’s tests when they turn 16, but this criticism fails to consider that Gen Zers have no need to drive when they have ready access to ride services like Uber and Lyft.

Do you think Gen Zers get an undeserved bad rap?

Yes, but that is changing. Of late, many people are beginning to appreciate the strength and pragmatism of Gen Zers.

What were you most surprised to learn about Gen Zers?

Our biggest surprise came in response to this interview question: “What type of communication do you like best?” We expected the interviewees to respond with their favorite type of digital communication – e.g., text, email, chat group, DM, FaceTime, Skype, etc. – but instead nearly every single person said their favorite form of communication was “in person.”

As Gen Zers enter the workforce, what would be helpful for other generations to know about their post-millennial colleagues?

For those who are now experiencing Gen Zers in the workplace, my advice is to recognize that these new colleagues are used to working collaboratively and flexibly, with an eye to being efficient in getting the job done. They are pragmatic and value direct communication, authenticity and relevance. They also value self-care. They may be more likely than older people were when they were the age of the Gen Zers to question rules and authority because they are so used to finding what they need on their own. They are not always right; often they don’t know what they need, especially in a new setting, and this is where inter-generational dialogue can be so helpful. Both the older and the younger colleagues can learn from the other, in each case by listening with more respect, appreciation and trust. The older colleague can learn some helpful new ways of getting a job done, while the younger colleague may learn good reasons for why things have long been done in a certain way. Without that dialogue, we’ll have a wasteful tug of war between the past and the future. The goal is for older and younger generations to work together, with openness and trust, to ensure that the wisdom – but not what has become the excess baggage – of the past is not lost to the future.

How has studying Gen Zers changed your own interactions with this generation?

I came to understand that Gen Zers are, on the whole, much better adapted to life in a digital age than those of us who are older and that they can be very frustrated by what appear to them to be outdated and often irrelevant ways of doing things. As one simple example that we cite in the book, an older person would likely assume that any organization needs a set of officers, for that has been the norm in their experience, but a Gen Zer would say, from their lived experience, that there is no need to elect officers (or other leaders) if the group can accomplish its mission through online collaborations that take advantage of the participants’ diverse skills.

In my own interactions with Gen Zers, I am much more likely than I used to be to listen closely to what they say, and to refrain from making a judgment about their ideas, values and behaviors based on an assumption that they are wrong and I am right. They often do things differently, have some different values and have some different ideas about the future than I do, and I have come to appreciate and trust that they often have a new and better approach. Many of us who are older have a different understanding of how the world works, which is rooted in our own early experiences, so it’s easy for us to assume that the world will continue to operate in much the same way going forward and that the young people need to adapt to that older way of living. But the younger people are necessarily future-oriented, and as we all are increasingly coming to appreciate, the digital-age future is quite different from the industrial-age past.

For 13 years, Katz served under Stanford University Presidents John Hennessy and Marc Tessier-Lavigne as the associate vice president for strategic planning. She also served as President Tessier-Lavigne’s interim chief of staff until early 2017. Katz has been deeply involved in the facilitation of a variety of interdisciplinary research initiatives at Stanford, and she is a current member of the CASBS board of directors.

This research was funded by the Knight Foundation.

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Essay on Importance of Internet: Samples for Students

Updated on
Nov 23, 2023

Internet is not just a need or luxury, it has become a household necessity. It was used as a source of entertainment but now it is impossible to work in offices or study without the Internet. When the global pandemic locked everyone in their house, it became an important medium to connect, study and work. Students were able to study without the risk of catching COVID-19 because of the Internet. The importance of the internet is also a common topic in various entrance exams such as SAT , TOEFL , and UPSC . In this blog, you will learn how to write an essay on the importance of the Internet.

This Blog Includes:

Tips to write the perfect essay on internet, sample 1 of essay on the importance of the internet (100 words), sample essay 2 – importance of the internet (150 words), sample essay 3 on use of internet for student (300 words).

Nikita Puri

Nikita is a creative writer and editor, who is always ready to learn new skills. She has great knowledge about study abroad universities, researching and writing blogs about them. Being a perfectionist, she has a habit of keeping her tasks complete on time before the OCD hits her. When Nikita is not busy working, you can find her eating while binge-watching The office. Also, she breathes music. She has done her bachelor's from Delhi University and her master's from Jamia Millia Islamia.

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25 Internet’s Impact on Millennials

Matthew Gibson

25.1 Introduction

Millennials: People born between 1981 and 1996.
LAN (Local Area Network): A group of computers and devices that share a common communications line or wireless link to a server in a specific area.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language): the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator): Specific address given to a unique and specific location on the web.
Influencer: Someone who has established credibility in a specific social media industry with access to a large audience, and can persuade their social media followers how to act based on their recommendations.
Instant Gratification: Wanting something or desiring something right away rather than waiting.

Learning Objectives

Understand the basic history of the internet and social media.
Given the past, consider what the future holds for the internet.
Think about what problems the internet has caused and what problems it has solved.

When it comes to growing up with the internet, the first group of people to truly grow up with it were millennials , people born between 1981 and 1996. The idea of the internet was first created in 1962, but it did not have the resources for it to thrive until the millennial generation. This led to the generation growing up and evolving with the internet as they evolved as well. With the beginning of the generation growing up and developing in the late 80s to early 90s, the technology available for them was limited with the first main use being emails. The later part of this generation however that grew up and developed during the late ‘90s to early 2000s had much more advanced technology such as google, social media, YouTube and internet blogs.

Although the internet and social media have had many positive influences on millennials for the most part, there are negative aspects such as hate speech, cyberbullying, suicidal tendencies and political tampering. These problems became more prevalent in the late 2000’s to 2010’s in which many millennials were affected by this more than other generations. The creation of the world wide web has ultimately impacted many generations in negative and positive ways, but no other generation had to navigate the internet on their own than millennials who grew up and adapted with the technology.

Key Takeaways

In the span of only 10 years, the percentage of American’s on the internet increased from 1% to 40% showing how rapidly the internet and social media are advancing. The benefactors of this surge in technology are the Millennials as they are getting to grow up using this technology instead of having to adapt to it.

25.2 When did the internet become prevalent in the everyday lives of millennials?

In 1990, less than 1% of the population had access to the internet regularly, compared to 2000 where almost 50% of the population did (Roser). No one was impacted by the growth of this technology more than the Millennials who began to grow up as pioneers for the internet. The first iterations of the internet involved using LAN, a local area network, which greatly limited the range of internet as well as capabilities. In 1990, the first HTML ; hypertext markup language, and URL ; uniform resource locator, came out, making a large impact and making the world wide web look more similar to how it does today. In 1995, Microsoft launched their first version of Windows with Windows 95, as well as Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Internet Explorer and Java all being created in this same year (Jefferson Online).

Once all of these systems and internet programs started to come out, they became more and more accessible and used for more purposes. This helps to eventually bring internet and computers into homes rather than having to go to a library or somewhere else to access it. The home computer then opens up many possibilities for the internet including video games, social media, and many other forms of entertainment.

“”Ethernet LAN”” by T. Seppelt is licensed under CC BY 4.0

The Local Area Network allowed people to be connected in a close proximity in email and video games as well as other activities before wireless internet was available. The computers are connected to a single server using ethernet cables.

25.2.1 Early forms of social media

The early internet had brought people together online through email and blogs, and other smaller media sources, but it wasn’t until social media platforms such as Myspace and Facebook became popular that the internet truly became connected. Myspace was founded in 2003 and by 2006 it was the most visited website on the planet until Facebook, which was founded in 2004, took over this spot in 2008 (Maryville University). Both of these websites were pretty similar and allowed you to share your photos, music, videos, thoughts etc. which allowed people to connect with each other that wouldn’t usually connect. This allowed long distance family members and friends to stay in touch and connected, but also created an environment of the more modern social media presence among younger people, and at this time millennials were the ones starting this.

“myspace website screenshot” by Spencer E Holtaway is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

25.2.2 YouTube

Another large form of social media that arose during this generation and is still growing up to 60% per year is YouTube (Fortson). YouTube is a social media platform for people to post whatever they would like to in video forms all while they can see how many views, likes, dislikes, comments and more they are getting on their videos. The range of videos on this platform are limitless, as long as they don’t violate the code, ranging from how-to videos to funny cat videos and more. The information on this website is practically unlimited with one hour of video being uploaded to YouTube every second and over 4 billion videos being viewed per day (Bullas).

This begins to lead to the rise of internet celebrities and social media influencers, most of them being millennials. This idea of influencers has not always been the same, but began on these social media sites. This opened a whole new way for people to make a living and defied the previous generations’ thoughts of how to make a living. Whether it’s from making money through the number of streams or through advertisements, there are countless amounts of people on YouTube using that as their job.

“youtube-logo” by UKBERRI.NET is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

25.2.3 Google

Another online resource that has greatly impacted Millennials is google. This internet resource provides information instantly at anyone’s fingertips. This opens up an entire new pathway of learning information and searching for information. Before this generation, if you wanted to find something out, you would have to search for it in person at libraries or ask around but with this new technology, you can type a few words and instantaneously have millions of answers. This leads to the increase in Instant Gratification , or people feeling uneasy about waiting for answers or things and want it right away. With the popularity of google increasing it leads to a decline in people going to libraries and other sources of information.

YouTube, Myspace and Facebook were the first three major forms of social media that took over the millennial generation in the early 2000s leading to greater connectivity and interaction among this generation specifically.

25.3 Impact of social media

A darker part of the internet and social media that is not always brought up is the talk of suicide and depression which has increased since social media has been prevalent. Social media and the internet is a great way for people to come together and interact, but those interactions are not always good. The impact of social media has led to the process of cyberbullying, which the millennial generation was the first to experience.

Another impact of social media and the internet is that it can affect election cycles through advertisements and endorsements. With newer demographic data for many of these websites, they are able to be targeted more easily and influenced one way or another based on advertisements or endorsements. Vassia Gueorgieva wrote an article addressing this situation for the 2008 election cycle and how Myspace and YouTube affected the voting (Gueorgieva). With the internet and social media being run by ads to fund them, political candidates, especially during election times, will target demographics on these media websites which are mostly newer voters in the millennial generation. This allows politicians and large organizations to spread the image and message they want to be spread on their terms. Now advertising for politics using the internet and advertisements is not inherently bad, but many politicians do not have enough money or influence to spread their message, giving those with more money or sponsors a better chance of getting more votes.

25.4 Future outlook

The internet is constantly changing and getting smarter as time goes on. People are beginning to make more lifestyle choices and employment choices via the internet than ever before. An anomaly that caused the internet to become more connected was COVID-19 where people were stuck in their houses but were able to communicate using the internet and social media. This shows how humans have adapted their lifestyles to the internet so much that even when people can’t see each other in person, they can still communicate via the internet. Even though the modern internet has been around for almost 40 years, we have barely scratched the surface on the possibilities of what we can do.

Suicidal Thoughts on Myspace Case Study

In a study done where an algorithm was made to find suicidal behaviors among people on Myspace from ages 13-24, it revealed that more than 29% of the sample size had posted something about suicide (Cash 2013). This study was done using data that ranged from 2003 to 2012, the time when millennials would mostly be using this site and would be in the sample size. This study reveals how the increase in social media and connectivity of thoughts leads to all thoughts being shared, even the darker ones. These profiles that were selected for the study being in this age range of teenagers to young adults show how the younger generation is being influenced on the internet by each other through social media. The influences come in positive and in this case as well as others, negative and counterproductive to the platform’s primary goals.

Social media has had a large impact on society in many positive ways and many negative ways. It has helped to connect people that might not have been connected before as well as meeting new people, but it has also caused many harmful effects to many people.

Chapter Summary

The internet and world wide web was a drastic addition to humanity as a whole in many ways. Its creation allowed people to connect with each other easier than ever before as well as making information available in seconds that would otherwise take forever to find out. Through the creation of social media and search engines, it completely altered the way humans interacted with each other and learned new information, and no generation was impacted more than millennials. Kids and teenagers during this time begin to spend less time interacting in person and opt to spend more time on the internet which can be seen increasing to this day.

Review Questions

1.What social media site was the first social media created, mentioned in this chapter?

a) Facebook

d) Instagram

2. What percentage of the American population were on the internet in 1990?

3. What was the first iteration of the internet where computers were connected only locally and not wirelessly?

b 2. c 3. d

Food For Thought

What do you think the future holds for the internet and social media?
What do you think can be done in the future to make the internet safer?
Do you think that the internet and social media have positively or negatively affected modern society?

Bullas, J. (2021, January 4). 30 mind numbing YouTube facts,figures and Statistics – Infographic. Jeffbullas’s Blog. Retrieved November 9, 2022, from https://www.jeffbullas.com/35-mind-numbing-youtube-facts-figures-and-statistics-infographic/

Cash, Scottye J., et al. “Adolescent Suicide Statements on MySpace.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, vol. 16, no. 3, 2013, pp. 166–74, https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2012.0098 .

Fortson, K. (2015, November 16). YouTube’s impact on our society. The Mycenaean. Retrieved November 9, 2022, from https://www.themycenaean.org/2015/11/youtubes-impact-on-our-society/

Gueorguieva, Vassia. “Voters, MySpace, and YouTube: The Impact of Alternative Communication Channels on the 2006 Election Cycle and Beyond.” Social Science Computer Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 2008, pp. 288–300, https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439307305636 .

Jefferson Online. (2020, March 10). An internet history timeline: From the 1960s to now. Jefferson Online. Retrieved November 18, 2022, from https://online.jefferson.edu/business/internet-history-timeline/

Josifovska, M. (2022, July 30). Millennial Marketing Statistics – truelist 2022. TrueList. Retrieved November 16, 2022, from https://truelist.co/blog/millennial-marketing-statistics/

Maryville University. (2021, March 3). The evolution of social media: How did it begin and where could it go next? Maryville Online. Retrieved November 20, 2022, from https://online.maryville.edu/blog/evolution-social-media/

Moise, Adrian Cristian (2014). Aspects Regarding the Impact of the Internet on the Society, Journal of Advanced Research in Law and Economics, (Volume V, Winter), 2(10): 157 – 170, doi: 10.14505/jarle.v5.2(10).11.

Roser, M., Ritchie, H., Ortiz-Ospina, E. (2015) – “Internet”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/internet

Vogels, E. A. (2020, September 23). Millennials stand out for their technology use, but older generations also Embrace Digital Life. Pew Research Center. Retrieved November 16, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/09/us-generations-technology-use/

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Regions & Countries

Defining generations: where millennials end and generation z begins.

Our approach to generational analysis has evolved to incorporate new considerations. Learn more about how we currently report on generations , and read tips for consuming generations research .

For decades, Pew Research Center has been committed to measuring public attitudes on key issues and documenting differences in those attitudes across demographic groups. One lens often employed by researchers at the Center to understand these differences is that of generation.

Generations provide the opportunity to look at Americans both by their place in the life cycle – whether a young adult, a middle-aged parent or a retiree – and by their membership in a cohort of individuals who were born at a similar time.

As we’ve examined in past work , generational cohorts give researchers a tool to analyze changes in views over time. They can provide a way to understand how different formative experiences (such as world events and technological, economic and social shifts) interact with the life-cycle and aging process to shape people’s views of the world. While younger and older adults may differ in their views at a given moment, generational cohorts allow researchers to examine how today’s older adults felt about a given issue when they themselves were young, as well as to describe how the trajectory of views might differ across generations.

Pew Research Center has been studying the Millennial generation for more than a decade . But by 2018, it became clear to us that it was time to determine a cutoff point between Millennials and the next generation. Turning 38 this year, the oldest Millennials are well into adulthood , and they first entered adulthood before today’s youngest adults were born.

In order to keep the Millennial generation analytically meaningful, and to begin looking at what might be unique about the next cohort, Pew Research Center decided a year ago to use 1996 as the last birth year for Millennials for our future work. Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 23 to 38 in 2019) is considered a Millennial, and anyone born from 1997 onward is part of a new generation.

Generation dominates online searches for information on the post-Millennial generation

Since the oldest among this rising generation are just turning 22 this year, and most are still in their teens or younger, we hesitated at first to give them a name – Generation Z , the iGeneration and Homelanders were some early candidates. (In our first in-depth look at this generation, we used the term “post-Millennials” as a placeholder.) But over the past year, Gen Z has taken hold in popular culture and journalism. Sources ranging from Merriam-Webster and Oxford to the Urban Dictionary now include this name for the generation that follows Millennials, and Google Trends data show that “Generation Z” is far outpacing other names in people’s searches for information. While there is no scientific process for deciding when a name has stuck, the momentum is clearly behind Gen Z.

Generational cutoff points aren’t an exact science. They should be viewed primarily as tools, allowing for the kinds of analyses detailed above. But their boundaries are not arbitrary. Generations are often considered by their span, but again there is no agreed upon formula for how long that span should be. At 16 years (1981 to 1996), our working definition of Millennials is equivalent in age span to their preceding generation, Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980). By this definition, both are shorter than the span of the Baby Boomers (19 years) – the only generation officially designated by the U.S. Census Bureau , based on the famous surge in post-WWII births in 1946 and a significant decline in birthrates after 1964.

Unlike the Boomers, there are no comparably definitive thresholds by which later generational boundaries are defined. But for analytical purposes, we believe 1996 is a meaningful cutoff between Millennials and Gen Z for a number of reasons, including key political, economic and social factors that define the Millennial generation’s formative years.

Most Millennials were between the ages of 5 and 20 when the 9/11 terrorist attacks shook the nation, and many were old enough to comprehend the historical significance of that moment, while most members of Gen Z have little or no memory of the event. Millennials also grew up in the shadow of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which sharpened broader views of the parties and contributed to the intense political polarization that shapes the current political environment. And most Millennials were between 12 and 27 during the 2008 election, where the force of the youth vote became part of the political conversation and helped elect the first black president. Added to that is the fact that Millennials are the most racially and ethnically diverse adult generation in the nation’s history. Yet the next generation – Generation Z – is even more diverse .

Beyond politics, most Millennials came of age and entered the workforce facing the height of an economic recession. As is well documented , many of Millennials’ life choices, future earnings and entrance to adulthood have been shaped by this recession in a way that may not be the case for their younger counterparts. The long-term effects of this “slow start” for Millennials will be a factor in American society for decades.

Technology, in particular the rapid evolution of how people communicate and interact, is another generation-shaping consideration. Baby Boomers grew up as television expanded dramatically, changing their lifestyles and connection to the world in fundamental ways. Generation X grew up as the computer revolution was taking hold, and Millennials came of age during the internet explosion.

In this progression, what is unique for Generation Z is that all of the above have been part of their lives from the start. The iPhone launched in 2007, when the oldest Gen Zers were 10. By the time they were in their teens, the primary means by which young Americans connected with the web was through mobile devices, WiFi and high-bandwidth cellular service. Social media, constant connectivity and on-demand entertainment and communication are innovations Millennials adapted to as they came of age. For those born after 1996, these are largely assumed.

