iGen

by Jean M. Twenge

  Figure 2.1. How 12th graders spend their screen time. Monitoring the Future, 2013–2015.

  Considering that teens spend about seventeen hours a day in school, sleeping, and on homework and school activities, nearly all of their leisure hours are now spent with new media. The hour and a half that’s left is used up by TV, which teens watch about two hours a day. Of course, this makes it look as if they have more than twenty-four hours in their days. But more than likely, they are multitasking—texting while web surfing, watching TV while posting to Instagram. (They might also be sleeping less, a possibility we’ll return to in chapter 4.) Overall, teens spend much more time online now than they did just a few years ago—12th graders in 2015 spent twice as much time online as 12th graders in 2006 (see Figure 2.2; see Appendix C for online time for 8th and 10th graders).

  Figure 2.2. Hours per day spent by 12th graders on new media (texting, on the Internet, social media, and gaming). Monitoring the Future, 2006–2015.

  Even with multitasking included, six hours a day is a staggering amount of time. What are teens doing with that time? Lots of texting—the teens I talked to all said it’s the primary way they communicate with their friends. About what? Many of the same things adults text about, but more often. “I am usually texting my girlfriend over random things, school items, and relationship issues. I also text my friends and just send jokes throughout the day,” wrote Victor, 18. “I text my best friend or my boyfriend,” said Eva, 19. “We are generally talking about something funny that happened during the day or just checking in to see how their day is going/anything new that’s happened since we last talked.” Texting has mostly replaced talking on the phone: in 2015, teens talked on the phone about forty-five minutes a day, about a third of the time they spent texting.

  The surveys did not start asking about texting until 2010, when the practice was already well established, so we can’t really see its popularity take off from nonexistent in the 1990s to a two-hour-a-day activity by 2010. From 2010 to 2015, the time teens spent texting actually declined slightly—by about thirteen minutes a day. Why? Probably because they were spending more time on social media.

  Everybody’s Doing It: Social Media

  As my rental car rumbles up the dirt road, I can see the barn in the distance against the green cornfields and blue sky of a summer day in rural Minnesota. Emily and her family are there when I pull up at the lake cabin where Emily’s extended family has gathered for the July Fourth weekend. Emily is 14 and has just finished her freshman year in high school. A member of the track team, she’s runner lean, with wavy blond hair in loose braids and a wide, happy smile that shows off her braces. She ends most sentences with a happy “So, yeah!”

  Emily lives in the Twin Cities, two hours away, but her best friend lives at the farm next door to the lake cabin, and the two shuttle back and forth frequently. So the first order of the day is for me to meet Emily’s cow, Liberty, born two years ago on the Fourth of July. Barefoot, Emily hops the fence at the barn door and brings Liberty over, smiling as we take her picture next to the huge black-and-white animal looking at us warily with dark brown eyes.

  A girl on a farm, braids swinging, showing off her cow—it’s a timeless scene, at home at any time in the last two hundred years. But it’s not just any time, and Emily is like most iGen teens in the 2010s: she connects with her friends through social media, partially because it’s virtually mandatory. “Everyone uses it,” she says. “It’s a good way to, like, make plans with people. If you don’t, you might miss out on plans that you could have gone to.” Emily got her first smartphone fairly late for an iGen’er, at the beginning of 9th grade, but already finds it indispensible. When I ask her what apps she uses, she says, “The main ones are Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter . . . . I’ll get updates from the track team and watch funny videos. I post pictures from my track meets and just if I’m doing a fun activity with my family or my friends. A lot of other people post a ton of selfies—like, every other post will be a selfie.” She tells me how tagging photos on Instagram works; if someone doesn’t tag you, that means “you’re not really friends anymore, or they’re mad at you.” This is the new reality of teen social life: it’s conducted online, for all to see, with clear messages about who’s in and who’s out.

  How much time are teens spending on social media, and is it really any different from ten years ago? Social media sites are not new. The first social media sites appeared as early as 1997, MySpace debuted in 2003, and Facebook opened up to everyone over age 13 in 2006. (I’ll use the terms social networking sites and social media interchangeably.) The Monitoring the Future survey first asked about social networking sites in 2008 (so sadly late that the otherwise diligent survey administrators must have been asleep at the wheel). The question about social media use is very general, asking whether teens use social networking sites “almost every day,” “at least once a week,” “once or twice a month,” “a few times a year,” or “never.” Even with the survey late to the party and asking such a broad question, the growth in these sites’ popularity is still very evident (see Figure 2.3).

  Figure 2.3. Percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders using social networking sites almost every day. Monitoring the Future, 2008–2015.

  In seven years, social media sites went from being a daily activity for half of teens to almost all of them. That’s especially true for girls: 87% of 12th-grade girls used social media sites almost every day in 2015, compared to 77% of boys. The increases in use have been even larger for minority and lower-income teens—in 2008, white and higher-SES (social scientists call this socioeconomic status, or SES) teens were more likely to use social media sites every day, but by 2015 the race and class differences had disappeared. The daily use of social media sites is now an equal opportunity experience among teens. They have become almost required: in 2008, 14% of 12th graders said they never used the sites, enough to perhaps form a group; by 2015, those who never used them had dwindled to 3%. Only 2% of 12th-grade girls said they “never” use social media sites. So 97% of 12th graders and 98% of 12th-grade girls use social media sites at least sometimes—about as universal an experience as you can get.

