Forum 2, Tuesday 17 October 2023. Doctor Damian Powell
Understanding our Constituency – Generation Z
“Good evening everyone. I’ve attended a lot of college dinners over 32 years, but recall a famous dinner before my time at Trinity College, where a guest became fed up with the speaker who was rambling on and on. So fed up, in fact, that he hurled an empty wine bottle, attempting to knock the speaker out. But the bottle fell just short, hitting the Principal on the back of the head, who was heard to exclaim ‘can you hit me again, I can still hear the bastard talking.’ So, as Henry the Eighth may have said to each of his wives on their wedding night, I promise not to keep you for too long.
Can I start by asking you to stand, and to keep standing, if the answer is yes to these questions please: how many of you have had children or grandchildren or nieces or nephews attend university? How many in the last ten years? How many in the last five years? How many right now?
If nothing else, my aim is to get you talking about how you imagine the student experience for the current cohort, hoping that what I offer by way of my own insights provoke your thinking.
I’ll structure my thoughts around three concepts, which might be seen to shape our experiences as we emerge from our teenage years into early adulthood and beyond. Attachment. Agency. Authenticity. My headline point is that the world really has changed for young people negotiating university life. It’s profoundly different from the days when I went through Melbourne High School back in the last century. There are complex reasons for this. But I’m going to offer one central clue as the propellant for this change. And here it is. This thing, the smart phone, has changed how we negotiate our realities – in our personal lives, our study lives, in our work habits, in our sleep habits, in our economic expectations, our sense of global connection and competition, in our recreation, in our conception of self, of other, of life, and even of death.
When comparing smartphone usage between 40 to 80-year-olds and 18-year-olds, it’s crucial to recognise the profound disparities in their smartphone relationships. While both age groups may show some degree of dependency on smartphones, the nature of this reliance differs. We’ve lived substantial portions of our lives without smartphones. For many of us, our formative years and early adulthood was largely devoid of constant digital connectivity. For this young generation, smartphone usage is deeply integrated into their sense of self and social interactions. These devices aren’t just tools; they serve as extensions of their identities and fundamental ways of relating to the world.
So for better and for worse, this device has changed everything. But how exactly?
Attachment. From the time we leave the womb, all of us need to seek some form of attachment, to others, to institutions, to places. We attach partly for pragmatic, commercial, and protective reasons, and partly to allow us to ind some fullness of human expression. So how’s attachment going for young people?
Well, there are very few parents I know who don’t worry at some level or another about the mental health of their children. This worry seemingly transcends all socio-economic markers, all cultural backgrounds. And at one level, we might wonder why – in terms of basic needs, our young people live in a relatively stable, aff luent nation compared to most. Most of their daily struggles fall into the category of ‘ first world problems’ as opposed to the hardships faced by our parents, and their parents.
And yet, many highly-educated young people just aren’t feeling it. The world they see is fractured, in decline, structurally and politically unjust – and it’s burning. You might paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock here, in thinking of a generation which knew too much. When eating an ice cream, they re flect on deforestation for palm oil that kills innocent orangutans. They wonder if AI will take their jobs, and maybe their lives. Information affords little innocence, little comfort, in terms of how to live well in contemporary Australia – living, I might add, as they imagine themselves to be, on stolen land.
The great cultural project that is Australia has been so challenged and problematised that what might seem, for many of us, a great success – with the secret ballot, female suffrage, multiculturalism, the eight hour day, to name but a few local inventions – now seen as tarnished and riddled with contradictions.
In its place are other senses of sel fhood and attachment. And for many young people this attachment, guided by algorithms and online communities of varying sincerity, are about difference, not togetherness. Stan Grant expressed this perfectly. ‘We prize identity more than citizenship. We look to what divides us; de fine ourselves in opposition to each other. This is an age of grievance, and grievance is a demoralising basis for identity. It is a contest of wounds; a contest in which there can be no winner.’
That young folk seek and f ind togetherness in difference from others is hardly new. But the internet amplif ies a sense of disconnection which really is different. It tribalises us into smaller and more radically assertive sub-cultures. It means that many young people live in a world which is driven by peer relations, far above any lateral input from parents or teachers or older people in general.
It seems to me to be less tolerant of nuance, or complex discussion or analysis than what you might get from attending, say, a university debate, or talking with someone over coffee after a tute.
I was surprised when less students attended major college dinners each year. The food and wine were excellent, and the speakers were of high quality, and nationally and internationally famous. However, I soon realised that students had other real-time options on their feeds. Why bother attending when you could watch a Ted Talk by Barack Obama and control the pace as you pleased? Superf icially, it’s easier to connect to your phone than the person beside you.
There’s also a physical aspect to this attachment. In my youth, the local cricket nets and the red rattler trains were part of my school experience. Back then, however, nobody checked their phones on the platform – because they didn’t exist.
Today, the average university student spends between seven and eight hours a day on their smartphone. Some of this time will be crucial, much of it gainful. But we know that much of it is driven by dopamine addiction, deliberately engineered by the big tech companies, whose revenue depends upon clicks. Phone addiction has led to massive increases in anxiety and fear of social disconnection, to the point where most young people have their phone within reaching distance for 24 hours of the day. For young folk right now, Tik Tok, as the dominant platform, easily outstrips newspapers, radio, all the television stations, all the streaming platforms, in shaping their perception of the world. Tik Tok is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, who can favour certain algorithms. What sort of a world do you think the CCP wants young Australians to imagine?
