A student at the Northern Valley Old Tappan High School, who asked to remain anonymous, admits to JSR, “Yeah, I think that a lot of us are guilty of that title. I’m definitely not as productive as I should be, partly because of Instagram and stuff. But there are ways that I use technology for my academic benefit, like Khan Academy videos for subjects I’m confused in. I also go on Facebook for help if I really can’t figure out a problem from homework.”
Older people have come to a consensus that teenagers waste their time on social media, and then complain about their workload from school. However, that is not always the case. Through major advancements in today’s technology, humans have discovered so much information that covers different types of topics, to the last detail. The academic topics of the past are different from today’s topics, considering that we have so much more information available to us at this time. Generation Z has much more to think about and learn about than their parents did.
And so, teenagers end up using their phones and laptops to access this knowledge for their education. With the development of online resources, many students utilize those resources to better understand a knowledge base that is more complex than it was 20 years ago. Still, older generations see the use of electronic devices purely as a lazy pastime.
The final verdict is that Generation Z lives a different kind of life than older generations do. Gen Z has grown up with technology, and members of Gen Z depend on it for social, academic–and yes, lazy–uses. Just because a teenager might not live the same type of life that an older person has, it does not necessarily mean that the teenager is “lazy.” There is a whole world inside of technology, and we as Generation Z are simply taking the advantage of using that world.