The implications of growing up in an “always on” technological environment are only now coming into focus. Recent research has shown dramatic shifts in youth behaviors, attitudes and lifestyles – both positive and concerning – for those who came of age in this era. What we don’t know is whether these are lasting generational imprints or characteristics of adolescence that will become more muted over the course of their adulthood. Beginning to track this new generation over time will be of significant importance.

Pew Research Center is not the first to draw an analytical line between Millennials and the generation to follow them, and many have offered well-reasoned arguments for drawing that line a few years earlier or later than where we have. Perhaps, as more data are collected over the years, a clear, singular delineation will emerge. We remain open to recalibrating if that occurs. But more than likely the historical, technological, behavioral and attitudinal data will show more of a continuum across generations than a threshold. As has been the case in the past, this means that the differences within generations can be just as great as the differences across generations, and the youngest and oldest within a commonly defined cohort may feel more in common with bordering generations than the one to which they are assigned. This is a reminder that generations themselves are inherently diverse and complex groups, not simple caricatures.

In the near term, you will see a number of reports and analyses from the Center that continue to build on our portfolio of generational research. Today, we issued a report looking – for the first time – at how members of Generation Z view some of the key social and political issues facing the nation today and how their views compare with those of older generations. To be sure, the views of this generation are not fully formed and could change considerably as they age and as national and global events intervene. Even so, this early look provides some compelling clues about how Gen Z will help shape the future political landscape.

In the coming weeks, we will be releasing demographic analyses that compare Millennials to previous generations at the same stage in their life cycle to see if the demographic, economic and household dynamics of Millennials continue to stand apart from their predecessors. In addition, we will build on our research on teens’ technology use by exploring the daily lives, aspirations and pressures today’s 13- to 17-year-olds face as they navigate the teenage years.

Yet, we remain cautious about what can be projected onto a generation when they remain so young. Donald Trump may be the first U.S. president most Gen Zers know as they turn 18, and just as the contrast between George W. Bush and Barack Obama shaped the political debate for Millennials, the current political environment may have a similar effect on the attitudes and engagement of Gen Z, though how remains a question. As important as today’s news may seem, it is more than likely that the technologies, debates and events that will shape Generation Z are still yet to be known.

We look forward to spending the next few years studying this generation as it enters adulthood. All the while, we’ll keep in mind that generations are a lens through which to understand societal change, rather than a label with which to oversimplify differences between groups.

Note: This is an update of a post that was originally published March 1, 2018, to announce the Center’s adoption of 1996 as an endpoint to births in the Millennial generation.

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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

What is Gen Z?

Gen Z is currently the second-youngest generation, with millennials before and Generation Alpha after. Like every generation, Gen Z’s behaviors are shaped by how they grew up. Young people today have come of age in the shadow of climate doom, pandemic lockdowns, and fears of economic collapse. The first Gen Zers were born when the internet had just achieved widespread use. They’re called “ digital natives ”—the first generation to grow up with the internet as a part of daily life. The generation spans a wide range: the oldest Gen Zers have jobs and mortgages, while the youngest are still preteens. Globally, Gen Z is growing fast: Gen Zers will make up a quarter of the population of the Asia–Pacific region by 2025. Read on to understand what makes Gen Z tick.

Learn more about our Growth, Marketing & Sales Practice .

What is a generation?

Get to know and directly engage with senior mckinsey experts on gen z..

Anita Balchandani is a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office; Erica Coe is a partner in the Atlanta office; Kana Enomoto is a senior knowledge expert and associate partner in the Washington, DC, office; Tracy Francis is a senior partner in the São Paulo office; and Jennifer Schmidt is a senior partner in the Minneapolis office.

No doubt you’re already familiar with the concept of generation within families. Your grandparents, parents, children, and children’s children all make up a distinct generation in relation to you. But each of them also belongs to a diffuse category of their peers, grouped together based on when they were born and what they experience during their lives. Social scientists have studied generations—in theory and more practically—for millennia. More recently, thinkers like August Comte have argued that generational change is the engine behind social change. More specifically, each generation entering into a new life stage at more or less the same time is the pulse that creates the history of a society.

Specific major-scale events can also shape the outlook of a generation and are often reflected in how they’re named. The Lost Generation, for example, is named for the malaise and disillusionment experienced by people who lived through World War I. Later, the Greatest Generation was named for the heroic sacrifice many made during World War II. Their children, born soon after the war ended, are called baby boomers; their outlook, in turn, was colored by the Vietnam War and the social upheavals of the 1960s. More recently, millennials’ worldviews have been shaped by the September 11 attacks and the proliferation of the internet.

Of course, these are generalizations: every so-called generation comprises a multitude of unique individuals with their own opinions, values, behaviors, and plans for the future. Some social scientists even believe that the practice of studying generations can obfuscate what motivates people on an individual level. Generational theory should be understood with this caveat, and used only as a way of thinking about society, rather than the gospel truth.

What is unique about Gen Z?

While there are substantive differences within the cohort known as Gen Z, there are a few commonalities its members share .

As the first real digital natives, Gen Zers—speaking generally—are extremely online . Gen Zers are known for working, shopping, dating, and making friends online; in Asia, Gen Zers spend six or more hours per day on their phones .

Digital natives often turn to the internet when looking for any kind of information, including news and reviews prior to making a purchase . They flit between sites, apps, and social media feeds , each one forming a different part of their online ecosystem. Having grown up with social media, Gen Zers curate their online selves more carefully than those in prior generations have, and they are more likely to turn to trends of anonymity, more personalized feeds, and a smaller online presence, even as they voraciously consume media online .

Video-sharing social media sites have seen a meteoric rise as Gen Z comes of age. TikTok currently rules trends, feelings, and culture for Gen Zers, who make up 60 percent of the app’s one billion-plus users . Gen Zers flock to corners of the internet where they can discuss their passions and interests with those who share them—from gaming to K-pop —bonding with both people they know in real life and ones they’ve only met online.

Gen Z also faces an unprecedented behavioral health crisis: US Gen Zers surveyed by McKinsey report the least positive outlook and the highest prevalence of mental illness of any generation, and European respondents report struggling with self-stigma. This pessimism is fueled by growing global unrest , wars and disruptions , financial crises , and educational interruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic . Feelings of “climate anxiety” are also widely reported : many Gen Zers report that they think about the fate of the planet on a daily basis.

They are already seeing decreased economic opportunity and don’t assume a social safety net will be there to catch them as pensions shrink, saving for retirement gets more difficult , and the older population grows . Already, 58 percent of Gen Zers in a recent McKinsey survey reported not having a basic social need met —the largest percentage by far of any generation.

But Gen Zers also report a more nuanced perspective around the stigma of mental illness than other generations. European Gen Zers seem less inclined to discriminate against people with mental illness ( although they do stigmatize themselves ).

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However, Gen Z is also generally known for its idealism —they’re part of a new wave of “ inclusive consumers ” and socially progressive dreamers. Generally speaking, Gen Zers believe in doing their part to help stop the intensification of climate change and to establish greater equity for all. More than any other generation, Gen Z collectively demands purpose and accountability , the creation of more opportunities for people of diverse and underrepresented backgrounds , and rigorous sustainable and green practices .

Learn more about McKinsey’s Retail , Healthcare , and Sustainability Practices, and check out our Diversity and Inclusion collection .

How are Gen Zers different from millennials?

Those on the cusp of Gen Z and millennial—people who were born shortly before the turn of the millennium—are sometimes referred to as “Zillennials” or “Zennials.” That includes older Gen Zers who’ve been in the workforce for a few years and young millennials who identify more with Gen Z.

However, Gen Z generally has its own formative experiences distinct from those of most millennials . Here are some ways American Gen Zers differ from their older counterparts :

They are generally more pragmatic , with both complicated idealism and worries for the future. Gen Zers dream of personal career fulfillment but expect economic struggles.
They have less positive life outlooks , with lower levels of emotional and social well-being than older generations.
They are more interested in belonging to an inclusive, supportive community .
They are more individualistic, with a stronger sense of personal expression.
They are more politically and socially active , advocating for what they believe on social media.

What are Gen Z’s values?

Gen Zers generally have strong values related to racial justice and sustainability . Mobilizations like the Global Climate March, led by Gen Z activist Greta Thunberg, thrive on the activism of young people.

Climate change is one of the issues Gen Zers care about most. They frequently call for reform on personal, public, and global scales to prevent future catastrophe. Many Gen Zers describe themselves as environmentally conscious, and the majority of Gen Z expects to see sustainability commitments from companies and organizations.

Gen Z is also living in a time marked by rapidly rising inflation and financial woes. Rising student loan debt also plagues many members of this generation.

What are Gen Z fashion trends?

Gen Z loves expressive clothes, wants to stand out rather than fit in , and has an ever-changing style —what was in a month ago might already be out today. Their trend-chasing habits are supported by fast-fashion retailers supplying accessible ways to switch it up. One Gen Z staple shop, Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein, adds 6,000 new products to its website per day . This may seem at odds with the generation’s values of sustainability, but the speed at which Gen Z trends change and their desire for unique style can sometimes overcome their eco-scruples.

Gen Zers also love thrifting and vintage styles—which are much more in line with their calls for circular fashion . Both ’90s and y2k-style clothes have seen a major comeback, including fast-fashion dupes and clothes dug out of closets and thrift stores. Fashion resale has experienced massive growth thanks to Gen Z resellers and influencers, and it’s normal for a Gen Z wardrobe to be a mix of cheap fast fashion and treasured vintage pieces.

Learn more about McKinsey’s Retail Practice .

What do Gen Z shoppers want?

The internet has changed retail forever and shaped the tastes of digital natives. Here’s how:

Consumption is about access rather than ownership —Gen Zers subscribe to streaming platforms instead of buying films or music. This trend extends even to services like car shares or luxury-clothing rentals.
Gen Zers accept their tastes might change, and they are more likely to spend on experiences that enrich their day-to-day lives than millennials, who are more likely to splurge on luxury.
Members of this generation care about ease of use: mobile pay, app-based services, and simple online transactions are important, and brands have found major success by restructuring to suit Gen Z tastes .
Gen Zers like brick-and-mortar stores more than millennials do but still want a great online shopping experience . Some brands have even found success through online-first launches , often supported by Gen Z consumers.
Ads are everywhere; Gen Zers experience brands “ at every moment ” as they move through their digital and physical worlds.

And as a generation committed to its values, Gen Z expects the same of its retailers—Gen Zers often choose brands that have a strong story or purpose , as well as those committed to green practices . In one McKinsey study, 73 percent of Gen Z reported trying to purchase from companies they consider ethical, and nine out of ten believe that companies have a responsibility to address environmental and social issues . However, they can tell when a brand is just paying lip service and isn’t backing up diversity or sustainability claims with real change.

Many Gen Zers throughout Asia see the internet as the first place to go when researching new products to purchase; in the United States, 40 percent of Gen Zers admit to being influenced online , often by the brands featured in the videos they watch. Members filter a lot of information, from influencers, family, and friends, to decide where and how they want to spend .

For more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s Generation Z collection . Learn more about Gen Z insights by subscribing to our newsletter —and check out entry-level job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced include:

“ The Gen Z Equation ,” June 26, 2023, McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty
“ Heat waves, the war in Ukraine, and stigma: Gen Z’s perspectives on mental health ,” September 27, 2022, Lea Arora, Erica Coe , Martin Dewhurst, and Kana Enomoto
“ Addressing the unprecedented behavioral-health challenges facing Generation Z ,” January 14, 2022, Erica Coe , Jenny Cordina , Kana Enomoto , Raelyn Jacobson , Sharon Mei, and Nikhil Seshan
“ Giving Gen Z customers what they want: A conversation with by.U ,” November 11, 2021, Edward Ying, Trio Lumbantoruan, and Andrew Roth
“ Gen Z and the Latin American consumer today, ” December 10, 2020, Tracy Francis and Fernanda Hoefel
“ How Gen Z and millennials are shaping the future of US retail ,” September 28, 2020, Bo Finneman and Emma Spagnuolo
“ Meet Generation Z: Shaping the future of shopping ,” August 4, 2020, Bo Finneman and Emma Spagnuolo
“ The young and the restless: Generation Z in America ,” March 20, 2020, Shruti Bhargava, Bo Finneman , Jennifer Schmidt , and Emma Spagnuolo
“ Asia’s Generation Z comes of age ,” March 17, 2020, Thomas Rüdiger Smith and Naomi Yamakawa
“ The influence of ‘woke’ consumers on fashion ,” February 12, 2019, Imran Amed, Anita Balchandani , Marco Beltrami, Achim Berg , Saskia Hedrich, and Felix Rölkens
“‘ True Gen’: Generation Z and its implications for companies ,” November 12, 2018, Tracy Francis and Fernanda Hoefel

Want to know more about Gen Z?

How does Gen Z see its place in the working world? With trepidation

Addressing the unprecedented behavioral-health challenges facing Generation Z

Heat waves, the war in Ukraine, and stigma: Gen Z’s perspectives on mental health

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World Psychiatry
v.18(2); 2019 Jun

The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition

Joseph firth.

1 NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University, Westmead, Australia

2 Division of Psychology and Mental Health, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

3 Centre for Youth Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

John Torous

4 Division of Digital Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Brendon Stubbs

5 Department of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK

6 Physiotherapy Department, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK

Josh A. Firth

7 Department of Zoology, Edward Grey Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

8 Merton College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Genevieve Z. Steiner

9 Translational Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia

10 Cambridge Centre for Sport and Exercise Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

Mario Alvarez‐Jimenez

11 Orygen, The National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

John Gleeson

12 School of Psychology, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

Davy Vancampfort

13 Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

14 University Psychiatric Center, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Christopher J. Armitage

15 NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, Manchester, UK

16 NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, Manchester, UK

Jerome Sarris

17 Professorial Unit, The Melbourne Clinic, Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, Australia

The impact of the Internet across multiple aspects of modern society is clear. However, the influence that it may have on our brain structure and functioning remains a central topic of investigation. Here we draw on recent psychological, psychiatric and neuroimaging findings to examine several key hypotheses on how the Internet may be changing our cognition. Specifically, we explore how unique features of the online world may be influencing: a) attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources, at the expense of sustained concentration; b) memory processes, as this vast and ubiquitous source of online information begins to shift the way we retrieve, store, and even value knowledge; and c) social cognition, as the ability for online social settings to resemble and evoke real‐world social processes creates a new interplay between the Internet and our social lives, including our self‐concepts and self‐esteem. Overall, the available evidence indicates that the Internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations in each of these areas of cognition, which may be reflected in changes in the brain. However, an emerging priority for future research is to determine the effects of extensive online media usage on cognitive development in youth, and examine how this may differ from cognitive outcomes and brain impact of uses of Internet in the elderly. We conclude by proposing how Internet research could be integrated into broader research settings to study how this unprecedented new facet of society can affect our cognition and the brain across the life course.

The Internet is the most widespread and rapidly adopted technology in the history of humanity. In only decades, Internet use has completely re‐invented the ways in which we search for information, consume media and entertainment, and manage our social networks and relationships. With the even more recent advent of smartphones, Internet access has become portable and ubiquitous to the point at which the population of the developed world can be considered “online” 1 , 2 , 3 .

However, the impact that this new channel for connection, information, communication, and screen time is having on our brains and cognitive functioning is unclear. Prior to the Internet, a large body of research had convincingly demonstrated that the brain is somewhat malleable to environmental demands and stimuli, particularly with regards to learning new processes, due to its capacity for neuroplasticity 4 . Various scenarios have been observed to induce long‐term changes in the neuronal architecture of the human brain, including second‐language acquisition 5 , learning new motor skills (such as juggling) 6 , and even formal education or exam preparation 7 . The widespread use of the Internet across the globe has introduced, for many, the necessity and opportunity to learn a myriad of new skills and ways to interact with society, which could bring about neural changes. As an example, even simple interactions with the Internet through the smartphone's touchscreen interface have been demonstrated to bring about sustained neurocognitive alterations due to neural changes in cortical regions associated with sensory and motor processing of the hand and thumb 8 . Beyond this, the Internet also presents a novel platform for almost‐endless learning of new information and complex processes, relevant to both the online and offline world 9 .

Along with neuroplastic mechanisms, other environmental and biological factors can also cause changes in the brain's structure and function, resulting in cognitive decline 10 . In aging samples, for instance, there is evidence to indicate that age‐related cognitive decline may be partly driven by a process of atrophy. Some studies have shown that adopting a less engaging lifestyle across the lifespan may accelerate loss of cognitive function 11 , due to lower “cognitive reserve” (the ability of the brain to withstand insult from age and/or pathology) 12 . Some emerging evidence indicates that disengaging from the “real world” in favor of virtual settings may similarly induce adverse neurocognitive changes. For example, a recent randomized controlled trial (RCT) 13 found that six weeks of engaging in an online role playing game caused significant reductions in grey matter within the orbitofrontal cortex – a brain region implicated in impulse control and decision making. However, the study did not address the extent to which these results were specific to online gaming, rather than general internet usage. Nonetheless, this raises the possibility that various types of Internet usage could differentially affect the brain and cognitive processes – in both adverse and beneficial ways. This may be of particular relevance to the developing brains of children and adolescents, as many cognitive processes (particularly those relevant to higher executive functions and social cognition) are not entirely innate, but rather are strongly influenced by environmental factors 14 .

Although only recently emerging, this possibility has led to a substantial body of research empirically investigating the multiple potential pathways through which the Internet could affect our brains’ structure, function, and cognitive development. Specifically, the bulk of existing research can be separated into three specific domains, examining how the internet is affecting: a) attention (i.e., how the constant influx of online information, prompts and notifications competing for our attention may encourage individuals to displace their concentration across multiple incoming media streams – and the consequences this may have for attentional‐switching versus sustained‐attention tasks); b) memory and knowledge (i.e., the extent to which we rely on the Internet as our primary informational resource, and how unique properties of online information access may affect how we process new memories and value our internal knowledge); c) social cognition (along with the personal and societal consequences of increasingly embedding our social networks, interactions, and status within the online world).

In this state‐of‐the‐art review, we present the current leading hypotheses of how the Internet may alter these cognitive processes, subsequently examining the extent to which these hypotheses are supported by recent findings from psychological, psychiatric and neuroimaging research. In this way, we aggregate the contemporary evidence arising from multiple fields of research to produce revised models on how the Internet may be affecting our brains and cognition. Furthermore, whereas studies to date have focused upon only specific age groups, we examine the effects of the Internet on the human brain across the entire life course. In particular, we explore how the potential benefits/drawbacks of extensive Internet integration with cognitive processes may differ among children and older adults. Finally, we identify important gaps in the existing literature to present key priorities for future research in order to gain new insights for minimizing detrimental effects of the Internet, while capitalizing on this new feature of our societies to potentially influence neurocognitive processes in a beneficial way.