We don’t know what the long term outcome of all this will be for our society. But I was struck by a major survey of secondary school students in the United States which noticed data sets around two questions which it had not intended to compare. The first question was ‘how happy are you?’ The second question was ‘how much time do you spend on your devices each day?’. The survey found that the relationship between the happiness data and the time on devices data was inverse: in other words, on average children who spent four hours a day on devices were half as happy as children who spent two hours a day on devices.
We can argue about the methodology. But as the state government moves to embed discussions on mental health in the curriculum within subjects such as English, we should at least be asking: what, if any, is the price we are paying in giving smartphones ubiquity, and what should we do about it?
Agency. How do I find work life balance, and transition from study to work? Here the public debate often overlooks the reality. Today, young people are deeply embedded in the gig economy. They readily embrace flexibility, being available at a moment’s notice and often creating side businesses to supplement their primary income. All the while technological advances such as the internet, mobile phones, and test messages, erode the traditional boundaries between work and personal life.
It’s no surprise that many view the workplace with scepticism, striving to ind a balance that sustains them without compromising their well-being. With the expectation of 17 career changes, young people acknowledge that many careers they envision now may not exist in the future, thanks to evolving technology. Changing careers was once akin to changing lanes on a highway, but now it’s more like being dropped into a desert, to be told one can head in any direction – supposedly great, because the choices are limitless – but all the time without a map.
Because technology is outstripping our social construct in an ethical sense, it’s all something of a tabula rasa. I was talking the other night to a young man who’s working for a company manipulating Chat GPT. He gets more done in a day than used to be done by a large of ice staff in a week. But he feels guilty, because he’s seen his colleagues lose their jobs, and sometimes both guilty and bored, because the company can’t generate enough work for him and Chat GPT to process. He actually wants to write a fantasy novel. So gainful employment offers him agency, because it doesn’t tax him very much physically or intellectually. But I wonder what our desire to increase corporate productivity will have on his life balance, as AI starts dominating, as it inevitably will, the entire workplace around him.
Authenticy. How to be authentic in a world dominated by hyperindividualism, with the decline of collective social mores, and the loosening of adult expectation and social control? One way might be to retreat from experimentation; to stay and home and stay a child, or at least play at staying a child, lest the wider world be too open and too unpredictable. Another may be to lock tight to a tribe facing the same challenges. From the vantage point of the colleges, I think both are at work.
Obviously, the human condition involves hardship. Many of us here experienced real stress and strain during our late teens and early twenties. However, I believe there’s been a recent shift among young people in framing hardship through what I call a de ficit narrative. This tendency might result from a lack of guidance from elders, who used to remind us to get over ourselves and imagine the bigger picture. The declining trust in institutions and the rise of postmodernism also contribute to this shift. We can’t be certain about the impact of this re lex to seek authenticity through de ficit on young people, but we do see a surge in mental health issues among them. Many seem to have lost all sense of joy in simply being themselves.
He, she or they need equal attention and care. But I do re flect on the challenges facing the young men as they encounter public discourse surrounding ‘toxic masculinity’ – by gender, and sometimes seemingly by def inition. On the left, there’s a tendency to con late good models of masculinity with femininity. On the right, masculinity is often now con lated with simple cruelty, with poster boys ranging from Andrew Tate to Donald Trump. So young men need good role models, perhaps more than they ever did. And I’m sure many of you in this room underestimate how important your own engagement with the young men in your orbit will be, in helping them to move into adulthood with a sense of hope.
How do we test our ideas of what is real and true in the wider currents around us? Here Universities should be places of robust discussion and debate. Today, in our universities, one can be readily accused of a ‘micro-aggression’ or making someone feel ‘unsafe’, as ‘de-platforming’, ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘cancelling’ increasingly shape the discourse. This comes partly out of genuine concerns for others. But also because people equate feeling uncomfortable, or being challenged, or called out, with feeling psychologically unsafe. Young people are placing stock in a new set of cultural shibboleths in terms of their authenticity. This opens up the question of how best to engage in meaningful conversations, when the human condition itself is not seen as suff icient for communal engagement?
I need to wrap up. I’ve tried to provoke you to think a bit about how things have changed from ‘back in our day’, acknowledging that everyone here had a different school experience, but also that the teachers here, and the GM&B, want to do what we can to foster the best possible experience for our young folk. To do this well, we need to remember that, while they may be experiencing many of the same pressures, they’re probably experiencing them through a very different framework than you did when you were their age.
We historians can be a bit pessimistic, noting that I haven’t even touched on the impact of COVID. And of course smart young people always, always find ways to sift and sort through whatever complexities they face, as the current students at MHS and Macrob will do in this generation. To help them, we also need to think about how we ourselves keep agency in the face of these changes, lest we become cynical in the face of generational differences. For our young folk, for whom peer to peer relationships are so highly valued, we can offer one point of lateral engagement. Hopefully armed with a bit of wisdom, but above all with the willingness to listen, and I mean really actively listen, and to engage gently where we can.
Thanks for your attention.”