My dad called me downstairs one day. “How do you make a live video on Facebook?”
I smirked. Because I was pretty sure that the ‘live’ feature was explained in detailed steps somewhere on the app. I was even more amused that even with his meticulousness and fastidiousness to detail, he still couldn’t figure it out. In two minutes, he was live. Well…”why did it take a couple minutes?” you may ask. Because I am not on Facebook!
Even with all the advancements Mr Zuckerberg has made, somehow the app still smells of musk, is damp and pale and has webs all around it like an old abandoned house.
“The content of your messages and calls in an end-to-end encrypted conversation is protected from the moment it leaves your device to the moment it reaches the receiver’s device,” Facebook Messenger director of product management Ruth Kricheli.
What a refreshing policy! Still doesn’t beat Twitter I’d say. Yes, I know there’s still no “edit” button, but the Gen Z gang and half the crop of Millennials are forever interested in being liable to banter and crass talk and/or being corrupted by the short-sighted, inexperienced and fast cooked opinions of other pseudo-charistmatic Gen Zs and Millennials on the app. My Gen X mother would say I’m always on my phone. I have never been able to satisfy her and my dad with this: Twitter is my newspaper, vogue magazine, supermarket, political platform, advocacy podium, social club and entertainment hub. They say there’s something else I can be doing offline. What? Making money? I’m a freelance writer. Where do you think I find my writing gigs?
I get their concern. They are Gen Xs. In their day, to be able to read newspapers implied a lot. It meant you were educated, you had an ambition, you were destined to be great, you automatically owned a spot in the middle-class, you could challenge the political class. You were the hero. It was some serious kind of thing. I daresay that they have carried on that sentiment about newspaper readers upon us. They are very careful, that you don’t taint the sanctity of the succinctly defined but unspoken expectations from a reader by having access to news so cheaply and flinging anything off literarily that you don’t find newsworthy.
When you talk about the amount of fashion content that is available to me on my Instagram and Twitter feed, again, I kind of get it. I don’t particularly want to die having worn the same kind of clothes all my life. But the fashion industry works itself up so fast that I don’t know exactly the kind of style I want. All I know is that I don’t want to wear ‘kembe’ (loose fitting clothes) or tuck in Polo in my trousers with a suit jacket on. And that frightens them; the pace of everything these days. I mean, they just really wanted to be able to reach out to their big sister in Kano or their uncle in Kogi without having to trek to the post office quarterly in a year.
They got what they wanted for a while. Phones became mobile. And then Facebook came up. And then they had access to the internet on their phones…It went haywire from there. Social media is what Gen Xs now seek to control. Not by staging a global protest against it, (because it won’t be fruitful even if they tried), but by controlling their own need for it. They don’t know how to change their display picture on WhatsApp, that’s fine. They have forgotten their Facebook password, I can swear it was almost intentional. They don’t know where the live button is, they could always call me to help them out with it. But there’s this set of people that confuse me though...
Have you heard of the other half crop of millennials? The generation specifically between very late Gen Xs and early Millennials? There’s a name for them. They are called XENNIALS! These people are either in their late 30s or early 40s now. These set of people have a deep appreciation for social media but at the same time kind of resent it. It’s a little bit weird. Theoretically, these are the set of people that support the twitter ban in Nigeria and at the same time tweet that they support the twitter ban in Nigeria, from their VPN-enabled phones. They are also the set of people that will shush you for using slangs. But let’s leave that and talk about their perception of social media.
These people’s prime zoomed too fast. Yesterday they were just cheekily jesting at their Gen X older brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles for being old school, and today they are already considered old school. They want their heydays back, when tech was simple.
“Xennials are nostalgic for the analog days and love anything that reminds them of their less technologically advanced childhoods” Forbes said. They miss the time when the best technology had to offer for entertainment were cassette mixtapes and Nintendo consoles. They wanted to take things very slowly.
When social media finally came around, they were the ones who opened the first accounts. They were in the know. They even helped us Gen Zs and “the other half crop of millennials” to navigate the analogous way of doing things at the cyber café, but when the speed potential of the internet and social media became a staying reality, they were caught off guard. They tried to defend their honour to no avail; that they were the social media savvy generation. They were the older brothers and sisters to late millennials and very early Gen Zs who seized their phones because they thought they were having too much screentime.
“They have a strong presence on social media, but remember life without it” (Stankorb and Oelbaum, 2014).
No one is accusing them of not being able to keep up with social media. They really can, because they watched the SM world bloom and in fact boom. But “Xennials became adults before texting, Facebook, or instant messaging” (Shafrir), and so they understand and value the importance of physical contact between people, which is something Gen Zs and late Millennials really need to learn.
It’s a long way that Xennials have come. They have come to terms—but are not necessarily at peace—with the sonic nature of the internet and the social media industry. And they have also come to depend hugely on social media, but happy nostalgia about their analogue days still plague them from time to time.
I don't have much to say about this newest set. They haven't shown me so much but they look promising. Generation Alpha. By now you’ve probably heard about two-year olds who can operate YouTube unassisted. These are the set of people, the oldest of them being eleven years of age now who very likely already have a Tiktok account. They are in line to become the game changers in the social media industry. Berkowitz explained that “people who are born in this Alpha Generation are expected to lead in this world within a few years.” “They are expected to develop technology and to invent innovative products”, Mary Rani Thomas said. But for now, just make sure you upload all your important documents to the cloud before you give them your phone.
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