“DIGITAL DISTRACTIONS”: A HIJACK OF ATTENTION ON THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY?

How does the internet gain and sustain our attention.

The Internet consumes a considerable chunk of our attention on a day‐to‐day basis. The vast majority of adults go online daily, and over a quarter report being online “almost constantly” 2 . Within this, one in five American adults are now “smartphone‐only” Internet users 1 . Importantly, the introduction of these Internet‐enabled mobile devices has also reduced the “digital divide” previously experienced by lower and middle income countries 15 . The amount and frequency of Internet usage is even more pronounced amongst younger people. Most adults today witnessed the beginning of the transition from “Internet‐free” to “Internet‐everywhere” societies. However, younger generations (termed “digital natives” 16 ) have been brought up entirely within a “connected world” , particularly in developed countries. Consequently, digital natives are often the first to adopt new online technologies as they arise 16 , and engage extensively with all existing features of the Internet. For instance, 95% of US teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% are online “almost constantly” 3 .

Multiple factors are driving the rapid uptake and extensive usage of Internet‐enabled technologies across the globe. This is partly due to the Internet now being unavoidable, ubiquitous, and a highly functional aspect of modern living. For instance, Internet use is now deeply entwined with education, travel, socializing, commerce, and the majority of workplaces. Along with pragmatic uses, the Internet also offers an endless array of recreational and entertainment activities, through podcasts, e‐books, videos, streaming movies and gaming. However, the ability of the Internet to capture and hold attention is not solely due to the quality of media content available online. Rather, it is also driven by the underlying design and presentation of the online world. One such example is the self‐evolving “attraction mechanism”; whereby aspects of the Internet that fail to gain attention are quickly drowned out in the sea of incoming information, while the successful aspects of the adverts, articles, apps or anything that does manage to capture our attention (even superficially) are logged (through clicks and scrolls), noticed (through online shares), and subsequently proliferated and expanded upon. Alongside this, leading technology companies have been accused of intentionally capitalizing on the addictive potential of Internet, by studying, testing, and refining the attention‐grabbing aspects of their websites and applications (“apps”) to promote extremely high levels of engagement, without due concern for user well‐being 17 .

Furthermore, even when not using the Internet for any specific purpose, smartphones have introduced widespread and habitual “checking” behaviours, characterized by quick but frequent inspections of the device for incoming information from news, social media, or personal contacts 18 . These habits are thought to be the result of behavioural reinforcement from “information rewards” that are received immediately on checking the device 19 , potentially engaging the cortico‐striatal dopaminergic system due to their readily available nature 20 . The variable‐ratio reinforcement schedule inherent to device checking may further perpetuate these compulsive behaviours 21 .

Cognitive consequences of the attention‐grabbing Internet

The unprecedented potential of the Internet to capture our attention presents an urgent need for understanding the impact that this may have on our thought processes and well‐being. Already, education providers are beginning to perceive detrimental effects of the Internet on children's attention, with over 85% of teachers endorsing the statement that “today's digital technologies are creating an easily distracted generation” 22 . The primary hypothesis on how the Internet affects our attentional capacities is through hyperlinks, notifications, and prompts providing a limitless stream of different forms of digital media, thus encouraging us to interact with multiple inputs simultaneously, but only on a shallow level, in a behavioural pattern termed “media multi‐tasking” 23 , 24 .

The seminal study by Ophir et al 23 was among the first to explore the sustained impact of media multi‐tasking on cognitive capacities. This was a cross‐sectional study of individuals who engaged in “heavy” (i.e., frequent and extensive) media multi‐tasking compared to those who did not. Cognitive testing of the two groups produced the then‐surprising finding that those involved in heavy media multi‐tasking performed worse in task‐switching tests than their counterparts – contrary to the authors’ expectation that the “extra practice” afforded by frequent media multi‐tasking would confer cognitive benefit in task‐switching scenarios. Closer inspection of findings suggested that the impeded task‐switching ability in heavy media multi‐tasking individuals was due to their increased susceptibility to distraction from irrelevant environmental stimuli 23 .

Since these initial findings, the effects of media multi‐tasking on cognition have come under increasing scrutiny, because the increasingly diverse forms of entertainment and activities available through the online world can further our capabilities (and temptation) of engaging in media multi‐tasking 25 , even on single devices. For instance, Yeykelis et al 26 measured participants’ media multi‐tasking between different types of online media content while using just one device (personal laptops), and found that switches occurred as frequently as every 19 seconds, with 75% of all on‐screen content being viewed for less than one minute. Measures of skin conductance during the study found that arousal increased in the seconds leading up to media switching, reaching a high point at the moment of the switch, followed by a decline afterward 26 . Again, this suggests that the proclivity for alternating between different computer windows, opening new hyperlinks, and performing new searches could be driven by the readily available nature of the informational rewards, which are potentially awaiting in the unattended media stream. Supporting this, the study also found that, whereas switching from work‐related content to entertainment was associated with increased arousal in anticipation of the switch, there was no anticipatory arousal spike associated with entertainment to work‐content switches 26 .

The growing concern around the increasing amount of media multi‐tasking with the spread of ubiquitous Internet access has resulted in further empirical studies. These have produced conflicting findings, with some failing to find any adverse effects on attention 27 , and others indicating that media multi‐tasking may even be linked to increased performance for other aspects of cognition, such as multisensory integration 28 . Nonetheless the literature, on balance, does seem to indicate that those who engage in frequent and extensive media multi‐tasking in their day‐to‐day lives perform worse in various cognitive tasks than those who do not, particularly for sustained attention 25 .

Imaging studies have shed light onto the neural differences which may account for these cognitive deficits. Functionally, those who engage in heavy media multi‐tasking perform poorer in distracted attention tasks, even though exhibiting greater activity in right prefrontal regions 29 . As right prefrontal regions are typically activated in response to distractor stimuli, the observed increases in recruitment of these regions alongside poorer performance suggests that heavy media multi‐taskers require greater cognitive effort to maintain concentration when faced with distractor stimuli 29 . Structurally, high levels of Internet usage 30 and heavy media multi‐tasking 31 are associated with decreased grey matter in prefrontal regions associated with maintaining goals in face of distraction (such as the right frontal pole and anterior cingulate cortex). However, the findings to date must be interpreted with caution, as various confounding factors may be affecting the results of these cross‐sectional imaging studies. Although the differences persist when controlling for general digital media use and other simple confounders (age, gender, etc.), further research is required to examine if the observed neural differences are specifically attributable to heavy vs. light media multi‐tasking, or in fact driven by broader differences in lifestyle between the two groups.

Given the amount of time that people now spend in media multi‐tasking via personal digital devices, it is increasingly relevant to consider not only sustained changes which arise in those who engage in large amounts of media multi‐tasking, but also the acute effects on immediate cognitive capacities. A meta‐analysis of 41 studies showed that engaging in multi‐tasking was associated with significantly poorer overall cognitive performance, with a moderate‐to‐large effect size (Cohen's d=–0.71, 95% CI: –0.86 to –0.57). This has been confirmed by more recent studies, further showing that even short‐term engagement with an extensively hyperlinked online environment (i.e., online shopping for 15 minutes) reduces attentional scope for a sustained duration after coming offline, whereas reading a magazine does not produce these deficits 32 .

Overall, the available evidence strongly indicates that engaging in multi‐tasking via digital media does not improve our multi‐tasking performance in other settings – and in fact seems to decrease this cognitive capacity through reducing our ability to ignore incoming distractions. Much of the multi‐tasking investigations so far have been focusing on personal computers. However, smartphone technologies may even further encourage people to engage in media multi‐tasking through high rates of incoming prompts from emails, direct messages and social media notifications occurring while both using and not using the device. Thus, along with determining long‐term consequences of media multi‐tasking, future research should examine how the constant multi‐tasking made possible by Internet‐enabled mobile devices may impact daily functioning through acute but high frequency effects.

Furthermore, both the immediate and chronic effects of media multi‐tasking are relatively unexplored in children and adolescents, who are the prime users of such technologies 33 and are at a phase of development that is crucial for refining higher cognitive abilities 14 . The first longitudinal study of media multi‐tasking in young people has recently found that frequent multi‐tasking behaviours do predict the development of attentional deficits specifically in early adolescents, but not in older teens 34 . Additionally, extensive media multi‐tasking during childhood and adolescence could also negatively impact cognitive development through indirect means, by reducing engagement with academic and social activities, as well as by interfering with sleep 35 , or reducing the opportunity to engage in creative thinking 36 , 37 . Clearly, further research is necessary to properly measure the effects of ubiquitous computing on children's cognitive development, and to find practical ways for ameliorating any detrimental impact this may be having.

“iFORMATION”: NEUROCOGNITIVE RESPONSES TO ONLINE INFORMATION GATHERING

The internet and transactive memory.

In response to the question “How has the Internet changed your life?” , some common answers include finding new friends, renewing old friendships, studying online, finding romantic relationships, furthering career opportunities, shopping, and travel 38 . However, the most common answer is people stating that the Internet has “changed the way in which they access information” 38 . Indeed, for the first time in human history, the majority of people living in the developed world have access to almost all factual information in existence literally at their fingertips.

Along with the obvious advantages, this unique situation also introduces the possibility of the Internet ultimately negating or replacing the need for certain human memory systems – particularly for aspects of “semantic memory” (i.e., memory of facts) – which are somewhat independent from other types of memory in the human brain 39 . An initial indication of Internet information gathering affecting typical memory processes was provided by Sparrow et al 40 , who demonstrated that the ability to access information online caused people to become more likely to remember where these facts could be retrieved rather than the facts themselves, indicating that people quickly become reliant on the Internet for information retrieval.

It could be argued that this is not unique to the Internet, but rather just an example of the online world acting as a form of external memory or “transactive memory” 40 , 41 . Transactive memory has been an integral part of human societies for millennia, and refers to the process by which people opt to outsource information to other individuals within their families, communities, etc., such that they are able to just remember the source of the knowledge, rather than attempting to store all of this information themselves 41 . Although beneficial at a group level, using transactive memory systems does reduce an individual's ability to recall the specifics of the externally stored information 42 . This may be due to individuals using transactive memory for “cognitive offloading” , implicitly reducing their allocation of cognitive resources towards remembering this information, since they know this will be available for future reference externally. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in multiple contexts, including those of team work 43 and other “non‐Internet” technologies (e.g., photography reducing individuals’ memories of the objects they photographed) 44 .

However, it is becoming clear that the Internet actually presents something entirely novel and distinct from previous transactive memory systems 45 , 46 . Crucially, the Internet seems to bypass the “transactional” aspect that is inherent to other forms of cognitive offloading in two ways. First, the Internet does not place any responsibility on the user to retain unique information for others to draw upon (as would typically be required in human societies) 45 . Second, unlike other transactive memory stores, the Internet acts as a single entity that is responsible for holding and retrieving virtually all factual information, and thus does not require individuals to remember what exact information is externally stored, or even where it is located. In this way, the Internet is becoming a “supernormal stimulus” 46 for transactive memory – making all other options for cognitive offloading (including books, friends, community) become redundant, as they are outcompeted by the novel capabilities for external information storage and retrieval made possible by the Internet.

How does a supernormal stimulus interact with normal cognition?

Unfortunately, the rapid methods of acquisition and constant availability of information afforded by the Internet may not necessarily lead to better use of information gained. For instance, an experimental study 47 found that individuals instructed to search for specific information online completed the information gathering task faster than those using printed encyclopedias, but were subsequently less able to recall the information accurately.

During Internet and encyclopedia information gathering tasks, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine activation in the ventral and dorsal streams. These regions are referred to as the “what” and “where” streams, respectively, due to their indicated roles in storing either the specific content (ventral stream) or external location (dorsal stream) of incoming information 47 . Although there was no difference in activation of the dorsal stream, results showed that the poorer recall of Internet‐sought information compared to encyclopedia‐based learning was associated with reduced activation of the ventral (“what”) stream during online information gathering. These findings further support the possibility, initially raised by Sparrow et al 40 , that online information gathering, while faster, may fail to sufficiently recruit brain regions for storing information on a long‐term basis.

The potential for online searching to produce a sustained impact upon our cognitive processes has been investigated in a series of studies examining pre‐post changes following a six‐day Internet search training paradigm. In these studies, young adults were given an hour per day of Internet search tasks, and undertook an array of cognitive and neuroimaging assessments pre‐ and post‐training. Results showed that the six‐day Internet search training reduced regional homogeneity and functional connectivity of brain areas involved in long‐term memory formation and retrieval (e.g., temporal gyrus) 48 . This indicates that a reliance on online searching may impede memory retrieval by reducing the functional connectivity and synchronization of associated brain regions 48 . Furthermore, when faced with new questions after the six days, the training had increased participants’ self‐reported impulses towards using the Internet to answer those questions, which was reflected in a recruitment of prefrontal brain areas required for behavioural and impulse control 49 . This increased propensity for relying on Internet searches for gathering new information has been replicated in subsequent studies 50 , and is in keeping with the “supernormal stimulus” nature of the Internet, potentially suggesting that online information gathering quickly trains people to become dependent on this tool when faced with unknown issues.

However, despite the possible adverse effects on regular “offline” memory, the six‐days training did make people more efficient at using the Internet for retrieving information, as participants became faster at the search tasks, with no loss of accuracy 51 . Search training also produced increases in white matter integrity of the fiber tracts connecting the frontal, occipital, parietal and temporal lobes, significantly more than the non‐search control condition 52 . In other studies, cognitive offloading via digital devices has also been found to improve people's ability to focus on aspects that are not immediately retrievable, and thus remember these better in the future 53 .

These findings seem to support the emergent hypotheses that relying on the Internet for factual memory storage may actually produce cognitive benefit in other areas, perhaps by “freeing up” cognitive resources 54 , and thus enabling us to use our newly available cognitive capacities for more ambitious undertakings than previously possible 45 . Researchers advocating this view have pointed to multiple domains of collective human endeavor that have already been transformed by the Internet's provision of supernormal transactive memory, such as education, journalism and even academia 55 . As online technologies continue to advance (particularly with regards to “wearables”), it is conceivable that the performance benefits from the Internet, which are already visible at the societal level, could ultimately become integrated within individuals themselves, enabling new heights of cognitive function 56 .

Unfortunately, however, a more sobering finding with regards to the immediate possibility of ubiquitous Internet access enabling new heights of human intelligence is provided by Barr et al 57 , who observed that analytical thinkers, with higher cognitive capacities, actually use their smartphone less for transactive memory in day‐to‐day situations compared to individuals with non‐analytical thinking styles. Furthermore, the reduced smartphone usage in analytical versus non‐analytical thinkers was specific to online information searching, with no differences in social media or entertainment usages, thus indicating that the differences are likely due to the Internet furthering “cognitive miserliness” among less analytical thinkers 57 .

Alongside this, the increasing reliance on the Internet for information may cause individuals to “blur the lines” between their own capabilities and their devices’ 58 . In a series of experiments, Fisher et al 59 investigated how the Internet influences our self‐perceived knowledge. Results showed that online searching increases our sense of how much we know, even though the illusion of self‐knowledge is only perceived for the domains in which the Internet can “fill in the gaps” for us. The experiments also demonstrated how quickly individuals internalized the Internet's external knowledge as their own – as even immediately after using the Internet to answer the task questions, participants attributed their higher quality explanations to “increased brain activity” . More recent studies have shown that illusions of self‐knowledge similarly persist when using smartphones to retrieve online information 58 . As individuals become more and more connected with their personal digital devices (which are also always accessible), it seems inevitable that the distinction between self and Internet's abilities will become increasingly elusive, potentially creating a constant illusion of “greater than actual knowledge” among large portions of the population.

Overall, the Internet clearly can provide a “superstimulus” for transactive memory, which is already changing the way we store, retrieve, and even value knowledge. However, with popular online information sources such as Google and Wikipedia less than 20 years old, it is currently not possible to ascertain how this may eventually be reflected in long‐term changes to the structure and function of the human brain. Nonetheless, our constant connection with the online world through personal devices (i.e., smartphones), along with the emerging potential for more direct integration through wearable devices, certainly indicates that we are set to become more reliant on the Internet for factual information as time goes on. Also, whereas the studies described above have focused on factual knowledge, the Internet is also now becoming a superstimulus for spatial information (through providing constant access to online maps and global positioning system). As spatial memory is somewhat independent from semantic memory in the human brain 60 , further research should investigate the multitude of ways in which extensive use of these external memory systems may reduce, enhance or alter our cognitive capacities.

ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS: FAULTY CONNECTIONS, OR FALSE DICHOTOMY?

Human sociality in the online world.

Social relationships and having a sense of connection are important determinants of happiness and stress relief 61 , 62 , mental and physical well‐being 63 , 64 , and even mortality 65 . Over the past decade, the proportion of an individual's social interactions that take place online within social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) has grown dramatically 66 , 67 , and our connection with these sites is now strongly meshed with the offline world. The real‐world implications of this are perhaps best evidenced by the critical role that social media have played in multiple global affairs, including reportedly starting and precipitating the London Riots, the Occupy movement 68 , and even the Arab Spring 69 , along with potentially influencing the outcomes of the UK's European Union Referendum (“Brexit”) 70 and the 2016 US elections 71 . Clearly, understanding the shift from real‐world interactions into the online social environment (and vice versa) holds significance to almost all aspects of people's lives.

Our motivations towards using social media is broadly similar to the instinctual desires underlying “real world” social interactions, as people are drawn to online sociality in order to exchange information and ideas, along with gaining social support and friendships 72 . However, whether or not these virtual interactions engage the human brain in ways analogous to real‐world socialization remains a topic of debate since the turn of the century 73 . Whereas it would be highly beneficial if social media sites could fulfil the implicit human needs for social connection, it may be that the distinction between online and offline networks is so great that entirely different cognitive domains are involved in navigating these different environments 74 , 75 .

How does the online environment affect our fundamental social structures?

To investigate the neuroimaging correlates of offline and online networks, the seminal study by Kanai et al 74 collected real‐world social network size, online sociality (i.e., Facebook friends) and magnetic resonance imaging scans from 125 participants. Results showed that both real‐world social network size and number of Facebook friends were significantly associated with amygdala volume. As this has previously been established as a key brain region for social cognition and social network size 76 , these results present a strong case for the overlap between online and offline sociality in the human brain.