  Social media also requires a specific strategy of self-presentation. Harper, 12, was the youngest iGen’er I interviewed. She and her aunt arrived at our house on a sunny spring afternoon, and we chatted as her aunt played with my kids. Harper still looks more like a kid than a teen, although she’s used to wearing lots of makeup for the cheerleading competitions she participates in nearly every weekend. She lives in a small town in the California mountains, sometimes staying with her grandparents due to her parents’ divorce. She already has an iPhone and uses it frequently. Like many teens I talked with, she agreed that social media was mostly for posting positive things, requiring a certain cultivation of one’s image. “Normally you don’t want to look sad on there,” she said. She uses social media mostly to follow her friends on Instagram: “If your friend is, like, out doing something, you can see all the cool things that they’re doing,” she says. “No one does anything bad on it—we just see what each other is doing.”

  The Washington Post recently profiled Katherine, a 13-year-old living in McLean, Virginia. The story described what she did on her iPhone during the twelve-minute drive home from school: “Her thumb [is] on Instagram. A Barbara Walters meme is on the screen. She scrolls, and another meme appears. Then another meme, and she closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed. There’s a story about Florida Gov. Rick Scott, which she scrolls past to get to a story about Janet Jackson, then ‘28 Things You’ll Understand If You’re Both British and American.’ She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up.
They’re home.” Katherine has 604 followers on Instagram and keeps only the photos that get enough likes: “Over 100 likes is good, for me,” she says. When she changed her Snapchat username, her Snapchat score went to zero (Snapchat users get a point for every snap they send or receive). So she sent 1,000 snaps in one day to up her score. She uses her phone so much that her father has had trouble finding a data plan to cover all of it.

  For her book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, reporter Nancy Jo Sales interviewed hundreds of teen girls across the country about what they do on their phones and how it affects them. She described girls constantly in search of likes and positive comments on their pages, with persistent pressure to post sexy and revealing photos. Those, after all, get the most likes. One spring day she interviewed a group of 13-year-olds in Montclair, New Jersey. The girls, just like the teens I interviewed, had a love-hate relationship with their phones and social media. “I spend so much time on Instagram looking at people’s pictures and sometimes I’ll be like, Why am I spending my time on this? And yet I keep doing it,” said Melinda. “If I go on my phone to look at Snapchat, I go on it like an hour, I lose track,” noted Riley. “The minute I start my homework I have to have my phone by me to see what my friends are texting . . . . It’s like someone is constantly tapping you on the shoulder, and you have to look,” said Sophia. They’d like to stop, but they feel they can’t. When Melinda’s parents deleted her Instagram app for a week as a punishment, “By the end of the week I was stressing, like, What if I am losing followers?” “I’ve always wanted to delete my Instagram,” said Sophia. “But then I think, I look so good in all my photos.”

  Eventually, many iGen’ers see through the veneer of chasing likes—but usually only once they are past their teen years. James, 20, is a college student in Georgia. “When you go on social media you post a status or you post a picture and all of a sudden you get all those likes, you get all those affirmations from people, and it can be addictive because you have the constant pats on the back that, like, ‘You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re attractive,’ ” he says. But, he acknowledges, “I feel like it’s also kind of hollow.”

  This is, of course, a different world from the one GenX’ers and even Millennials grew up in. “You realize how insane things are today when you think about the relative rate of change,” says Paul Roberts, the author of The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification. “When I was in high school, if I had gone around saying, ‘Here’s a picture of me, like me,’ I would have gotten punched. If a girl went around passing out naked pictures of herself, people would have thought she needed therapy. Now, that’s just Selfie Sunday.”

  So which sites are teens using? Social media sites go into and out of fashion, and by the time you read this book several new ones will probably be on the scene. In fall 2016, the management firm Piper Jaffray found that only 30% of 14-year-olds used Facebook at least once a month, compared to 80% using Instagram and 79% using Snapchat. Those platforms were also growing among young adults: by spring 2016, Pew Research Center found that 59% of 18- to 29-year-olds used Instagram and 56% used Snapchat, a big increase since 2015. The teens I talked to, in late 2015 and 2016, mentioned Instagram and Snapchat the most often. Most recently, group video chat apps such as Houseparty were catching on with iGen, allowing them to do what they call “live chilling.”

  Matthew, the 19-year-old Pennsylvania college student we met in chapter 1, uses a Snapchat feature called Snapstory. “If I’m at tennis practice or at one of the dining halls with some friends, I’ll take a video or a picture and add it to my Snapstory and share it with friends. I’ll also see other friends’ Snapstories, and see what they’re doing,” he says. On Snapstory, photos stay for twenty-four hours and then disappear, forming a continuous, updated stream of photos that are sent to everyone you’ve tagged as a friend. It’s easy, he says, because “The app is basically just a camera” and the pictures upload much faster than they do to Facebook. “It helps me stay in the loop and just know what’s going on with everybody.” Many teens use the regular version of Snapchat, in which pictures and messages automatically disappear (according to the company, Snapchat servers automatically delete “snaps” after they have been viewed). Teens see Snapchat as a “safe” way to talk to their friends, because there is no embarrassing permanent record that can be shared around. A relatively new feature alerts users when someone has tried to keep their message by using a screenshot—“and then they get mad at you,” one teen told me.

