By Tom Forbes, First Year, History and Modern Languages
There comes a time in the life of every generation when it starts to hate the one that's going to succeed them. This hatred often tends to be because of cultural distance and ignorance, and is often directed less at people but instead at pop culture. In the case of our parents this was music and television. Roald Dahl’s poem ‘Television’ put it this way:
'IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK – HE ONLY SEES!'
Dahl's rhetoric is identical to received wisdom on social media today, except now the generation that it complained about is the one doing the complaining, best revealed in the reaction to Adolescence (2025) released last spring. Much of the show’s success is because that corner of the internet was suddenly exposed as a sort of dark underworld many parents have always feared it was. A place where boys like Jamie Miller (academically bright, from a loving family, with no pre-existing mental health conditions) can become machete-wielding murderers. That such a case has never occurred and that the series was actually a work of fiction was all ignored by most of the 'grown-ups' watching, the Prime Minister included, who went so far as to nearly call it a documentary. Although the intention is hard to judge negatively, the message was essentially anti-technological and ageist: get that phone out of your boy's hands lest he be the next JM, conveyed, ironically enough, through television. I make this point not because I think that young boys aren't at risk of being radicalised online (they are), or that some girls suffer from body image issues because of Instagram (they do), but because lots of older people seem to view social media as just a fad with potentially catastrophic effects that only affect the young.
‘I've never seen so many lonely old men, smacking back beers and watching boomer brainrot on their own’
‘I've never seen so many lonely old men, smacking back beers and watching boomer brainrot on their own’ said a friend of mine when we found ourselves in a bar on a trip in mid-December. The loud tedious music, the screens playing endlessly rotating clips of films and old football matches. Have I… been here before? I thought to myself. I had, as it turned out, barely two hours before, waiting back in our hostel and sharing reels with my friends.
There is some self-awareness in most people our age that concede that caring that much about the recent developments in Mikaela Tesla and Anna Paul's feud, or Timothee Chalamet's latest movements, is strange. Having grown up just in between analog and the digital age means we engage with brainrot with a depressing realization that our teenage years could have probably done without this. But human beings have always sought distraction of some kind and it is churlish to pretend that new technologies have suddenly introduced idleness to us.
The best example of this is the intergenerational factor of social media use that's often glossed over. My own parents 'screentime' now exceeds mine many times over.
‘I used to read it, going into work, when phones were just phones.’ said my dad recently, sadly, talking about a book he'd recommended to me. Two months into university my mum decided to start keeping in touch with me by sending reels over Whatsapp, sent in turn to her by another middle aged friend, his very boomerish profile pic greeting me with a smile when I opened Instagram.
‘Once you're in it, you're in it,’ she admitted. If my parents, safely in their middle age when social media was born, are as deep as we are, who says we won't be a few decades down the line?
As hard as it is to imagine, there will come a day when our generation will morph into middle aged bores with the reins of cultural, political, and financial power firmly in our hands. Our normal will be the normal. D.H. Lawrence's masterpiece, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was banned for years in England on the grounds it had the potential to corrupt readers and society at large, only for it to be repealed by a generation who laughed at the old and set the sexual revolution into motion. Don't be surprised, then, if fifty years down the line TikTok's are considered a form of fine art and whatever our kids enjoy is dangerous, subversive, and alien. And if the worst examples of 1990s TV culture taught us anything it is that hard-working people are perfectly capable of having jobs and enjoying low-effort, mind numbing entertainment. The only difference now is that it's in our hands, not our sitting rooms, condensed into twenty five second clips.
Theano Dimopoulou
Picture us all then, if you will. The Bristol class of '28, or what's left of us anyway, are sitting in a geriatric ward in Weston-super-Mare. The year is 2087. Grim crowd, we look, our nappies being changed as we stare blankly at our feeds and mutter to ourselves about Gen C and how dumb they're getting. We ask, when our relatives visit, when they're going to get off those neuralinks and start scrolling like we did in the good old days.
Featured image: Unsplash / Sayo Garcia
What do you think social media use will be like in the next generation?