However, those authors also found that the grey matter volume of other brain regions (specifically, posterior regions of the middle temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus, and the right entorhinal cortex) were predicted by the numbers of participants’ Facebook friends, but held no relationship to their real‐world social networks. This suggests that certain unique aspects of social media implicate aspects of the brain that are not central in “real‐world” social settings. For instance, the tendency for online networks to encourage us towards holding many weak social connections, involving thousands of face‐to‐name pairs, could require high associative memory capacities, which is not typically required in real‐world networks (as these are comprised of fewer, but more familiar, relationships) 74 . As associative memory formation for name‐face pairs involves the right entorhinal cortex 77 , 78 , this could explain the exclusive relationship that this region holds with online social (but not real‐world) network size 74 .

Indeed, one key difference which may separate how the brain handles online and offline social networks is the unique capacity afforded by the Internet for people to hold, and simultaneously interact with, millions of “friendships” 79 , 80 . Empirical testing of this hypothesis is a most fruitful area of investigation stemming from research into the fundamental similarities and differences between these two social worlds at a biological level 66 . When defining “friendships” under a broad context (people who maintain contact and share an emotional bond) 66 , two patterns are prominent across a diverse range of real‐world social networks: a) the average individual has around 150 “friendships” (but this is highly variable between individuals), and b) this is made up of five hierarchical layers, consisting of primary partners, intimate relationships, best friends, close friends, and all friends, which follow a size‐scaling ratio of around 3 (i.e., each cumulative layer is 3 times bigger than the last), and therefore have set average (cumulative/inclusive) sizes of 1.5, 5, 15, 50 and 150 respectively 66 . The patterns of the average number of 150 total friendship connections, and the scaling sizes of the five hierarchical layers of relationships making this up, have been found across regions and time periods within various human organizations, ranging from hunter‐gatherer societies 81 , 82 and historical village populations 83 , armies 66 , residential camps 84 , to personal networks of modern Europeans 85 .

Thus, given the unprecedented potential that online social networks allow in terms of number of connections, and the varied contexts these take place over 79 , 80 , it is imaginable that this extraordinary environment may allow these two apparently set aspects of real‐world social networks to be bypassed. However, recent findings have confirmed that user‐to‐user friendship connections, posting patterns and exchanges within Twitter, Facebook, and even online gaming platforms, all indicate a similar average number of general friendships (around 150, despite high skew), along with maintaining the same scaled sizes of the hierarchical structure of the five distinct friendship layers (as determined by reciprocal communication exchanges) 86 , 87 , 88 , 89 . Therefore, even within the unique realms of online social networks, the most fundamental operations of human social networks appear to remain relatively unchanged 88 , 89 . So, it is highly conceivable that the social connections formed in the online world are processed in similar ways to those of the offline world, and thus have much potential to carry over from the Internet to shape “real‐world” sociality, including our social interactions and our perceptions of social hierarchies, in ways that are not restricted to the context of the Internet.

The driving forces that sustain the set structural patterns of social networks, even when faced with the immense connective potential of the online world, may be broadly explained by two overlapping mechanisms. First, constraints on social cognition within the human brain seem to carry over across social contexts 66 . For instance, humans struggle to engagingly interact with more than three individuals simultaneously in the real world, and this limitation on attention also appears to apply online 90 , 91 . This evidence is in agreement with the hypothesis that circumventing the cognitive constraints on social relationships may be difficult even when technology affords unnatural opportunities to do so 88 .

The second driver of set boundaries on social activity is that simple underlying factors may produce social constraints, even within online settings. Most obviously, investment in social relationships is limited by time constraints, and this may contribute to the set patterns of both the number and type of social connections 93 , 94 . In line with this, analyses across various social contexts have shown that temporal limitations govern the number of social interactions that individuals engage in, and how they distribute these across their different kinds of relationships 93 , 94 . Again, these general interaction rates remain similar within online social networks 87 , 88 .

The possibility that the parameters on all social networks (online or offline) are governed by basic underlying factors is further supported by research showing that similar structures also exist within simpler social systems, such as animal societies 66 , 95 . For instance, the sizes and scaling of hierarchical “friendship” layers found in online and offline human networks are also found in dolphins, elephants, and various primate species 96 , and the phenomena of humans increasing the number and strength of their social networks connections following the death of a friend on Facebook 97 is also seen in wild birds, which show compensatory up‐regulation of their social network connections upon experiencing the loss of a social associate 98 .

Supporting the idea that limited cognitive capacities govern our social structures is research showing that the brain regions predicting individual variation in social network size in humans also do so for macaques 99 . Strong support for simple underlying factors (such as time) governing our general patterning of social interactions can be found in studies demonstrating that entirely computationally simulated systems replicate some of the apparent complexities of human social networks, even under relatively simple rules 100 , 101 . Examples include agent‐based models generating similar social layering structures as humans when sociality is defined as time‐limited 100 .

In light of the current evidence regarding how the Internet may have affected human thinking surrounding social networks, it is undeniable that the online environment poses unique potential and context for social activity 79 , 80 , 102 , 103 , which may invoke some non‐identical cognitive processes and brain areas in comparison to the offline world 74 , 75 . Nevertheless, aside from these comparatively fine‐scale differences, it appears that our brains process the online and offline social networks in surprisingly similar ways, as demonstrated by the shared cognitive capacities and simple underlying factors ultimately governing their fundamental structure 87 , 88 . As such, the online social world has very significant implications for not only measuring and understanding human sociality, but also for governing the outcomes of social processes across various aspects of life.

Social cognitive responses to the online social world

Given the evidence above, an appropriate metaphor for the relationship between online and real‐world sociality could be a “new playing field for the same game” . Even beyond the fundamental structure, emerging research suggests that neurocognitive responses to online social occurrences are similar to those of real‐life interactions. For instance, being rejected online has been shown to increase activity in brain regions strongly linked with social cognition and real‐world rejection (medial prefrontal cortex 104 ) in both adults and children 105 , 106 , 107 . However, within the “same old game” of human sociality, online social media is bending some of the rules – potentially at the expense of users 17 . For instance, whereas real‐world acceptance and rejection is often ambiguous and open to self‐interpretation, social media platforms directly quantify our social success (or failure), by providing clear metrics in the form of “friends” , “followers” , and “likes” (or the potentially painful loss/absence of these) 107 . Given the addictive nature of this immediate, self‐defining feedback, social media companies may even capitalize upon this to maximally engage users 17 . However, growing evidence indicates that relying on online feedback for self‐esteem can have adverse effects on young people, particularly those with low social‐emotional well‐being, due to high rates of cyberbullying 108 , increased anxiety and depression 109 , 110 , and increased perceptions of social isolation and exclusion among those who feel rejected online 111 .

Another process common to human social behaviour in both online and offline worlds is the tendency to make upward social comparisons 112 , 113 . Whereas these can be adaptive and beneficial under regular environmental conditions 112 , this implicit cognitive process can also be hijacked by the artificial environmental manufactured on social media 113 , 114 , which showcases hyper‐successful individuals constantly putting their best foot forward, and even using digital manipulation of images to inflate physical attractiveness. By facilitating exposure to these drastically upward social comparisons (which would rarely be encountered in everyday life), online social media can produce unrealistic expectations of oneself – leading to poor body image and negative self‐concept, particularly for younger people 107 , 111 , 115 , 116 . For instance, in adolescents (particularly females), those who spent more time on social media and smartphones have a greater prevalence of mental health problems, including depression, than those who spent more time on “non‐screen” activities 116 , with greater than 5 hrs/day (versus 1 hr/day) associated with a 66% increased risk of one suicide‐related outcome 117 .

However, a causal relationship between high levels of social media use and poorer mental health is currently difficult to establish, as there is most likely a complex interaction between several confounding factors, including reduced sleep and in‐person social interaction, and increased sedentary behaviour and perceived loneliness 116 , 118 . Nonetheless, given the large amounts of social media use observed among young people, future research should thoroughly examine the potentially detrimental effects that this new setting for sociality may have on health and well‐being, along with aiming to establish the driving factors – such that adjustments can be made in subsequent iterations of social media in order to produce more positive outcomes.

Whereas young people with mental disorders may be the most vulnerable to negative input from social media, these media may also present a new platform for improving mental health in this population, if used correctly. In future, social media may also be exploited to promote ongoing engagement with Internet‐based interventions, while addressing key (but frequently neglected) targets such as social connectedness, social support and self‐efficacy, to aim to bring about sustained functional improvements in severe and complex mental health conditions 119 . To achieve these goals, online social media‐based interventions need to be designed to promote engagement by harnessing, in an ethical and transparent manner, effective strategies used by the industry. For instance, developing technologies which are increasingly adopted by online marketing and tech companies, such as natural language processing, sentiment analyses and machine learning, could be capitalized upon, for example making it possible to identify those at increased risk for suicide or relapse 120 , and rationalizing human driven support to those who need it most at the time they need it 121 . In addition, online systems will be able to learn from what helps individuals and when, opening a window into personalized, real time interventions 121 .

While the use of online social media‐based interventions is in its infancy, pioneering efforts indicate that these interventions are safe, engaging, and have the potential to improve clinical and social outcomes in both patients and their relatives 122 , 123 , 124 , 125 , 126 , 127 . That said, online interventions have failed up to now to be adopted by mental health services 128 , 129 . The main reasons include high attrition rates, poor study designs which reduce translational potential, and a lack of consensus around the required standards of evidence for widespread implementation of Internet‐delivered therapies 130 , 131 , 132 . Efforts are currently underway to determine the long‐term effects of the first generation of social media‐based interventions for mental illness via large randomized controlled trials 133 , 134 . Alongside this clinical use, developing public health strategies for young adults in the general population to avoid the potential adverse effects and negative aspects of typical social media are also warranted.

CONCLUSIONS AND DIRECTIONS

As digital technologies become increasingly integrated with everyday life, the Internet is becoming highly proficient at capturing our attention, while producing a global shift in how people gather information, and connect with one another. In this review, we found emerging support for several hypotheses regarding the pathways through which the Internet is influencing our brains and cognitive processes, particularly with regards to: a) the multi‐faceted stream of incoming information encouraging us to engage in attentional‐switching and “multi‐tasking” , rather than sustained focus; b) the ubiquitous and rapid access to online factual information outcompeting previous transactive systems, and potentially even internal memory processes; c) the online social world paralleling “real world” cognitive processes, and becoming meshed with our offline sociality, introducing the possibility for the special properties of social media to impact on “real life” in unforeseen ways.

However, with fewer than 30 years since the Internet became publicly available, the long‐term effects have yet to be established. Within this, it seems particularly important that future research determines the impact of the Internet on us throughout different points in the lifespan. For instance, the Internet's digital distractions and supernormal capacities for cognitive offloading seem to create a non‐ideal environment for the refinement of higher cognitive functions in critical periods of children and adolescents’ brain development. Indeed, the first longitudinal studies on this topic have found that adverse attentional effects of digital multi‐tasking are particularly pronounced in early adolescence (even compared to older teens) 34 , and that higher frequency of Internet use over 3 years in children is linked with decreased verbal intelligence at follow‐up, along with impeded maturation of both grey and white matter regions 135 .

On the other hand, the opposite may be true in older adults experiencing cognitive decline, for whom the online environment may provide a new source of positive cognitive stimulation. For instance, Internet searching engaged more neural circuitry than reading text pages in Internet savvy older adults (aged 55‐76 years) 9 . Furthermore, experimental studies have found that computer games available online and through smartphones can be used to attenuate aging‐related cognitive decline 136 , 137 , 138 . Thus, the Internet may present a novel and accessible platform for adults to maintain cognitive function throughout old age. Building from this, successful cognitive aging has previously been shown to be dependent upon learning and deploying cognitive strategies, which can compensate for aging‐related decline in “raw” memory capacities 139 . This has previously been referred to as optimizing internal cognitive processes (e.g., through mnemonic strategies), or taking advantage of cognitive offloading in traditional formats (list making, transactive memory, etc.) 139 . Nonetheless, as Internet‐based technologies become more deeply integrated with our daily cognitive processing (through smartphones, wearables, etc.), digital natives could feasibly develop forms of “online cognition” in the aging brain, whereby older adults can increasingly take advantage of web‐based transactive memory and other emerging online processes to fulfil (or even exceed) the typical capacities of a younger brain.

Although it is an emerging area of study, the same could apply for social aspects of the online world. Whereas young people seem particularly prone to the rejections, peer pressure, and negative appraisals this world may induce 107 , older adults may ultimately be able to harness social media in order to overcome isolation and thus continue to benefit from the diverse range of physical, mental and neurocognitive benefits associated with social connection 73 . Viewed collectively, the nascent research in this area already indicates that equivalent types of Internet usage may have differential effects on individuals’ cognitive and social functioning depending on their point in the lifespan.

For better or for worse, we are already conducting a mass‐scale experiment of extensive Internet usage across the global population. A more fine‐scale analysis is essential to gaining a fuller understanding of the sustained impact of this usage across our society. This could include measuring frequency, duration and types of Internet usage as a standard part of national data projects, for instance through collecting Internet data (from either device‐based or self‐report measures) in “biobank” assessment protocols. Combining this with the extensive genetic, socio‐demographic, lifestyle and neuroimaging data gathered by some ongoing projects, researchers could be able to establish the impact of Internet usage on psychological well‐being and brain functioning across entire populations (rather than the currently limited study samples), while also controlling for multiple confounders.

Overall, this early phase of the Internet's introduction into our society is a crucial period for commencing rigorous and extensive research into how different types of Internet usage interact with human cognition, in order to maximize our opportunities for harnessing this new tool in a beneficial manner, while minimizing the potentially adverse effects.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

J. Firth is supported by a Blackmores Institute Fellowship. J. Sarris is supported by an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Clinical Research Fellowship (APP1125000). B. Stubbs is supported by the Health Education England and the National Institute for Health Research Integrated Clinical Academic Programme Clinical Lectureship (ICA‐CL‐2017‐03‐001). G.Z. Steiner is supported by an NHMRC‐Australian Research Council (ARC) Dementia Research Development Fellowship (APP1102532). M. Alvarez‐Jimenez is supported by an NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (APP1082934). C.J. Armitage is supported by National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Manchester Biomedical Research Centre and NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the above‐mentioned entities.

Can We Save the Koalas from Extinction?

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The Internet has turned our existence upside down. It has revolutionized communications, to the extent that it is now our preferred medium of everyday communication. In almost everything we do, we use the Internet. Ordering a pizza, buying a television, sharing a moment with a friend, sending a picture over instant messaging. Before the Internet, if you wanted to keep up with the news, you had to walk down to the newsstand when it opened in the morning and buy a local edition reporting what had happened the previous day. But today a click or two is enough to read your local paper and any news source from anywhere in the world, updated up to the minute.

The Internet itself has been transformed. In its early days—which from a historical perspective are still relatively recent—it was a static network designed to shuttle a small freight of bytes or a short message between two terminals; it was a repository of information where content was published and maintained only by expert coders. Today, however, immense quantities of information are uploaded and downloaded over this electronic leviathan, and the content is very much our own, for now we are all commentators, publishers, and creators.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Internet widened in scope to encompass the IT capabilities of universities and research centers, and, later on, public entities, institutions, and private enterprises from around the world. The Internet underwent immense growth; it was no longer a state-controlled project, but the largest computer network in the world, comprising over 50,000 sub-networks, 4 million systems, and 70 million users.

The emergence of web 2.0 in the first decade of the twenty-first century was itself a revolution in the short history of the Internet, fostering the rise of social media and other interactive, crowd-based communication tools.

The Internet was no longer concerned with information exchange alone: it was a sophisticated multidisciplinary tool enabling individuals to create content, communicate with one another, and even escape reality. Today, we can send data from one end of the world to the other in a matter of seconds, make online presentations, live in parallel “game worlds,” and use pictures, video, sound, and text to share our real lives, our genuine identity. Personal stories go public; local issues become global.

The rise of the Internet has sparked a debate about how online communication affects social relationships. The Internet frees us from geographic fetters and brings us together in topic-based communities that are not tied down to any specific place. Ours is a networked, globalized society connected by new technologies. The Internet is the tool we use to interact with one another, and accordingly poses new challenges to privacy and security.

Information technologies have wrought fundamental change throughout society, driving it forward from the industrial age to the networked era. In our world, global information networks are vital infrastructure—but in what ways has this changed human relations? The Internet has changed business, education, government, healthcare, and even the ways in which we interact with our loved ones—it has become one of the key drivers of social evolution.

The changes in social communication are of particular significance. Although analogue tools still have their place in some sectors, new technologies are continuing to gain ground every day, transforming our communication practices and possibilities—particularly among younger people. The Internet has removed all communication barriers. Online, the conventional constraints of space and time disappear and there is a dizzyingly wide range of communicative possibilities. The impact of social media applications has triggered discussion of the “new communication democracy.”

The development of the Internet today is being shaped predominantly by instant, mobile communications. The mobile Internet is a fresh revolution. Comprehensive Internet connectivity via smartphones and tablets is leading to an increasingly mobile reality: we are not tied to any single specific device, and everything is in the cloud.

People no longer spend hours gazing at a computer screen after work or class; instead, they use their mobile devices to stay online everywhere, all the time.

Anyone failing to keep abreast of this radical change is losing out on an opportunity.

Communication Opportunities Created by the Internet

The Internet has become embedded in every aspect of our day-to-day lives, changing the way we interact with others. This insight struck me when I started out in the world of social media. I created my first social network in 2005, when I was finishing college in the United States—it had a political theme. I could already see that social media were on the verge of changing our way of communicating, helping us to share information by opening up a new channel that cuts across conventional ones.

That first attempt did not work out, but I learned from the experience.I get the feeling that in many countries failure is punished too harshly—but the fact is, the only surefire way of avoiding failure is to do nothing at all. I firmly believe that mistakes help you improve; getting it wrong teaches you how to get it right. Creativity, hard work, and a positive attitude will let you achieve any goal.

In 2006, after I moved to Spain, I created Tuenti. Tuenti (which, contrary to widespread belief, has nothing to do with the number 20; it is short for “tu entidad,” the Spanish for “your entity”) is a social communication platform for genuine friends. From the outset, the idea was to keep it simple, relevant, and private. That’s the key to its success.

I think the real value of social media is that you can stay in touch from moment to moment with the people who really matter to you. Social media let you share experiences and information; they get people and ideas in touch instantly, without frontiers. Camaraderie, friendship, and solidarity—social phenomena that have been around for as long as humanity itself—have been freed from the conventional restrictions of space and time and can now thrive in a rich variety of ways.

Out of all the plethora of communication opportunities that the Internet has opened up, I would highlight the emergence of social media and the way they have intricately melded into our daily lives. Social media have changed our personal space, altering the way we interact with our loved ones, our friends, and our sexual partners; they have forced us to rethink even basic daily processes like studying and shopping; they have affected the economy by nurturing the business startup culture and electronic commerce; they have even given us new ways to form broad-based political movements.