  As we saw earlier, girls usually spend more time on social media sites than boys do. So what are boys doing instead? Often, they’re playing video games—and so are many of the girls. Teens spend more time playing games on their computers than they did just a few years ago—12th graders spend about 1½ hours a day, compared to less than an hour a day in 2008. Girls have caught up quickly in video game time, perhaps due to less violent, more girl-friendly games on phones such as Candy Crush.

  Gaming has what statisticians call a “bimodal distribution”: some teens don’t do it at all, and others do it a lot. In 2015, 27% of teens said they played video games less than an hour a week, and 9% said they played more than forty hours a week—the time commitment of a full-time job.

  When I interview Max, 16, at his San Diego high school and ask him about what he likes to do for fun, he says, “Play video games.” He usually plays multiplayer games online in which he can talk to other players through his headset, he tells me. I’ve never played those games, so I ask him how they work, and he tries to explain. “You start at one point, and you’re trying to capture or destroy the enemy’s thing and you have minions and stuff that fight each other and take down towers along the way,” he says. He and his group of four friends talk about things other than the game, but when I ask if he gets together with his friends in person, he says, “Sometimes, but not really that often.” He doesn’t do much on social media sites, either. When I ask him about other social activities, he says he doesn’t go out much. That’s when I begin to realize that playing video games is Max’s only social activity.

  Mark is a 20-year-old community college student in Texas who describes himself as “a big gamer.” He met his best friend when he heard him say “Snapshot” (a reference to his favorite video game, Halo) in the high school hallway. They exchanged their Xbox gamer tags and have been playing together ever since. When I ask Mark what he most wants older people to understand about his generation, he surprises me by saying that the most important thing is for older people to understand how video games work. “With Xbox whenever you play online with people, you can’t pause your game. Well, when your parents want something of you, they demand it then and now. And when you try to explain to them, ‘I’m playing online with other people,’ I can’t just pause and hop to it, they don’t understand.”

  Some young men spend so much time playing video games they eventually have to cut themselves off. Twenty-year-old Darnell is majoring in business at a state university in Georgia. In high school, he says, “I had a problem where I would play and I really wouldn’t do anything else. I’d get out of sports practice at eight thirty, nine, I’d come home and start playing video games and I’d probably play until three thirty, four o’clock in the morning. And I’d have to be ready for school at, like, six thirty,” he says. Now he restricts his gaming to school breaks and doesn’t play when classes are in session. “I didn’t want that to be a problem in college. There’s no one to say, ‘Go to class,’ so I just wouldn’t go to class.”

  Overall, both boys and girls are spending much more time online and with electronic devices. Here’s the thing: this time must come from somewhere—there must be something else that iGen teens are not doing that previous generations did. There are probably several, but one obvious candidate is all the other ways people used to communicate and entertain themselves. And I don’t mean flip phones.

  Are Books Dead?

  The cool air inside th
e house is a welcome relief as we come in from a muggy late-spring day in suburban Virginia. Thirteen-year-old Sam opens the door to his room gingerly—his arm is encased in a black sling after he injured it tussling with a friend. His room is a mix of sports posters and school clutter, with wood furniture and navy blue curtains. He plans to play football in high school, and maybe wrestle as well: “I like physical sports where you take people to the ground,” he tells me matter-of-factly. His favorite thing to do is hang out with his friends, and they tease each other in the easy, friendly way that only males can get away with. One friend’s slight mustache inspired the nickname “Pube-stash,” and another is dubbed the “Diabeto Torpedo.” Although Sam prefers to see his friends in person, he also likes Snapchatting with them, especially the face swap feature, which switches the faces (but not the body or hair) of two people in a photo. “It usually ends up being superfunny,” he says. If he has a half hour of downtime, he’ll watch SportsCenter on ESPN or sports videos on YouTube. That made me wonder: Does he read Sports Illustrated or the sports section of a newspaper or books about sports? No, he says, “I only read what’s assigned for an English project. I’m not a big fan of reading for fun.”

  Is Sam’s aversion to print typical of iGen? They spend so much time on their phones, it would be an easy guess to say yes. Even if it is typical, maybe teens have never liked to read. As always, the best way to tell is to compare teens of the same age across time: are iGen teens less likely to read than teens in previous eras?

  That appears to be the case. In the late 1970s, the clear majority of teens read a book or a magazine nearly every day, but by 2015, only 16% did. In other words, three times as many Boomers as iGen’ers read a book or magazine every day. Because the survey question was written in the 1970s, before e-readers existed, it does not specify the format of the book or magazine, so Millennials or iGen’ers who read on a Kindle or iPad would still be included.