Generation-Z is the first generation to grow up entirely online. For as long as Zoomers can remember, the internet has been ubiquitous and pervasive to daily life through smartphones. As a result, Gen-Z has no consensus culture—no TV shows, movies, or music they all consumed growing up. Everything had fractured into thousands of subcultures on the internet. Each Zoomer is an island. There may be another person who shares all your same niche cultural interests, but you are unlikely to ever randomly meet that person in person. You will only ever “meet” that person online. This fragmentation of culture is not necessarily good or bad. It just is. And it is different from every other generation that came before. 

Millennials grew up with the internet, but as it was developing. Our pre-pubescent years were pre-computers, so we mostly watched TV for entertainment. There was cable, but only a few dozen channels—and even fewer networks aimed at young people (such as Nickelodeon, then MTV for teens). With limited choices available, we mostly watched all the same TV shows. There was a larger choice of movies to rent from Blockbuster, but each Blockbuster around the country had the same selection. There was some choice and deviation, but within a limited enough pool that anyone could easily find others at school and in their hometown who watched the same movies and TV shows as themselves. The same for music and the limited number of radio stations. There was pop, rap, rock, or alternative—and that was about it. Everyone watched TRL (Total Request Live) after school. (Back in my day MTV still played music videos…) Every individual fit into a handful of available archetypes (jock, geek, nerd, skater, stoner, etc.)¹. You could always find someone who shared your same interests because pre-internet there were only so many interests one could have.

As Millennials came into their teen years, America went online through AOL. Everyone finally had a personal computer in their homes, though access was slow due to dial-up connections. And there were no smartphones yet, so you couldn’t access the internet outside of your home. The choices of where to go online were also limited. There were no social networks yet. Instead we communicated on AIM, in chatrooms, and on message boards devoted to personal interests. This is where the fracturing of pop culture began. 

Entire message boards and subcultures sprung up devoted to a single band (or game, or hobby, or political theory, or historical period, or book or movie franchise, etc.), often obscure subcultures that no one else at your school knew or cared about. Online you could talk to other people from around the world who were equally obsessed with that niche topic. But you didn’t only talk about the central topic of the message board. People would talk about all manner of subjects, sharing other obscure interests they had, which led others down rabbit holes to discover different subcultures.² But no matter what users talked about on the message board, everyone there was a subset of like-minded souls who bonded over their shared interest of the band/hobby. This promoted a generally more positive online atmosphere, as opposed to modern social media where it is a free-for-all. Everyone in the world is on the same platform, so everyone spends their time arguing with people they hate, whom they share zero interests with. 

Today, instead of 100 cable channels to form your interests and identity, there are 100,000 YouTube channels.³ Instead of a few radio stations to form your musical taste, there are a few million artists on Spotify. Zoomers have the capacity to form much more varied and unique interests and identities, making it less likely that any two Zoomers will have crossover interests. Though there are outlier success stories of certain pop culture icons that break through to mainstream popularity, such as MrBeast and Taylor Swift, they are few and far between. 

This is not all to say to Gen-Z that, “It was so much better back in my day.” Because that is the same thing Boomers say to Millennials, and Silents said to Boomers, and every older generation said to every younger generation throughout human history. There is a reason for this. Culture was even more homogeneous during Boomers’ childhoods, before cable television, when there were only a handful of channels to choose from. Due to the advancement of telecommunication technology, there has been a steady trend of decentralization and culture becoming less uniform over time. 

Then again, before television and radio, there were no mass telecommunication networks to homogenize culture. Hence culture was more localized. People developed cultural tastes and interests directly from people they met in person. A single neighborhood would develop a uniform culture, but one neighborhood’s culture could vary wildly from the next, especially the further apart they were. So perhaps this “trend” is more of a cycle (as The Fourth Turning theorized). We are currently in a decentralizing stage of culture, but culture may centralize again in the future and become much more homogeneous than it is today. That centralization could come from people adopting a new form of technology like Neuralink that facilitates consensus thinking, or it could come via governmental force from an authoritarian regime. (North Korea’s culture is currently quite homogeneous.) 

The preference for a consensus versus a fractured culture may come down to one’s personality type. Some want the freedom to explore their unique interests and separate themselves from others, while others want to be part of a large group where everyone shares the same interests.⁴ I personally prefer a more decentralized heterogeneous culture because I am more temperamentally individualistic and my tastes tend toward the weird. When the internet came along, I jumped at the opportunity to discover obscure indie rock bands rather than listen to the pop hits on Z100⁵. With TikTok everyone can create their own top ten music video countdowns, instead of watching whatever is on TRL. Yet even with every song in history available on Spotify, some people still listen to Z100. 

A homogenized culture is not necessarily better or worse than a fractured culture—it is just different. Which is my main point. Older generations always say they don’t understand the younger generation—because they can’t, not really. They literally grew up in a different world. 

1. Gen-Z doesn’t seem to fit as neatly into these archetypes. Each Zoomer is a little bit of everything (i.e. a straight-A athlete who also watches Star Wars and smokes weed). ↩︎
2. You log on looking for info about the new Radiohead tour but end up chatting about The Matrix or the JFK conspiracy. ↩︎
3. There are more streaming services and more shows on each platform, so finding someone who watches all the same TV shows is unlikely. Plus Zoomers are less likely to even watch traditional TV shows, even on Netflix, as they often prefer YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok over long-form TV and movies. ↩︎
4. This theme is explored in my book, Work for Idle Hands. ↩︎
5. New York’s #1 Hit Music Station ↩︎