The Internet and Education

The Internet has clearly impacted all levels of education by providing unbounded possibilities for learning. I believe the future of education is a networked future. People can use the Internet to create and share knowledge and develop new ways of teaching and learning that captivate and stimulate students’ imagination at any time, anywhere, using any device. By connecting and empowering students and educators, we can speed up economic growth and enhance the well-being of society throughout the world. We should work together, over a network, to build the global learning society.

The network of networks is an inexhaustible source of information. What’s more, the Internet has enabled users to move away from their former passive role as mere recipients of messages conveyed by conventional media to an active role, choosing what information to receive, how, and when. The information recipient even decides whether or not they want to stay informed.

We have moved on from scattergun mass communication to a pattern where the user proactively selects the information they need.

Students can work interactively with one another, unrestricted by physical or time constraints. Today, you can use the Internet to access libraries, encyclopedias, art galleries, news archives, and other information sources from anywhere in the world: I believe this is a key advantage in the education field. The web is a formidable resource for enhancing the process of building knowledge.

I also believe the Internet is a wonderful tool for learning and practicing other languages—this continues to be a critical issue in many countries, including Spain, and, in a globalized world, calls for special efforts to improve.

The Internet, in addition to its communicative purposes, has become a vital tool for exchanging knowledge and education; it is not just an information source, or a locus where results can be published, it is also a channel for cooperating with other people and groups who are working on related research topics.

The Internet and Privacy and Security

Another key issue surrounding Internet use is privacy. Internet users are becoming more sensitive to the insight that privacy is a must-have in our lives.

Privacy has risen near the top of the agenda in step with an increasing awareness of the implications of using social media. Much of the time, people started to use social media with no real idea of the dangers, and have wised up only through trial and error—sheer accident, snafus, and mistakes. Lately, inappropriate use of social media seems to hit the headlines every day. Celebrities posting inappropriate comments to their profiles, private pictures and tapes leaked to the Internet at large, companies displaying arrogance toward users, and even criminal activities involving private-data trafficking or social media exploitation.

All this shows that—contrary to what many people seem to have assumed—online security and privacy are critical, and, I believe, will become even more important going forward. And, although every user needs privacy, the issue is particularly sensitive for minors—despite attempts to raise their awareness, children still behave recklessly online.

I have always been highly concerned about privacy. On Tuenti, the default privacy setting on every user account is the highest available level of data protection. Only people the user has accepted as a “friend” can access their personal details, see their telephone number, or download their pictures. This means that, by default, user information is not accessible to third parties. In addition, users are supported by procedures for reporting abuse. Any user can report a profile or photograph that is abusive, inappropriate, or violates the terms of use: action is taken immediately. Security and privacy queries are resolved within 24 hours.

We need to be aware that different Internet platforms provide widely different privacy experiences. Some of them are entirely open and public; no steps whatsoever are taken to protect personal information, and all profiles are indexable by Internet search engines.

On the other hand, I think the debate about whether social media use should be subject to an age requirement is somewhat pointless, given that most globally active platforms operate without age restrictions. The European regulatory framework is quite different from the United States and Asian codes. Companies based in Europe are bound by rigorous policies on privacy and underage use of social media. This can become a competitive drawback when the ground rules do not apply equally to all players—our American and Japanese competitors, for instance, are not required to place any kind of age constraint on access.

Outside the scope of what the industry or regulators can do, it is vital that users themselves look after the privacy of their data. I believe the information is the user’s property, so the user is the only party entitled to control the collection, use, and disclosure of any information about him or herself. Some social networks seem to have forgotten this fact—they sell data, make it impossible to delete an account, or make it complex and difficult to manage one’s privacy settings. Everything should be a lot simpler and more transparent.

Social networks should continue to devote intense efforts to developing self-regulation mechanisms and guidelines for this new environment of online coexistence to ensure that user information is safe: the Internet should be a space for freedom, but also for trust. The main way of ensuring that social media are used appropriately is awareness. But awareness and user education will be of little use unless it becomes an absolute requirement that the privacy of the individual is treated as a universal value.

The Internet and Culture

As in the sphere of education, the development of information and communication technologies and the wide-ranging effects of globalization are changing what we are, and the meaning of cultural identity. Ours is a complex world in which cultural flows across borders are always on the rise. The concepts of space, time, and distance are losing their conventional meanings. Cultural globalization is here, and a global movement of cultural processes and initiatives is underway.

Again, in the cultural arena, vast fields of opportunity open up thanks to online tools. The possibilities are multiplied for disseminating a proposal, an item of knowledge, or a work of art. Against those doomsayers who warn that the Internet is harming culture, I am radically optimistic. The Internet is bringing culture closer to more people, making it more easily and quickly accessible; it is also nurturing the rise of new forms of expression for art and the spread of knowledge. Some would say, in fact, that the Internet is not just a technology, but a cultural artifact in its own right.

In addition to its impact on culture itself, the Internet is enormously beneficial for innovation, which brings progress in all fields of endeavor—the creation of new goods, services, and ideas, the advance of knowledge and society, and increasing well-being.

The Internet and Personal Relationships

The Internet has also changed the way we interact with our family, friends, and life partners. Now everyone is connected to everyone else in a simpler, more accessible, and more immediate way; we can conduct part of our personal relationships using our laptops, smart phones, and tablets.

The benefits of always-online immediate availability are highly significant. I would find a long-distance relationship with my life partner or my family unthinkable without the communication tools that the network of networks provides me with. I’m living in Madrid, but I can stay close to my brother in California. For me, that is the key plus of the Internet: keeping in touch with the people who really matter to me.

As we have seen, the Internet revolution is not just technological; it also operates at a personal level, and throughout the structure of society. The Internet makes it possible for an unlimited number of people to communicate with one another freely and easily, in an unrestricted way.

Just a century ago, this was unimaginable. An increasing number of couples come together, stay together, or break up with the aid—or even as a consequence—of social communication tools. There are even apps and social networks out there that are purposely designed to help people get together for sex.

Of course, when compared to face-to-face communication, online communication is severely limited in the sense impressions it can convey (an estimated 60 to 70 percent of human communication takes place nonverbally), which can lead to misunderstandings and embarrassing situations—no doubt quite a few relationships have floundered as a result. I think the key is to be genuine, honest, and real at all times, using all the social media tools and their many advantages. Let’s just remember that a liar and a cheat online is a liar and a cheat offline too.

The Internet and Social and Political Activism

Even before the emergence of social media, pioneering experiments took place in the political sphere—like Essembly , a project I was involved in. We started to create a politically themed platform to encourage debate and provide a home for social and political causes; but the social networks that have later nurtured activism in a new way were not as yet in existence.

Research has shown that young people who voice their political opinions on the Internet are more inclined to take part in public affairs. The better informed a citizen is, the more likely they will step into the polling booth, and the better they will express their political liberties. The Internet has proved to be a decisive communication tool in the latest election campaigns. It is thanks to the Internet that causes in the social, welfare, ideological, and political arenas have been spoken up for and have won the support of other citizens sharing those values—in many cases, with a real impact on government decision making.

The Internet and Consumer Trends

New technologies increase the speed of information transfer, and this opens up the possibility of “bespoke” shopping. The Internet offers an immense wealth of possibilities for buying content, news, and leisure products, and all sorts of advantages arise from e-commerce, which has become a major distribution channel for goods and services. You can book airline tickets, get a T-shirt from Australia, or buy food at an online grocery store. New applications support secure business transactions and create new commercial opportunities.

In this setting, it is the consumer who gains the upper hand, and the conventional rules and methods of distribution and marketing break down. Consumers’ access to information multiplies, and their reviews of their experience with various products and services take center stage. Access to product comparisons and rankings, user reviews and comments, and recommendations from bloggers with large followings have shaped a new scenario for consumer behavior, retail trade, and the economy in general.

The Internet and the Economy

The Internet is one of the key factors driving today’s economy. No one can afford to be left behind. Even in a tough macroeconomic framework, the Internet can foster growth, coupled with enhanced productivity and competitiveness.

The Internet provides opportunities for strengthening the economy: How should we tackle them? While Europe—and Spain specifically—are making efforts to make the best possible use of the Internet, there are areas in which their approach needs to improve. Europe faces a major challenge, and risks serious failure if it lets the United States run ahead on its own. The European Commission, in its “Startup Manifesto,” suggests that the Old World be more entrepreneur-friendly—the proposal is backed by companies like Spotify and Tuenti. Europe lacks some of the necessary know-how. We need to improve in financial services and in data privacy, moving past the obsolete regulatory framework we now have and making a bid to achieve a well-connected continent with a single market for 4G mobile connections. We need to make it easier to hire talent outside each given country.

The use of e-commerce should be encouraged among small and medium-sized enterprises so that growth opportunities can be exploited more intensely. Following the global trend of the Internet, companies should internalize their online business. And much more emphasis should be placed on new technologies training in the academic and business spheres.

Modern life is global, and Spain is competing against every other country in the world. I do not believe in defeatism or victim culture. Optimism should not translate into callousness, but I sincerely believe that if you think creatively, if you find a different angle, if you innovate with a positive attitude and without fear of failure, then you can change things for the better. Spain needs to seize the moment to reinvent itself, grasping the opportunities offered up by the online world. We need to act, take decisions, avoid “paralysis through analysis.” I sometimes feel we are too inclined to navel-gazing: Spain shuts itself off, fascinated with its own contradictions and local issues, and loses its sense of perspective. Spain should open up to the outside, use the crisis as an opportunity to do things differently, in a new way—creating value, underlining its strengths, aspiring to be something more.

In the United States, for instance, diving headfirst into a personal Internet-related startup is regarded as perfectly normal. I’m glad to see that this entrepreneurial spirit is beginning to take hold here as well. I believe in working hard, showing perseverance, keeping your goals in view, surrounding yourself with talent, and taking risks. No risk, no success. We live in an increasingly globalized world: of course you can have a Spain-based Internet startup, there are no frontiers.

We need to take risks and keep one step ahead of the future. It is precisely the most disruptive innovations that require radical changes in approach and product, which might not even find a market yet ready for them—these are the areas providing real opportunities to continue being relevant, to move forward and “earn” the future, creating value and maintaining leadership. It is the disruptive changes that enable a business, product, or service to revolutionize the market—and, particularly in the technology sector, such changes are a necessity.

The Future of Social Communications, Innovation, Mobile Technologies, and Total Connectivity in Our Lives

The future of social communications will be shaped by an always-online culture. Always online is already here and will set the trend going forward. Total connectivity, the Internet you can take with you wherever you go, is growing unstoppably. There is no turning back for global digitalization.

Innovation is the driving force of growth and progress, so we need to shake up entrenched processes, products, services, and industries, so that all of us together—including established businesses, reacting to their emerging competitors—can move forward together.

Innovation is shaping and will continue to shape the future of social communications. It is already a reality that Internet connections are increasingly mobile. A survey we conducted in early 2013 in partnership with Ipsos found that 94 percent of Tuenti users aged 16 to 35 owned cell phones, 84 percent of users connected to the Internet using their phones, and 47 percent had mobile data subscriptions for connecting to the Internet. A total of 74 percent of users reported connecting to the Internet from their phone on a daily basis, while 84 percent did so at least weekly. Only 13 percent did not use their phones to connect to the Internet, and that percentage is decreasing every day.

Mobile Internet use alters the pattern of device usage; the hitherto familiar ways of accessing the Internet are changing too. The smartphone activities taking up the most time (over three hours a day) include instant messaging (38%), social media use (35%), listening to music (24%), and web browsing (20%). The activities taking up the least time (under five minutes a day) are: SMS texting (51%), watching movies (43%), reading and writing e-mail (38%), and talking on the phone (32%). Things are still changing.

Smartphones are gaining ground in everyday life. Many of the purposes formerly served by other items now involve using our smartphones. Some 75 percent of young people reported having replaced their MP3 player with their phone, 74 percent use their phone as an alarm clock, 70 percent use it as their camera, and 67 percent use it as their watch.

We have been observing these shifts for a while, which is why we decided to reinvent ourselves by placing smartphones at the heart of our strategy. I want to use this example as a showcase of what is happening in the world of social communication and the Internet in general: mobile connectivity is bringing about a new revolution. Tuenti is no longer just a social network, and social media as a whole are becoming more than just websites. The new Tuenti provides native mobile apps for Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Phone, as well as the Firefox OS app and the mobile version of the website, m.tuenti.com. Tuenti is now a cross-platform service that lets users connect with their friends and contacts from wherever they may be, using their device of choice. A user with a laptop can IM in real time with a user with a smartphone, and switch from one device to another without losing the thread of the conversation. The conversations are in the cloud, so data and contacts are preserved independently of the devices being used. This means the experience has to be made uniform across platforms, which sometimes involves paring down functionalities, given the processing and screen size limitations of mobile devices. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on are all evolving to become increasingly cross-platform experiences. But Tuenti is the first social network that has also developed its own Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO)—the company is an Internet service provider over the mobile network. Tuenti is an MVNO with a social media angle, and this may be the future path of telecommunications.

Social media are evolving to become something more, and innovation must be their hallmark if they are to continue being relevant. Tuenti now embraces both social communications and telecom services provision, offering value added by letting you use the mobile app free of charge and without using up your data traffic allowance, even if you have no credit on your prepaid card—this is wholly revolutionary in the telecom sector. The convergence of social media with more traditional sectors is already bringing about a new context for innovation, a new arena for the development and growth of the Internet.

Just about everything in the world of the Internet still lies ahead of us, and mobile communications as we know them must be reinvented by making them more digital. The future will be shaped by innovation converging with the impact of mobility. This applies not just to social media but to the Internet in general, particularly in the social communications field. I feel that many people do not understand what we are doing and have no idea of the potential development of companies like ours at the global level. Right now, there may be somebody out there, in some corner of the world, developing the tool that will turn the Internet upside down all over again. The tool that will alter our day-to-day life once more. Creating more opportunities, providing new benefits to individuals, bringing more individual and collective well-being. Just ten years ago, social media did not exist; in the next ten years, something else radically new will emerge. There are many areas in which products, processes, and services can be improved or created afresh. The future is brimming with opportunities, and the future of the Internet has only just begun.

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The Impact of the Internet on Society: A Global Perspective
Implications of the Revolution in Work and Family
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Millennials and Gen Z: Dependence on Technology Essay

Even though some people may regard the negative assessment of a younger generation that appears in social media feed as faulty, they are partially correct. There is, indeed, a significant generation gap between people who lived in the 1960s and the people entering their twenties today. There also is substantial evidence that people of one generation share similar characteristics since they grow in one social and political environment (Arnett & Jensen, 2019).

The world has changed since the sixties, and people need more time to grow up due to the economic revolution, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, and the youth’s movement (Arnett & Jensen, 2019). Today, people need to prepare themselves for a more complicated life, which makes them postpone their commitment to a family, stable job, or even to a specific geographical location. Therefore, the statement that modern people are more dependent on technology and try to avoid commitment is true, and it is not necessarily a bad thing.

Arnett, J. J., & Jensen, L. A. (2019). Human development: A cultural approach (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

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IvyPanda . "Millennials and Gen Z: Dependence on Technology." June 24, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/millennials-and-gen-z-dependence-on-technology/.

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Essay On Internet for Students and Children

500+ words essay on internet.

We live in the age of the internet. Also, it has become an important part of our life that we can’t live without it. Besides, the internet is an invention of high-end science and modern technology . Apart from that, we are connected to internet 24×7. Also, we can send big and small messages and information faster than ever. In this essay on the Internet, we are going to discuss various things related to the internet.

Reach of Internet

It is very difficult to estimate the area that the internet cover. Also, every second million people remain connected to it with any problem or issue. Apart from that, just like all the things the internet also has some good and bad effect on the life of people. So the first thing which we have to do is learn about the good and bad effect of the internet.

Good effects of the internet mean all those things that the internet make possible. Also, these things make our life easier and safer.

Bad effects of the internet mean all those things that we can no longer do because of the internet. Also, these things cause trouble for oneself and others too.

You can access in any corner of the world. Also, it is very easy to use and manage. In today’s world, we cannot imagine our life without it.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Uses Of Internet

From the time it first came into existence until now the internet has completed a long journey. Also, during this journey, the internet has adopted many things and became more user-friendly and interactive. Besides, every big and small things are available on internet and article or material that you require can be obtainable from internet.

Tim Berners-Lee can be called one of the main father of internet as he invented/discovered the WWW (World Wide Web) which is used on every website. Also, there are millions of pages and website on the internet that it will take you years to go through all of them.

The Internet can be used to do different things like you can learn, teach, research, write, share, receive, e-mail , explore, and surf the internet.

Read Essay on Technology here

Convenience Due To Internet

Because of internet, our lives have become more convenient as compared to the times when we don’t have internet. Earlier, we have to stand in queues to send mails (letters), for withdrawing or depositing money, to book tickets, etc. but after the dawn of the internet, all these things become quite easy. Also, we do not have to waste our precious time standing in queues.

Also, the internet has contributed a lot to the environment as much of the offices (government and private), school and colleges have become digital that saves countless paper.

Although, there is no doubt that the internet had made our life easier and convenient but we can’t leave the fact that it has caused many bigger problems in the past. And with the speed, we are becoming addict to it a day in will come when it will become our basic necessity.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [ { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What are the limitation of internet?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Although internet can help you with anything but there are certain limitation to it. First of it does not have a physical appearance. Secondly, it does not have emotions and thirdly, it can’t send you to a place where you can’t go (physically).” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What is the ideal age for using internet?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Nowadays everybody from small kids to adult is internet addicts. So it is difficult to decide an ideal age for using internet. However, according to researches using internet from an early age can cause problems in the child so internet usage of small children should be controlled or banned.” } } ] }

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It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

By Louis Menand

The discovery that you can make money marketing merchandise to teen-agers dates from the early nineteen-forties, which is also when the term “youth culture” first appeared in print. There was a reason that those things happened when they did: high school. Back in 1910, most young people worked; only fourteen per cent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were still in school. In 1940, though, that proportion was seventy-three per cent. A social space had opened up between dependency and adulthood, and a new demographic was born: “youth.”

The rate of high-school attendance kept growing. By 1955, eighty-four per cent of high-school-age Americans were in school. (The figure for Western Europe was sixteen per cent.) Then, between 1956 and 1969, college enrollment in the United States more than doubled, and “youth” grew from a four-year demographic to an eight-year one. By 1969, it made sense that everyone was talking about the styles and values and tastes of young people: almost half the population was under twenty-five.

Today, a little less than a third of the population is under twenty-five, but youth remains a big consumer base for social-media platforms, streaming services, computer games, music, fashion, smartphones, apps, and all kinds of other goods, from motorized skateboards to eco-friendly water bottles. To keep this market churning, and to give the consulting industry something to sell to firms trying to understand (i.e., increase the productivity of) their younger workers, we have invented a concept that allows “youth culture” to be redefined periodically. This is the concept of the generation.

