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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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If there's one thing I've noticed about Gen Z purely from interacting with them online it's that they're incredibly, remarkably gullible. Like, broadly resistant to the concept of facetiousness, sarcasm, or that they might be being taken for a ride. They take everything at face value. I once made the joke on reddit that the greatest Disney villain of all time was Cobra Bubbles from Lilo and Stitch because his backstory was that he used to work for the CIA before becoming a social worker, which meant there was a non-zero percent chance he helped train Osama Bin Laden in insurgency tactics in the 1980s and was therefore indirectly responsible for 9/11. The zoomers were both confused and outraged because they believed me entirely at face value. I would imagine them applying a similar degree of online literacy to your average dark pattern scam that said "click here for free V Bucks." There are no V Bucks, dog. There's never any V Bucks.
I'm not sure that is any different than any other generation. Hell, I doubt you know the age of all the people you're talking about.
If you ask my grandparents the whole US is being destroyed by immigrants despite their day-to-day being the same for decades.
All I gotta do is point out Newsmax and Fox News viewership to counter this stupid Zoomer vs Boomer shit. Just because they are less terminally online doesn't mean they are less gullible.
*Person criticizes Zoomers*
Random Zoomer: "Yeah, well, THE BOOMERS ARE WORSE."
I'm not even a zoomer. I'm just trying to not be sensationalist like the source.
By the source I assume you mean me, and not the article. Because I'm not being sensationalist. I'm being unfair and judgmental. Very different things.
No I mean the source. You're just being anecdotal and that's ok.
Vox is being charitable to the Zoomers, though, observing that "Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology." The original study is also in a peer reviewed journal. It's not making judgment calls about Zoomers. It's aggregating statistical data. You can read the article here: https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=ijcic
From the discussion of findings at the end of the article, the researchers observed that
"It is reasonable to assume that the safer practices the older group self-reported is accompanied by greater knowledge of information security simply because of the additional years of being engaged in a digital-technology world. Specifically, it was hypothesized that Generation Y would rank higher than Generation Z adults on the OSBBQ Cybersecurity Awareness subscale, and significant differences were observed for half of the items included in the analysis."
And also that
"From a developmental perspective, it is possible that the normal adaptations that occur throughout one’s life impacted how individuals in this study perceived the literal meaning of the items. This could be due to cultural differences inherent to their generational cohort and the individual experiences that occur over time with age. For example, people tend to lose their sense of invulnerability as hey age (Denscombe & Drucquer, 1999) and generation Y adults grew up in a world where adapting to privacy and cybersecurity threats were first becoming more commonplace. These individuals are now at an age where the realities of (online) risk have become part of their conscious awareness as it relates to their lack of invulnerability."
Like, this formal study is incredibly generous in its discussion of why Gen. Z might be shown to be more statistically likely to fall for online scams than other cohorts. It also goes into great detail to explain its own limitations as a study.
That study seems to be a survey of college students knowledge of cyber security not anything to do with what you were claiming before as there are no boomers in question.
Yes, they acknowledge that as well when they discuss the sample population. Baby Boomers are literally not a part of it. The title of the Vox article is just drawn from a Deloitte industry survey. Which has no real context or judgment around it - it's purely a reporting of aggregate statistics. The Vox article just attempts to explain why Zoomers, a generational cohort that grew up with the internet, might be more statistically prevalent for succumbing to those scams compared to Baby Boomers, who were fully adult when the internet became widespread. The superficial presumption is that you would expect the opposite - the older generations have little to no familiarity with modern technology and are more easily victimized by it. That presumption is all the Vox article is discussing, really, and why it's probably not correct.
So you agree the article is sensationalist? Why link me a study that is irrelevant for no reason?
The article is not sensationalist. Please quote me a part of the article that you feel is and I can address the statements that make you feel that way.
Because that study is referenced as one of the primary sources the article uses to provide evidence for the phenomenon it discusses. The link to that research paper is literally in the article. It's critical to the article.
You just broke it down on how it sensationalized some completely bs data because boomers aren't online as much as zoomers. You've gotta be trolling with this
You can say the title is clickbait, but that doesn't make it sensationalist. I feel like either you and I have totally different definitions of sensationalist, or you think the article is doing something it's not. The article does the following
I'd like to know what part of that is sensationalist to you, because in my mind that is a remarkably by the numbers tech article.
Also, the data itself is not "BS" - it's something that is accurate, but has to be understood within a specific context. That's literally what the article is doing - contextualizing the information. You are saying it's sensationalizing the data. It's not. If anything it's doing the opposite. It's making the data more mundane by providing logical explanations for it.
Sensationalism- the use of exciting or shocking stories or language at the expense of accuracy.
You clearly grasp it is surprising or shocking and you clearly grasp that a higher percentage of Z are online in their generation than the percentage of boomers online.
You've got to be trolling at this point.
I have no evidence of who's falling for my 'trolling' online but it's very similar to what you describe. I'll make some absurd, nonsense claim or insult them using flowery nonsense language that can't possibly be taken seriously - but they do!
I suggested that Java devs (programmers) are the reason we'll never have FTL engines. They took me seriously!
Yet there's other times you'll get obviously younger people screaming in comments under videos "FAKE!" because they can't conceive that the video'd thing could happen.
In that instance I can understand it to a degree because they don't have the lived years experience to compare what they're seeing on screen. You'll get them claiming "that would never happen" or "people don't do that and if you think it's real go touch grass" and I'm thinking - "hang on that's happened to me at least 3 times".
I understand it's probably just the arrogance of youth but it's quite shocking at times just how confident they can be of their own ignorance.
I know people who teach high school and they say that Gen Z has both an extreme degree of personal esteem and that they won't take shit from anyone who disparages who they fundamentally are as people (like people giving shit for them being from immigrant families, being POCs, being LGBT, etc.), which is fantastic - no one should ever put up with shit like that. But they also seem to have a very hard time organizing their thoughts and making logical conclusions from structured evidence. Like they can't write a paper making an argument for something and providing evidence for why something is a certain way. It's all stream of consciousness. I think that as a generational cohort they might be more inclined towards "unstructured thought" or perhaps "stream of consciousness" than other generations. As old as I might sound because of this opinion, I do think that the fact that they interact with information almost entirely through mobile devices is a potential component of that. The mechanisms and mediums by which you consume information arguably shape how you process information.