The term is borrowed from human reproductive biology. In a kinship structure, parents and their siblings constitute “the older generation”; offspring and their cousins are “the younger generation.” The time it takes, in our species, for the younger generation to become the older generation is traditionally said to be around thirty years. (For the fruit fly, it’s ten days.) That is how the term is used in the Hebrew Bible, and Herodotus said that a century could be thought of as the equivalent of three generations.

Around 1800, the term got transplanted from the family to society. The new idea was that people born within a given period, usually thirty years, belong to a single generation. There is no sound basis in biology or anything else for this claim, but it gave European scientists and intellectuals a way to make sense of something they were obsessed with, social and cultural change. What causes change? Can we predict it? Can we prevent it? Maybe the reason societies change is that people change, every thirty years.

Before 1945, most people who theorized about generations were talking about literary and artistic styles and intellectual trends—a shift from Romanticism to realism, for example, or from liberalism to conservatism. The sociologist Karl Mannheim, in an influential essay published in 1928, used the term “generation units” to refer to writers, artists, and political figures who self-consciously adopt new ways of doing things. Mannheim was not interested in trends within the broader population. He assumed that the culture of what he called “peasant communities” does not change.

Nineteenth-century generational theory took two forms. For some thinkers, generational change was the cause of social and historical change. New generations bring to the world new ways of thinking and doing, and weed out beliefs and practices that have grown obsolete. This keeps society rejuvenated. Generations are the pulse of history. Other writers thought that generations were different from one another because their members carried the imprint of the historical events they lived through. The reason we have generations is that we have change, not the other way around.

There are traces of both the pulse hypothesis and the imprint hypothesis in the way we talk about generations today. We tend to assume that there is a rhythm to social and cultural history that maps onto generational cohorts, such that each cohort is shaped by, or bears the imprint of, major historical events—Vietnam, 9/11, COVID . But we also think that young people develop their own culture, their own tastes and values, and that this new culture displaces the culture of the generation that preceded theirs.

Today, the time span of a generational cohort is usually taken to be around fifteen years (even though the median age of first-time mothers in the U.S. is now twenty-six and of first-time fathers thirty-one). People born within that period are supposed to carry a basket of characteristics that differentiate them from people born earlier or later.

This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. (Do you have less in common with your parents than with people you have never met who happen to have been born a few years before or after you?) The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64). And that someone born in the last birth year of Gen X, 1980, has more in common with someone born in 1965 or 1970 than with someone born in 1981 or 1990.

Everyone realizes that precision dating of this kind is silly, but although we know that chronological boundaries can blur a bit, we still imagine generational differences to be bright-line distinctions. People talk as though there were a unique DNA for Gen X—what in the nineteenth century was called a generational “entelechy”—even though the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.

You could say the same things about decades, of course. A year is, like a biological generation, a measurable thing, the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. But there is nothing in nature that corresponds to a decade—or a century, or a millennium. Those are terms of convenience, determined by the fact that we have ten fingers.

Yet we happily generalize about “the fifties” and “the sixties” as having dramatically distinct, well, entelechies. Decade-thinking is deeply embedded. For most of us, “She’s a seventies person” carries a lot more specific information than “She’s Gen X.” By this light, generations are just a novel way of slicing up the space-time continuum, no more arbitrary, and possibly a little less, than decades and centuries. The question, therefore, is not “Are generations real?” The question is “Are they a helpful way to understand anything?”

Bobby Duffy, the author of “The Generation Myth” (Basic), says yes, but they’re not as helpful as people think. Duffy is a social scientist at King’s College London. His argument is that generations are just one of three factors that explain changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The others are historical events and “life-cycle effects,” that is, how people change as they age. His book illustrates, with a somewhat overwhelming array of graphs and statistics, how events and aging interact with birth cohort to explain differences in racial attitudes, happiness, suicide rates, political affiliations—you name it, for he thinks that his three factors explain everything.

TITLE The Four Musicians Of The Apocalypse

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Duffy’s over-all finding is that people in different age groups are much more alike than all the talk about generations suggests, and one reason for all that talk, he thinks, is the consulting industry. He says that, in 2015, American firms spent some seventy million dollars on generational consulting (which doesn’t seem that much, actually). “What generational differences exist in the workplace?” he asks. His answer: “Virtually none.”

Duffy is good at using data to take apart many familiar generational characterizations. There is no evidence, he says, of a “loneliness epidemic” among young people, or of a rise in the rate of suicide. The falling off in sexual activity in the United States and the U.K. is population-wide, not just among the young.

He says that attitudes about gender in the United States correlate more closely with political party than with age, and that, in Europe, anyway, there are no big age divides in the recognition of climate change. There is “just about no evidence,” he says, that Generation Z (1997-2012, encompassing today’s college students) is more ethically motivated than other generations. When it comes to consumer boycotts and the like, “ ‘cancel culture’ seems to be more of a middle-age thing.” He worries that generational stereotypes—such as the characterization of Gen Z-ers as woke snowflakes—are promoted in order to fuel the culture wars.

The woke-snowflake stereotype is the target of “Gen Z, Explained” (Chicago), a heartfelt defense of the values and beliefs of contemporary college students. The book has four authors, Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead—an anthropologist, a linguist, a historian, and a sociologist—and presents itself as a social-scientific study, including a “methodological appendix.” But it resembles what might be called journalistic ethnography: the portrayal of social types by means of interviews and anecdotes.

The authors adopt a key tenet of the pulse hypothesis. They see Gen Z-ers as agents of change, a generation that has created a youth culture that can transform society. (The fact that when they finished researching their book, in 2019, roughly half of Gen Z was under sixteen does not trouble them, just as the fact that at the time of Woodstock, in 1969, more than half the baby-boom generation was under thirteen doesn’t prevent people from making generalizations about the baby boomers.)

Their book is based on hour-long interviews with a hundred and twenty students at three colleges, two in California (Stanford and Foothill College, a well-regarded community college) and one in the U.K. (Lancaster, a selective research university). The authors inform us that the interviewees were chosen “by word of mouth and personal networking,” which sounds a lot like self-selection. It is, in any event (as they unapologetically acknowledge), hardly a randomized sample.

The authors tell us that the interviews were conducted entirely by student research assistants, which means that, unless the research assistants simply read questions off a list, there was no control over the depth or the direction of the interviews. There were also some focus groups, in which students talked about their lives with, mostly, their friends, an exercise performed in an echo chamber. Journalists, or popular ethnographers, would at least have met and observed their subjects. It’s mystifying why the authors felt a need to distance themselves in this way, given how selective their sample was to begin with. We are left with quotations detached from context. Self-reporting is taken at face value.

The authors supplemented the student interviews with a lexical glossary designed to pick out words and memes heavily used by young people, and with two surveys, designed by one of the authors (Woodhead) and conducted by YouGov, an Internet polling company, of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in the United States and the U.K.

Where there is an awkward discrepancy between the survey results and what the college students say in the interviews, the authors attempt to explain it away. The YouGov surveys found that ninety-one per cent of all persons aged eighteen to twenty-five, American and British, identify as male or female, and only four per cent as gender fluid or nonbinary. (Five per cent declined to answer.) This does not match the impression created by the interviews, which suggest that there should be many more fluid and nonbinary young people out there, so the authors say that we don’t really know what the survey respondents meant by “male” and “female.” Well, then, maybe they should have been asked.

The authors attribute none of the characteristics they identify as Gen Z to the imprint of historical events—with a single exception: the rise of the World Wide Web. Gen Z is the first “born digital” generation. This fact has often been used to stereotype young people as screen-time addicts, captives of their smartphones, obsessed with how they appear on social media, and so on. The Internet is their “culture.” They are trapped in the Web. The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” emphatically reject this line of critique. They assure us that Gen Z-ers “understand both the potential and the downside of technology” and possess “critical awareness about the technology that shapes their lives.”

For the college students who were interviewed (although not, evidently, for the people who were surveyed), a big part of Gen Z culture revolves around identity. As the authors put it, “self-labeling has become an imperative that is impossible to escape.” This might seem to suggest a certain degree of self-absorption, but the authors assure us that these young people “are self-identified and self-reliant but markedly not self-centered, egotistical, or selfish.”

“Lily” is offered to illustrate the ethical richness of this new concern. It seems that Lily has a friend who is always late to meet with her: “She explained that while she of course wanted to honor and respect his unique identity, choices, and lifestyle—including his habitual tardiness—she was also frustrated by how that conflicted with her sense that he was then not respecting her identity and preference for timeliness.” The authors do not find this amusing.

The book’s big claim is that Gen Z-ers “may well be the heralds of new attitudes and expectations about how individuals and institutions can change for the better.” They have come up with new ways of working (collaborative), new forms of identity (fluid and intersectional), new concepts of community (diverse, inclusive, non-hierarchical).

Methodology aside, there is much that is refreshing here. There is no reason to assume that younger people are more likely to be passive victims of technology than older people (that assumption is classic old person’s bias), and it makes sense that, having grown up doing everything on a computer, Gen Z-ers have a fuller understanding of the digital universe than analog dinosaurs do. The dinosaurs can say, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” but Gen Z-ers can say, “You don’t understand what you’re getting.”

The claim that addiction to their devices is the cause of a rise in mental disorders among teen-agers is a lot like the old complaint that listening to rock and roll turns kids into animals. The authors cite a recent study (not their own) that concludes that the association between poor mental health and eating potatoes is greater than the association with technology use. We’re all in our own fishbowls. We should hesitate before we pass judgment on what life is like in the fishbowls of others.

The major problem with “Gen Z, Explained” is not so much the authors’ fawning tone, or their admiration for the students’ concerns—“environmental degradation, equality, violence, and injustice”—even though they are the same concerns that almost everyone in their social class has, regardless of age. The problem is the “heralds of a new dawn” stuff.

“A crisis looms for all unless we can find ways to change,” they warn. “Gen Zers have ideas of the type of world they would like to bring into being. By listening carefully to what they are saying, we can appreciate the lessons they have to teach us: be real, know who you are, be responsible for your own well-being, support your friends, open up institutions to the talents of the many, not the few, embrace diversity, make the world kinder, live by your values.”

I believe we have been here before, Captain. Fifty-one years ago, The New Yorker ran a thirty-nine-thousand-word piece that began:

There is a revolution under way . . . It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.

The author was a forty-two-year-old Yale Law School professor named Charles Reich, and the piece was an excerpt from his book “The Greening of America,” which, when it came out, later that year, went to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list.

Reich had been in San Francisco in 1967, during the so-called Summer of Love, and was amazed and excited by the flower-power wing of the counterculture—the bell-bottom pants (about which he waxes ecstatic in the book), the marijuana and the psychedelic drugs, the music, the peace-and-love life style, everything.

He became convinced that the only way to cure the ills of American life was to follow the young people. “The new generation has shown the way to the one method of change that will work in today’s post-industrial society: revolution by consciousness,” he wrote. “This means a new way of living, almost a new man. This is what the new generation has been searching for, and what it has started to achieve.”

So how did that work out? The trouble, of course, was that Reich was basing his observations and predictions on, to use Mannheim’s term, a generation unit—a tiny number of people who were hyperconscious of their choices and values and saw themselves as being in revolt against the bad thinking and failed practices of previous generations. The folks who showed up for the Summer of Love were not a representative sample of sixties youth.

Most young people in the sixties did not practice free love, take drugs, or protest the war in Vietnam. In a poll taken in 1967, when people were asked whether couples should wait to have sex until they were married, sixty-three per cent of those in their twenties said yes, virtually the same as in the general population. In 1969, when people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine were asked whether they had ever used marijuana, eighty-eight per cent said no. When the same group was asked whether the United States should withdraw immediately from Vietnam, three-quarters said no, about the same as in the general population.

Most young people in the sixties were not even notably liberal. When people who attended college from 1966 to 1968 were asked which candidate they preferred in the 1968 Presidential election, fifty-three per cent said Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Among those who attended college from 1962 to 1965, fifty-seven per cent preferred Nixon or Wallace, which matched the results in the general election.

The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” are making the same erroneous extrapolation. They are generalizing on the basis of a very small group of privileged people, born within five or six years of one another, who inhabit insular communities of the like-minded. It’s fine to try to find out what these people think. Just don’t call them a generation.

Buffalo walk one behind the other in a straight line.

Most of the millions of Gen Z-ers may be quite different from the scrupulously ethical, community-minded young people in the book. Duffy cites a survey, conducted in 2019 by a market-research firm, in which people were asked to name the characteristics of baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials (1981-96), and Gen Z-ers. The top five characteristics assigned to Gen Z were: tech-savvy, materialistic, selfish, lazy, and arrogant. The lowest-ranked characteristic was ethical. When Gen Z-ers were asked to describe their own generation, they came up with an almost identical list. Most people born after 1996 apparently don’t think quite as well of themselves as the college students in “Gen Z, Explained” do.

In any case, “explaining” people by asking them what they think and then repeating their answers is not sociology. Contemporary college students did not invent new ways of thinking about identity and community. Those were already rooted in the institutional culture of higher education. From Day One, college students are instructed about the importance of diversity, inclusion, honesty, collaboration—all the virtuous things that the authors of “Gen Z, Explained” attribute to the new generation. Students can say (and some do say) to their teachers and their institutions, “You’re not living up to those values.” But the values are shared values.

And they were in place long before Gen Z entered college. Take “intersectionality,” which the students in “Gen Z, Explained” use as a way of refining traditional categories of identity. That term has been around for more than thirty years. It was coined (as the authors note) in 1989, by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. And Crenshaw was born in 1959. She’s a boomer.

“Diversity,” as an institutional priority, dates back even farther. It played a prominent role in the affirmative-action case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978, which opened the constitutional door to race-conscious admissions. That was three “generations” ago. Since then, almost every selective college has worked to achieve a diverse student body and boasts about it when it succeeds. College students think of themselves and their peers in terms of identity because of how the institution thinks of them.

People who went to college in an earlier era may find this emphasis a distraction from students’ education. Why should they be constantly forced to think about their own demographic profiles and their differences from other students? But look at American politics—look at world politics—over the past five years. Aren’t identity and difference kind of important things to understand?

And who creates “youth culture,” anyway? Older people. Youth has agency in the sense that it can choose to listen to the music or wear the clothing or march in the demonstrations or not. And there are certainly ground-up products (bell-bottoms, actually). Generally, though, youth has the same degree of agency that I have when buying a car. I can choose the model I want, but I do not make the cars.

Failure to recognize the way the fabric is woven leads to skewed social history. The so-called Silent Generation is a particularly outrageous example. That term has come to describe Americans who went to high school and college in the nineteen-fifties, partly because it sets up a convenient contrast to the baby-boom generation that followed. Those boomers, we think—they were not silent! In fact, they mostly were.

The term “Silent Generation” was coined in 1951, in an article in Time —and so was not intended to characterize the decade. “Today’s generation is ready to conform,” the article concluded. Time defined the Silent Generation as people aged eighteen to twenty-eight—that is, those who entered the workforce mostly in the nineteen-forties. Though the birth dates of Time’s Silent Generation were 1923 to 1933, the term somehow migrated to later dates, and it is now used for the generation born between 1928 and 1945.

So who were these silent conformists? Gloria Steinem, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King, Jr., Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Berry Gordy, Amiri Baraka, Ken Kesey, Huey Newton, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol . . . Sorry, am I boring you?

It was people like these, along with even older folks, like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Pauli Murray, who were active in the culture and the politics of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from a few musicians, it is hard to name a single major figure in that decade who was a baby boomer. But the boomers, most of whom were too young then even to know what was going on, get the credit (or, just as unfairly, the blame).

Mannheim thought that the great danger in generational analysis was the elision of class as a factor in determining beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Today, we would add race, gender, immigration status, and any number of other “preconditions.” A woman born to an immigrant family in San Antonio in 1947 had very different life chances from a white man born in San Francisco that year. Yet the baby-boom prototype is a white male college student wearing striped bell-bottoms and a peace button, just as the Gen Z prototype is a female high-school student with spending money and an Instagram account.

For some reason, Duffy, too, adopts the conventional names and dates of the postwar generations (all of which originated in popular culture). He offers no rationale for this, and it slightly obscures one of his best points, which is that the most formative period for many people happens not in their school years but once they leave school and enter the workforce. That is when they confront life-determining economic and social circumstances, and where factors like their race, their gender, and their parents’ wealth make an especially pronounced difference to their chances.

Studies have consistently indicated that people do not become more conservative as they age. As Duffy shows, however, some people find entry into adulthood delayed by economic circumstances. This tends to differentiate their responses to survey questions about things like expectations. Eventually, he says, everyone catches up. In other words, if you are basing your characterization of a generation on what people say when they are young, you are doing astrology. You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.

Take the boomers: when those who were born between 1946 and 1952 entered the workforce, the economy was surging. When those who were born between 1953 and 1964 entered it, the economy was a dumpster fire. It took longer for younger boomers to start a career or buy a house. People in that kind of situation are therefore likely to register in surveys as “materialistic.” But it’s not the Zeitgeist that’s making them that way. It’s just the business cycle. ♦

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Impact of Internet on Youth English essay

This is an outstanding version of the essay "The Impact of internet or youth" written in English. The essay describes all the positive and negative impacts of the Internet and social media on our kids and young generation. So, the essay has outlined, quotations and a conclusion.

Influence of the internet on youth essay

This essay is best for college lever and high school level students. I have included some relevant quotations and the outline in this essay. So, let us start the essay below:

Impact of the Internet on youth essay with quotations

We are all now connected by the internet, like neurons in a giant brain - Stephen Hawking

Internet nowadays has become a necessity. Everyone, especially young people, cannot survive without it. Be it school work, academic or professional work.

The influence of anything in life has positive and negative influences. The same applies to the internet as well. The young generation’s life has greatly changed with the internet.

Due to access to the internet, the young generation has vast awareness. With the touch of a button, one can find news about anything. A youngster is more globally aware today of the internet.

The internet gave us access to everything; but it also gave everything access to us - James Veitch

Internet has certainly made life a lot easier. There is efficient communication, connecting, etc. This has had a positive influence of the youth. The students and youth can work in peers online while sitting at their homes.

The Internet has provided an excellent source of earning. This involves freelancing, social media jobs and e-commerce. This has benefited the youth extensively; they are able to earn at home. They also find online jobs and know about vacant positions at a company. They apply for the job online.

Alongside the positive influence, there exists negative ones. Time wastage is the major issue with internet. The main target becomes the young generation. They tend to waste time with games, movies, social media etc. To an extent, this issue is spoiling our youth.

The internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers - J.K. Rownling

Nowadays, spectacles have become very common in youth. The negative effect of internet via smartphones has led too poor eyesight amongst them.

A huge negative influence has been cyber bullying. With youth as the primary target such crimes have been on the rise. Internet has exposed young people to such negativity.

Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the privce we accept for just getting on the internet - Gary Kovacs

Poor mental health has been on the rise in the younger generation. A lot of it is due to increased competition and insecurities brought with internet via social media. Sadly, suicide rates have become more common among students.

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Internet generation

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For Instance, the designs tend to emphasize stoically and straightforward commands and prompts. Keyboards are less cluttered with keys, and the software lacks design complications.

The computers also make the tasks common to elderly users, such as email or viewing photos, easy to access and operate. These are just a few ways companies as well as new technology make it easier for the elderly to learn. Among the complications for the elderly in using computers are the physical, mental and cognitive impairments that come with age.These issues can include problems of vision, hearing, motor skills, attention span and memory. The elderly can struggle with recognizing patterns or resisting glare even while managing the simple process of viewing a computer screen.

Their declining ability to reason and to learn new tasks also makes computer use and learning difficult. These Impediments are important to note when trying to educate people on computer/Lenten usage. For this paper I interviewed one of my clients who I used to work for in 2009. My client was a 82 year old realtor who needed computer assistance, as well as filing and data managing services.

During the time working for her, we developed a very close relationship based on the ways I could help her remember how to do computer related tasks. We would spend long hours on the phone, as she watched me control her computer remotely. Whenever a command was done that she did not understand, she would simply ask and I would repeat the steps or re-explain the procedure. This allowed for a very hands-on approach to her computer skill development. In as little as two months she was able to accomplish tasks with little to no assistance.

When I asked, "what do you need me to do In order to better this experience for you? She replied, "let me see you do It, and do It very slowly and speak clearly please. " Once shown the steps and spoken to clearly, she was able to do ere tasks the way she wanted. My client would even have her "girlfriends" over at It only took a week to get their email accounts clean, and teach them the importance of cleaning their inbox. I had explained to them cleaning their email, is as important as taking out your garbage every week. If you do not take your garbage out, then it will become harder to manage and will only accumulate.Giving real world examples always benefited the interaction I had with my client and her friends.

Another way to make learning easier for the elderly is to compare the digital things you are doing with real-life actions. If you make analogies frequently, you make it easier for your tech UN-as',no. ' seniors to comprehend what it is you are going to show them how to do. For example, you could tell seniors that "logging into your email account is Just like walking to the mailbox to pick up a stack of mail.

" The Elderly do well with visual-aids, and simple analogies may make for a better example than showing them how things are done.By making software and interfaces more user-friendly, companies are not the only ones who can ease the elderly with their learning. Relatives of the elderly as well as friends can assist with the introduction to computers. Bring your elderly or family member to the library to use the computerized card catalog. Grandmas and grandpas are familiar with the library. In fact, in their day, research for school papers was done at the library, not online like it is today.

Show your grandma the card catalog, and how she can type in a word and it automatically brings up a list of matching titles.Sit down at the computer yourself with your grandpa right next to you. Surf the Internet. (You can probably do this right at the library if you want. Most libraries have Internet access for their card holders.

) Show him firsthand what is available on the Internet. This might be the first time he has ever seen it! Give your grandma or grandpa their own computer, after a couple weeks of going to the library. It doesn't have to be brand new. This will get her used to seeing a computer every day and calling it her own.

Teach your grandma or grandpa how to play simple games like solitaire.This will allow them to navigate through the screens to find the desired game. It will also help them learn how to operate a mouse. Games are great for people who are uncomfortable with computers. Set up an email account for your grandma.

Write down the exact steps she should take to get there. Demonstrate the tepees for her, and then have her do it herself in front of you. When you get home, write her an email and show her how to respond to it the next day. Those are Just a few examples of how to introduce people to computers and its uses.

Computer technology has made vast amounts of information available to the fingertips of all people, great and small, young and old. Though this information has been made available, teaching the elderly how to access that available data can prove difficult. The "abstraction," or bigger idea, of the World Wide Web is something many elderly cannot understand because they haven't had exposure to even the most basic imputer and network terminology. Elderly respond well to visual aids, hands-on experience and real-life parallels.

While seniors are skilled at many things, many of them struggle with the use of computers.Because the majority of seniors have little or no experience with computers, completing computer-aided tasks often proves challenging for these individuals. By teaching seniors to use computers effectively, you can open their eyes to a host of opportunities that computers afford their users. Computers, with patience and persistence even the most inexperienced senior can learn to use a computer effectively. There are more problems associated with web accessibility than normally come to mind, and this is why it is so important we realize and understand the growing problems elderly face in an advancing society.It's not as if older people don't use the web, because they do.

It's Just that they are not as actively involved with it in public settings, or even digital settings. "Wired" seniors are often as enthusiastic as younger users in the major activities that define online life such as email and the use of search engines to answer specific questions. In other words, we should not stereotype all older adults as technophobes (fears of technology). With that being said, then why don't the elderly understand the technology as well as the teens?If you remember the problems I stated with aging, then you may remember why they have problems.

According too poll done in California, 23. 9% of the elderly and 30. 3% of disabled people polled state the reason for not using technology as, "little or no knowledge of what it can do" (Web). Older generations have trouble grasping the concepts of what can be achieved while online, and tend to "futz" around more than younger users. Younger users seem less afraid to Just "click", where as an older user ay reach the conclusion that their computer may break when they "click.

Explaining the Internet to a senior citizen can often be tantamount to explaining the universe to a young child. But a computer is only as effective as the bandwidth of connectivity, I. E. , the weakest link in the chain limits all other features and attributes.

People in general and especially older people will quickly lose interest and avoid the frustration of waiting for some vast and complex web page to download. This frustration can be subdued if people are willing to spend time educating and providing help to these willing citizens.

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Topic-to-essay generation with knowledge-based content selection

The topic-to-essay generation task is a challenging natural language generation task that aims to generate paragraph-level text with high semantic coherence based on a given set of topic words. Previous work has focused on the introduction of external knowledge, ignoring the insufficient generated text diversity. In order to improve the generation diversity, we propose a novel copy mechanism model with a content selection module that integrates rich semantic knowledge from the language model into the decoder. Furthermore, we introduce the improved prefix tuning method to train the model, enabling it to adapt to varying input complexities. In addition, we have contributed a new Chinese dataset for TEG tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can improve the generated text diversity by 35% to 59% compared to the state-of-the-art method, while maintaining a high level of topic consistency.

Index Terms — Topic-to-essay generation, New Chinese dataset, Knowledge Selection

1 Introduction

Topic-to-essay generation (TEG), which aims at generating fluent, novel, and topic-consistent paragraph-level text with several given topics (keywords), as shown in Fig. 1 , has a great deal of practical applications. It can be used for automatic advertisement generation, mail generation or keyword-based news writing [ 1 ] .

Due to the wide range of applications of TEG, this task has attracted a large amount of research attention. Previous study mentioned that unlike machine translation and text summarization, in TEG task, the semantic resources contained in the input sequence are much smaller than those in the output sequence, and it is almost impossible to generate satisfied text without enough semantic resources [ 2 ] . Therefore, in order to improve the quality of generated texts, researchers have started to explore the introduction of different types of external resources. Some previous studies [ 2 , 3 , 4 ] incorporate knowledge from the commonsense knowledge base like ConceptNet [ 5 ] and HowNet [ 6 ] . They utilize different graph structure encoders to fully leverage the external information. However, some studies argue that the information in the training corpus is sufficient to generate high-quality text, so they focus on how to effectively leverage the information within the corpus [ 7 , 8 ] . Additionally, some other works focus on different aspects, such as the inconsistency between the training and inference processing [ 9 ] , the human writing conventions [ 10 ] , and the multiple perspectives of input information [ 11 ] .

Although these methods produced high-quality text, there are still two issues that need to be addressed in TEG. First, the existing methods fail to utilize the rich semantic knowledge in language models, resulting in unsatisfactory text quality. Second, previous methods excessively emphasize the importance of labeled text, thereby restricting the diversity of generated text.

To address these problems, we propose a novel content selection topic-to-essay generator based on the encoder-decoder framework. The generator uses a pre-trained GENIUS language model [ 12 ] and a copy mechanism with content selection module, applying a unique training method to protect the knowledge in GENIUS from being destroyed. GENIUS is trained using a unique sketch reconstruction pre-training task, which enables it to learn knowledge similar to the TEG task while other language models can’t. To enhance the diversity of generated texts and make full use of the rich semantic knowledge contained in GENIUS, we propose a content selection module to the generator, using the improved prefix tuning method to train. It also monitors the state of the decoder at all time steps to make sure that the generated text is always correlated with the topics. Like prefix tuning [ 13 ] , the knowledge in the model is preserved. Furthermore, we have released a new Chinese dataset NAES for the TEG task. This dataset includes news articles and essays on various topics, such as finance, society, and lifestyle. Experimental results demonstrate that our method has an average improvement of over 40% compared to SOTA methods for text diversity on all evaluation datasets, while maintaining a high level of topic-consistency.

2 Methodology

In Figure 2 , we present our proposed model, GCS-IPT, which utilizes a pre-trained G ENIUS model comprising of a copy mechanism with C ontent S election module, and is trained using the I mproved P refix- T uning approach.

2.1 Task Formulation

The TEG task takes a topic set T = { t 1 , t 2 , … , t m } 𝑇 subscript 𝑡 1 subscript 𝑡 2 … subscript 𝑡 𝑚 T=\{t_{1},t_{2},...,t_{m}\} italic_T = { italic_t start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 1 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , italic_t start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 2 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , … , italic_t start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_m end_POSTSUBSCRIPT } consisting of m 𝑚 m italic_m topic words as input, aims to generate paragraph-level text E = { e 1 , e 2 , … , e n } 𝐸 subscript 𝑒 1 subscript 𝑒 2 … subscript 𝑒 𝑛 E=\{e_{1},e_{2},...,e_{n}\} italic_E = { italic_e start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 1 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , italic_e start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 2 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , … , italic_e start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_n end_POSTSUBSCRIPT } that is coherent with the input topics and n 𝑛 n italic_n is the token number of generated text. For example, as shown in Figure 1 , when given five topics: “we”, “like”, “birds”, “helping”, and “beauty”, a TEG model will generate paragraph-level text as shown in the figure.

2.2 Copy mechanism with Content Selection

The copy mechanism allows for additional attention to be given to the input sequence during the generation process:

At time step t 𝑡 t italic_t , the context vector c t subscript 𝑐 𝑡 c_{t} italic_c start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT is calculated with the hidden state of the encoder h t subscript ℎ 𝑡 h_{t} italic_h start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT and the attention of the target sequence to source sequence α t superscript 𝛼 𝑡 \alpha^{t} italic_α start_POSTSUPERSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUPERSCRIPT . And we get p g ⁢ e ⁢ n subscript 𝑝 𝑔 𝑒 𝑛 p_{gen} italic_p start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_g italic_e italic_n end_POSTSUBSCRIPT , the probability of selecting a word from the vocabulary where W 𝑊 W italic_W and b 𝑏 b italic_b are learnable hyperparameters in a fully-connected layer.

While the copy mechanism enables heightened attention to the topic words during generation, it fails to consider the accurate expression of diverse topic semantics in the resulting text. In order to address this, we propose the Content Selection module to compute the probability p g ⁢ e ⁢ n subscript 𝑝 𝑔 𝑒 𝑛 p_{gen} italic_p start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_g italic_e italic_n end_POSTSUBSCRIPT .

Next, we select the helpful information for generation.

Finally, the probability p g ⁢ e ⁢ n subscript 𝑝 𝑔 𝑒 𝑛 p_{gen} italic_p start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_g italic_e italic_n end_POSTSUBSCRIPT is calculated as follows:

Similar to the traditional copy mechanism, the probability distribution for copying words from the input source sequence P c ⁢ o ⁢ p ⁢ y subscript 𝑃 𝑐 𝑜 𝑝 𝑦 P_{copy} italic_P start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_c italic_o italic_p italic_y end_POSTSUBSCRIPT can be obtained through attention α 𝛼 \alpha italic_α . For the current word e t subscript 𝑒 𝑡 e_{t} italic_e start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT to be generated, the words in the source sequence with higher attention scores for e t subscript 𝑒 𝑡 e_{t} italic_e start_POSTSUBSCRIPT italic_t end_POSTSUBSCRIPT are more likely to be copied. Finally, the probability distribution for generating a word e 𝑒 e italic_e combines the probability distribution from the vocabulary and the probability distribution for copying words.

2.3 Improved Prefix-tuning

Throughout the training process, preserving the semantic knowledge within GENIUS is of utmost importance. Therefore, we opt for training it utilizing the prefix-tuning approach. Considering the complexity of the input text often varies in TEG task, which escalating proportionally with the count of topic words, we propose an enhanced variant of the prefix-tuning technique.

Specifically, prefix vector is a fixed-length vector, but different subvectors are trained based on the number of topics. Let n 𝑛 n italic_n represents the given number of topics. We obtain the initial index i ⁢ d ⁢ x 𝑖 𝑑 𝑥 idx italic_i italic_d italic_x for the subvector by applying a linear transformation to the initial state h 0 subscript ℎ 0 h_{0} italic_h start_POSTSUBSCRIPT 0 end_POSTSUBSCRIPT of the encoder. And a softmax normalization is applied to obtain probabilities. Finally, once the initial index and length of the subvector are determined, the selection of the subvector is also finalized.

2.4 Training

Given a set of topic words as input, a variable-length prefix is added to the front and the model then calculates the state and attention. At each time step of the generation stage, the states of both encoder and decoder are passed to the content selection module. This module computes the representation of the input topics and eventually generates a copying probability distribution. Finally, copying distribution integrates with the vocabulary probability distribution, generating the probability distribution for the output at the current time step. The objective function of the entire training process is to minimize the negative log-likelihood loss.

3 Experiments

3.1 datasets.

Public Available Dataset: We conduct experiments on the ZHIHU and ESSAY [ 14 ] public datasets. The number of topics used follows the same settings as [ 2 ] and the training set and test set are set to 25,000 and 2,000, respectively.

Self-Constructed Dataset: Due to the lack of diversity caused by the uniform style of open-source datasets for TEG, we contribute a new Chinese dataset News and Essays (NAES) 1 1 1 https://mega.nz/folder/5r12GIBb#UF1v6p50CwJOpI4tRssMxQ for the TEG task. This dataset includes topic news such as finance, social, culture and tourism, as well as high-scoring essays. We gather articles from publicly accessible online sources, choosing paragraphs that fall within the length range of 50 to 200 words. For extracting key phrases, we employ the YAKE algorithm [ 15 ] to extract 5 topics from each text. In addition, we select the top 100 most frequent topics from NAES. The training and test set is set to 18000 and 1400 data samples.

3.2 Evaluation Setup

Baselines We select MTA [ 14 ] , CTEG [ 2 ] , SCTKG [ 3 ] and GENIUS [ 12 ] as baselines. The first three models are specifically designed for TEG tasks and the SCTKG is the SOTA model. We draw inspiration from [ 16 ] and [ 17 ] , where the pre-training tasks of language models have a significant impact on the performance of downstream tasks. The knowledge in GENIUS learned from the sketch reconstruction task [ 12 ] is similar to what TEG tasks require. So we choose GENIUS as one of the baselines for TEG tasks. All experimental results are the average values of five experiments.

Implement Details We utilize genius-base-chinese 2 2 2 https://huggingface.co/beyond/genius-base-chinese . as the initialization parameters for our model. We implement changes to the model structure using PyTorch. Training is conducted for 50 epochs on a single 1080 Ti GPU. The Adam optimizer is employed, with an initial learning rate of 5e-6. During testing, a beam search decoding strategy is applied with a beam width set to 3. For model hyperparameters, we set prefix base length to 30, and the similarity threshold is set to 0.2.

Automatic Evaluation Similarly, based on previous work, we choose the following evaluation method: BLEU score [ 18 ] , Diversity (DIST-2) [ 19 ] , Consistency [ 2 , 3 ] sand Novelty [ 2 , 3 ] . BLEU can reflect the similarity between generated text and labels, so a higher BLEU score may limit diversity. However, considering that BLEU can to some extent reflect the quality of text, we still report this metric as a reference. Dist-2 and Novelty both reflect the diversity of generated text. Consistency, on the other hand, indicates whether the generated content is centered around the semantic of the input topic.

3.3 Performance Comparsion

The experimental results of automatic evaluation are presented in Table 1 . The results demonstrate that our method achieves the best performance on all metrics except the BLEU score in both the ZHIHU and ESSAY datasets. Particularly, TEG is an open-ended text generation task where the generated content should not heavily rely on the labeled text. At this level, a higher BLEU score may hinder the ability to generate diverse text. However, we still report the BLEU score because it can to some extent reflect the coherence of the generated texts by the model.

Our proposed model maintains an objective BLEU score while surpassing the SOTA method in terms of consistency. This indicates that our approach achieves high-quality text generation with impressive topic-consistency. Furthermore, our method outperforms the SOTA by 35.59% and 47.87% on the DIST-2 metric for the two public datasets, and surpasses the SOTA by 6.66% and 12.14% on the Novelty. These results demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of text diversity and novelty compared to the SOTA approaches.

Table 1 also presents the experimental results of several baseline methods compared to our model on NAES. Apart from a slight difference in BLEU compared to SCTKG (state-of-the-art), our model significantly outperforms existing methods in other metrics. Specifically, the baselines exhibit noticeable performance degradation on NAES compared to ZHIHU and ESSAY, whereas our model demonstrates a relatively smaller performance decline. This indicates that our method is more suitable for realistic corpus environments, showcasing stronger adaptability and robustness.

3.4 Ablation Study

Table 2 presents the ablation experiments. The GCS model represents the addition of a copy mechanism with a content selection module to the GENIUS. GCS-PT denotes the training of GCS using the original prefix-tuning method, while the complete model GCS-IPT refers to the training of GCS using our improved prefix-tuning method.

Due to the incorporation of the copying mechanism and content selection, the model considers not only the probability distribution of the vocabulary during generation but also the probability distribution of the input content. As a result, BLEU and Consistency are improved. With the help of prefix-tuning, which preserving the rich knowledge in language model, all evaluation metrics show improvement. Finally, the improved prefix-tuning method adapts to diverse input information by utilizing prefix vectors of different lengths based on the length of the input topic words. This adaptation enhances the performance in terms of DIST-2 and Novelty.

4 Conclusion

In this paper, we present a novel content selection module within a topic-to-essay model that incorporates a copy mechanism which integrates rich semantic knowledge in language model to the generation process. Additionally, we introduce an improved prefix tuning training process to further enhance the model’s performance by allowing the model to adapt to both simple and complex topic inputs. In addition, we contribute a large Chinese TEG task dataset that has multi-topic text. Experiments show that our model can generate more diverse, novel text while maintaining a high topic-consistency, and notably outperform other baselines in text diversity.

[1] Leo Leppänen, Myriam Munezero, Mark Granroth-Wilding, and Hannu Toivonen, “Data-driven news generation for automated journalism,” in Proceedings of the 10th international conference on natural language generation , 2017, pp. 188–197.
[2] Pengcheng Yang, Lei Li, Fuli Luo, Tianyu Liu, and Xu Sun, “Enhancing topic-to-essay generation with external commonsense knowledge,” in Proceedings of the 57th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics , 2019, pp. 2002–2012.
[3] Lin Qiao, Jianhao Yan, Fandong Meng, Zhendong Yang, and Jie Zhou, “A sentiment-controllable topic-to-essay generator with topic knowledge graph,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.05511 , 2020.
[4] Dan Luo, Xinyi Ning, and Chunhua Wu, “Sememe-based topic-to-essay generation with neural networks,” in Journal of Physics: Conference Series . IOP Publishing, 2021, vol. 1861, p. 012068.
[5] Robyn Speer, Joshua Chin, and Catherine Havasi, “Conceptnet 5.5: An open multilingual graph of general knowledge,” in Proceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, February 4-9, 2017, San Francisco, California, USA , Satinder Singh and Shaul Markovitch, Eds. 2017, pp. 4444–4451, AAAI Press.
[6] Jingwen Cao, Tiexin Wang, Wenxin Li, and Chuanqi Tao, “A method of calculating the semantic similarity between english and chinese concepts,” in Machine Learning and Intelligent Communications: 4th International Conference, MLICOM 2019, Nanjing, China, August 24–25, 2019, Proceedings 4 . Springer, 2019, pp. 313–324.
[7] Xinyi Ning, “Topic-to-text generation with pmi-ir additional semantic information,” in 2021 International Conference on Asian Language Processing (IALP) . IEEE, 2021, pp. 131–136.
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[9] Zhiyue Liu, Jiahai Wang, and Zhenghong Li, “Topic-to-essay generation with comprehensive knowledge enhancement,” in Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Applied Data Science Track: European Conference, ECML PKDD 2021, Bilbao, Spain, September 13–17, 2021, Proceedings, Part V 21 . Springer, 2021, pp. 302–318.
[10] Wangbo He and Yuan Rao, “Transformer-based hierarchical topic-to-essay generation,” Procedia Computer Science , vol. 202, pp. 414–421, 2022.
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[12] Biyang Guo, Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen, Songqiao Han, Hailiang Huang, Nan Duan, and Weizhu Chen, “Genius: Sketch-based language model pre-training via extreme and selective masking for text generation and augmentation,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.10330 , 2022.
[13] Xiang Lisa Li and Percy Liang, “Prefix-tuning: Optimizing continuous prompts for generation,” in Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers) , 2021, pp. 4582–4597.
[14] Xiaocheng Feng, Ming Liu, Jiahao Liu, Bing Qin, Yibo Sun, and Ting Liu, “Topic-to-essay generation with neural networks.,” in IJCAI , 2018, pp. 4078–4084.
[15] Ricardo Campos, Vítor Mangaravite, Arian Pasquali, Alípio Jorge, Célia Nunes, and Adam Jatowt, “Yake! keyword extraction from single documents using multiple local features,” Inf. Sci. , vol. 509, pp. 257–289, 2020.
[16] Linhan Zhang, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Chong Deng, Shiliang Zhang, Bing Li, Wei Wang, and Xin Cao, “Mderank: A masked document embedding rank approach for unsupervised keyphrase extraction,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.06651 , 2021.
[17] Anton Sinitsin, Vsevolod Plokhotnyuk, Dmitriy Pyrkin, Sergei Popov, and Artem Babenko, “Editable neural networks,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.00345 , 2020.
[18] Kishore Papineni, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward, and Wei-Jing Zhu, “Bleu: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation,” in Proceedings of the 40th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics , 2002, pp. 311–318.
[19] Jiwei Li, Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, Jianfeng Gao, and Bill Dolan, “A diversity-promoting objective function for neural conversation models,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.03055 , 2015.

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Some Words Feel Truer in Spanish

The Spanish word “maleta,” written in bright yellow script, looping in and out of the word “suitcase” in block print, against a sky blue background.

By Natalia Sylvester

Ms. Sylvester is the author of the forthcoming children’s book “A Maleta Full of Treasures” (“La Maleta de Tesoros”).

My earliest relationship with language was defined by rules. As an immigrant who came to this country from Peru at age 4, I spent half of my days in kindergarten occupied with learning the rules of the English language. There was the tricky inconsistency of pronunciation to navigate and, once I learned to speak it, the challenge of translating what I’d learned into reading skills.

At home, my mom would often create games to help my sister and me preserve our Spanish and improve our grammar. Driving around our neighborhood in Miami, she’d point at a traffic light, hold up four fingers and say, “Se-ma-fo-ro — on which syllable do you put the accent?”

Each language had its defined space: English in school, Spanish at home. But as my parents became more fluent (and my sister and I more dominant) in English, the boundaries became blurred. Being bilingual empowered us to break barriers beyond the rules and definitions attached to words. Some things were simply untranslatable, because they spoke to this new space we were living in — within, between and around language. We were making a new home here, same as so many immigrants who end up shaping language as much as it shapes us.

It became evident as the phrase “Cómo se dice?” or “How do you say?” became a constant in my home. Sometimes, it’d be my parents who asked, “How do you say” followed by a word like “sobremesa” or “ganas.” It seemed simple enough in theory, but proved nearly impossible for us to translate without elaborating using full sentences or phrases. After all, to have a word to describe a long conversation that keeps you at the table and extends a meal, you’d have to value the concept enough to name it. Some ideas are so embedded in Latin American and Spanish cultures that they exist implicitly. Of course “ganas” can be something you feel but also give, and be at once more tame yet more powerful than “desire.” (If you know, you know.)

Other times, it’d be my sister and I who were curious about a word’s Spanish counterpart. Was there really no differentiating in Spanish between the fingers (dedos) on our hands, and those on our feet we call toes? When we wanted to say we were excited about something, the word “emocionada” seemed to fall short of capturing our specific, well, emotion. Sometimes we would blank on a word. But sometimes, we would find that the perfect word isn’t necessarily in the language we’re speaking.

What I’m describing, of course, has its own word: code switching. The act of shifting from one language or dialect to another, particularly based on social context, is often framed as something that so-called minorities do to fit into more mainstream spaces. It’s true that code switching can be a form of assimilation, a way of shielding ourselves from the prejudices rooted in racism, classism and xenophobia that can arise when we freely express our culture and language in spaces not designed to embrace them. But what I seldom see discussed is how code switching isn’t solely a reactionary response to feeling unwelcome. Within our own communities, it can signal comfort and belonging.

Take the Spanish word “maleta,” or “suitcase” in English. This year, I was at a writing conference and met up with two Mexican American authors, one of whom brought her suitcase to the venue because she had already checked out of the hotel. We walked the halls and offered to help with her maleta, making several jokes and references to it, but never once using the word “suitcase,” despite speaking mainly in English.

This was an entirely natural and unspoken decision. There are some words that simply feel truer in Spanish than they do in English. I call these home words and heart words because I associate them with the place I most grew up using them: at home, among family. Though the words might share a literal definition with their translation, one version carries emotional depth that enriches its meaning. To code switch this way among friends implies we share not only a language, but an intimate understanding of where we come from.

A suitcase is for clothes and possessions when someone travels, but to me, a maleta meant family had arrived from Peru, carrying flavors, textures and memories of my birthplace. Language is rooted in context, which is another way of saying that language is driven by memory. In this way, what we do or don’t choose to translate is another way of telling stories about our past.

Last year, a study on the specific way that Miamians use direct Spanish translations to form English phrases called the practice an emerging dialect. It’s a form of borrowing between languages that results in what is known as calques. For decades, expressions like “get down from the car” and “super hungry,” which are translated from Spanish, have made their way into regional speech, even in the case of non-Spanish speakers.

When I shared the article on social media, my DMs were flooded by friends and family — not only in Miami but also in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and in Southern California — who joked that they’ve been using these phrases since they were children, and their parents had, too. The novelty was not in their usage but in their validation (whether or not we sought that validation). My friends and I grew up being told to speak a certain way and respect the rules of both languages. We, in turn, didn’t so much break the rules as we simply played with them, swirling bits of English and Spanish together until it resembled something new yet familiar, our fingerprints proudly planted in its mess.

This is one of my greatest joys as a writer. I love language not only for all it can do but also for all it can’t and all the space it leaves in the gaps for creation. It is empowering that something as supposedly fixed as the meaning of a word or phrase is actually alive and evolving. It means we don’t have to lose parts of ourselves to assimilation; we can expand language to include the full breadth of our experiences.

Words are just sounds and letters until we collectively give them meaning through story. When we use language to connect, it’s one of the most beautiful things that makes us human.

Natalia Sylvester is the author of the forthcoming children’s book “A Maleta Full of Treasures” (“La Maleta de Tesoros”).

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Every iPhone Generation: A Full History of Release Dates

Dive into the evolution of one of apples mobile phone..

The Apple iPhone is one of the most innovative inventions of the 21st century. To date, over 2.3 billion iPhones have been sold across the world. It's arguably one of the most revolutionary devices ever created. With 17 years since the first iPhone, it can be easy to get lost thinking about how many iPhone generations there have been. Apple released multiple iPhone lines in some years, and every year new phones are released regardless. Below, we've compiled every iPhone ever released in chronological order. With the latest iPhone being the iPhone 15, there's an extensive history to uncover from 2007 to 2024.

iPhone Release History
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How Many iPhone Generations Have There Been?

In total, there have been 23 different iPhone generations . The first iPhone debuted in 2007, and at least one new model has been released in each year following. This list counts separate models like the Plus or Max series with the mainline iPhone generation, but we did include new models like the iPhone SE 2 and the iPhone XR as separate entries.

How often do you get a new iPhone?

Every iPhone Generation in Order of Release

Iphone - june 29, 2007.

The revolutionary first iPhone was released on June 29, 2007. Revealed as a device that was capable of iPod, Phone, and Internet functionalities, the iPhone marked the large first step in the smartphone market we know today. Apple made a huge departure from traditional cell phones, choosing to eliminate the keyboard and offer a digital option within the screen. With its 3.5-inch display and 2 megapixel embedded camera, the iPhone is a fun device to look back on as it changed the world of technology forever.

iPhone 3G - July 11, 2008

The second iPhone ever released was the iPhone 3G. This device brought 3G functionality to the iPhone, allowing for much faster speeds when utilizing cellular data. Additionally, this iPhone was the first to include the Apple App Store, which opened the door to developers creating applications for mobile phones.

iPhone 3GS - June 19, 2009

iPhone 3GS was the first iPhone to introduce a camera upgrade, with a new 3 megapixel camera on the back of the phone. This allowed for clearer pictures, further moving the smartphone into replacing traditional cameras. Additionally, new storage options were introduced to allow users to download more apps on the App Store. Performance overall was also claimed to be twice as fast as the iPhone 3G.

iPhone 4 - June 24, 2010

FaceTime was the star of the iPhone 4 , allowing for users to video call between devices from any given location. iPhone 4 featured a 5 megapixel camera, allowing for HD video capture for the first time. This camera also included an LED flash, which had not previously been available on the iPhone. Alongside these features, the iPhone 4 offered Apple's first Retina display, which sharpened the display to make text much more readable.

iPhone 4S - October 14, 2011

Most notably, the iPhone 4S is best known for the debut of Siri. The virtual assistant has gone on to be a staple of the Apple ecosystem, and it all started here. The iPhone 4S also featured 1080p video capture, thanks to its 8 megapixel onboard camera. Other major software like iCloud, iMessage, and more made their debut here on the iPhone 4S.

iPhone 5 - September 21, 2012

iPhone 5 was the first iPhone to support LTE technology, which created opportunities for large tasks and content to be available on cellular data. Audio was also a major focus, with new microphones added for crystal clear audio across both calls and FaceTime. This device was also the first iPhone to feature the Lightning port, a large departure from the previous 30-pin adapter.

iPhone 5S - September 20, 2013

The iPhone 5S marked the first appearance of Touch ID, a new technology that allowed you to unlock your iPhone by holding your finger against the home button. This became a staple in all future models up until the iPhone X. Alongside this feature, the iPhone 5S packed in the A7 processor and new camera technologies.

iPhone 5C - September 20, 2013

The iPhone 5C was Apple's first budget conscious iPhone. Released alongside the iPhone 5S, the 5C was made available in vibrant colors that caught the attention of anyone passing by. Internally, the device utilizing the same hardware as the iPhone 5 from 2012, so Apple was able to offer the 5C at a lower, more approachable price, making it one of the cheapest iPhones .

iPhone 6 - September 19, 2014

The iPhone 6 took a departure from the boxy design previously seen in the last three generations and offered a slimmed out device perfect for any pocket. Arguably, the biggest feature of the iPhone 6 was none other than Apple Pay, which was powered by NFC technology embedded inside the phone. This was also the first iPhone generation to introduce multiple models, with the iPhone 6 Plus offering a larger 5.5 inch screen.

iPhone 6S - September 25, 2015

The flagship feature of the iPhone 6S was 3D Touch, a technology that allowed the screen of the device to measure and take in different amounts of pressure. This allowed for multiple commands depending on how firmly you pressed against the screen, which led to new gestures all around. Additionally, the iPhone 6S was the first iPhone to have 4K video capabilities, which paved the way for iPhone to be used for filming.

iPhone SE - March 31, 2016

The iPhone SE (Special Edition) brought back the body style of the iPhone 5S and packed it with new, updated features. Capabilities from the iPhone 6S such as 4K video were included on the SE, offering a quality and compact option at a lower price point. This marked the first iPhone SE, with two more generations produced in the years following 2016.

iPhone 7 - September 16, 2016

iPhone 7 launched in Fall 2016 with a huge controversial twist - Apple decided to remove the headphone jack. This move shifted audio to either Bluetooth or through the Lightning port. This generation also added water resistance to the iPhone, in addition to a sturdy home button that utilized Apple's Taptic Engine for haptic feedback. Lastly, the iPhone 7 Plus was the first iPhone to offer a dual camera system.

iPhone 8 - September 22, 2017

iPhone 8 was largely the same design as the iPhone 7, with a few solid improvements to help the device stand out. First, wireless charging was added with a glass panel placed on the back of the iPhone. For the first time, you did not need to charge the phone through the Lightning port. Further, the iPhone 8 was the first phone to introduce the True Tone display. This display changes the colors and brightness of your device depending on your environmental surroundings.

iPhone X - November 3, 2017

The iPhone X was a huge departure from prior models, serving as the company's vision 10 years after the release of the original iPhone. The device made away with the home button, opting for a phone made entirely of just screen. New facial recognition technology called Face ID was revealed, which allowed users to unlock the iPhone X by directly looking at it. The iPhone X shaped all models that released after it, with each new iPhone utilizing a similar display and Face ID tech.

iPhone XS - September 21, 2018

The iPhone XS was a minimal improvement over the iPhone X, but there are some decent upgrades that future models benefitted from. Water resistance A largely overlooked new feature in the iPhone XS was the addition of a dual-SIM tray. This opened up the ability to load multiple SIM cards into one iPhone, which was a godsend for travelers overseas.

iPhone XR - October 26, 2018

The iPhone XR acted as 2018's budget friendly iPhone model. This device utilized a LCD display instead of the OLED display found on the iPhone X and iPhone XS. It also included only one camera on the back, similar to iPhone 8. Overall, the iPhone XR offered a similar experience to the premium iPhone X and iPhone XS at an affordable price point.

iPhone 11 - September 20, 2019

iPhone 11 increased the standard screen size across base models to 6.1 inches, moving from a Super Retina display to a Liquid Retina display. The device also opted for an Ultra Wide camera over the Telephoto camera found in prior dual camera models. The iPhone 11 was also the first generation to offer Pro models , which contained Super Retina displays, a triple camera setup, and HDR support.

iPhone SE (2nd Gen) - April 24, 2020

The iPhone SE 2 was a large improvement over the first SE model, with a new A13 Bionic chip that drastically improved performance. The screen size increased from 4 inches to 4.7 inches, with a True Tone display to offer the best picture quality no matter your environment. Additionally, Haptic Touch was added to the iPhone SE 2, as it was not present on the first model.

iPhone 12 - October 23, 2020

The iPhone 12 introduced MagSafe, a feature that allowed certain chargers and accessories to magnetically connect to the back of the iPhone. The base models received the Super Retina XDR display, providing a gorgeous OLED panel at an affordable price. iPhone 12 also added a Ceramic Shield, which proved to be tougher than glass and much more durable over time.

iPhone 13 - September 24, 2021

iPhone 13 brought massive leaps in battery life, with up to 19 hours of video playback. New features for photography were also introduced, like Cinematic Mode, which automatically focused on objects for perfect transitions every time. The iPhone 13 Pro models featured ProRes video, a type of capture that allowed for raw 4K30 videos.

iPhone SE (3rd Gen) - March 18, 2022

Released in the Spring of 2022, iPhone SE 3 brought back the home button for the first time in five years. Additionally, this model included 5G connectivity to take advantage of the new 5G towers that began popping up in 2021. Many of the photography features that were released in between the SE 2 and SE 3 were added to this model, including Night Mode, Photographic Styles, and more.

iPhone 14 - September 16, 2022

iPhone 14 brought new features like Emergency SOS, which utilizes Satellite connectivity to reach response teams in the event of an emergency. Additionally, the camera system across all models received sizable upgrades, such as improved ultrawide and zoom lenses. This generation also marked the return of the Plus model , a standard iPhone 14 with a larger screen.

iPhone 15 - September 22, 2023

The latest iPhone generation is none other than the iPhone 15 . Similar to the iPhone 14, a standard, Plus, Pro, and Pro Max model are all available to purchase. The biggest changes with this generation mostly occur with the Pro models, with a new lens, titanium frame, and action button to replace to mute switch. Of course, by far the biggest change is the switch from Lightning to USB-C, which was made due to new EU regulations.

When Is the iPhone 16 Coming Out?

Although we don't have exact details about the release of Apple's next flagship iPhone, Apple's release schedule has been consistent enough every year for us to make an educated guess. We expect the iPhone 16 to come out in the fall of 2024, most likely in September. We will likely learn more about the upcoming iPhone generation at Apple's WWDC event on June 10 this year. This is usually when Apple previews major updates to its various operating systems, including iOS.

Noah Hunter is a freelance writer and reviewer with a passion for games and technology. He co-founded Final Weapon, an outlet focused on nonsense-free Japanese gaming (in 2019) and has contributed to various publishers writing about the medium. His favorite series include Xeno and Final Fantasy.

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25 Internet’s Impact on Millennials

25.1 Introduction

25.2 When did the internet become prevalent in the everyday lives of millennials?

25.2.1 Early forms of social media

25.2.2 YouTube

25.2.3 Google

25.3 Impact of social media

25.4 Future outlook

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