On Sephora Kids, Media-Consumption, And Gen Alpha
When everything’s an arms-length away, what happens? We’re seeing it firsthand with Generation Alpha. Gen Alpha’s oldest are twelve-year-olds and they’re taking the world by storm, and not in a good way. They’re the generation of iPad-kids with too much media for their own good. The generation of rude, undisciplined kids. The generation that lacks entirely any empathy.
I first noticed it when the discussion of Sephora and makeup came up, like it has for every generation. The big question of: what makes someone grown? Is it makeup, is it skincare, is it how you act, or is it just how many years have passed since you’ve been born? But along with these stories came the horror stories of all these ten-to-twelve year old girls storming Sephora like they own the place, all in search for the next and newest Drunk Elephant product. Drunk Elephant is a newer makeup and skincare brand which, oddly enough, has been getting an incredible amount of traction among younger girls. I’ve heard stories of these girls fighting for the last product, arguing with literal adults for something that won’t even impact their skin. Of course, I think it’s important to teach a kid self-hygiene, but not when that means a ten-step skincare routine, finished off with retinol of all things. And along with them came the influx of GRWMs (Get-Ready-With-Me) on Tiktok. And what do these kids have to talk about? Let’s talk about the things I hate. The things I love. Things you didn’t know about me. Some stupid drama. And often it’s negative and pointed and lacking any empathy.
It’s not just girls, of course. I’ve seen an alarming amount of young boys being exposed to video games and adopting the treacherous language that goes on in those voice-chats. (I play video games often and don’t necessarily believe that the violence in them CAUSES violence, but I do believe that the violence and language perpetuated by these games is correlated to the rise of angry, arrogant, and ignorant boys.) And these kids will start repeating the things they’ve heard: the crude insults, the slurs, and the most bigoted rhetoric you’ll ever hear. Coming out of a twelve-year-old’s mouth! Then, they’ll turn around and leave awful hate comments on girls’ posts, commenting on their bodies and their faces and how they don’t align with the porn-obsessed vision they’ve fostered for themselves. (This is an entirely different, and much longer, discussion but still worthy to mention.) They’ll insert themselves into political discussions, their only knowledgable arsenal being that from 30-second Tiktoks and inflammatory, and often false, tweets.
So where does the blame lie? The parents? A little. I’m a firm believer that nurture beats nature, and maybe it’s because I’m an optimist, but I don’t want to believe that these kids were born mean. I think the most blame lies in the evolution of media, and — like everything else — capitalism.
Generation Alpha, and younger Gen Z kids, were born at the height of the media revolution. When everyone and everything began to rely on phones more, when they became a normal accessory rather than a luxury. The term ‘iPad kids’ has gained popularity in the last few years; it describes the type of kids that have been brought up using iPads, that their parents opted for entertainment to soothe, rather than discipline. It was supplemented by the rise of channels like CocoMelon, all made to profit off of our reliance on entertainment. These kids have become overly-stimulated, and now they can’t exist without stimulation. (I’m a little guilty of this of course, and usually I’m listening to music while doing something — just as I am writing this now.) But the media evolution really epitomized itself in the birth of Tiktok. (Yes, musical.ly came first — and I was an avid user — but Tiktok reached a popularity I don’t think musical.ly could have ever reached.)
Tiktok defined the standards for our casual media consumption. Rather than watching TV or playing stupid iPhone games, watching short, 30-second clips became our entertainment. In turn, our time-spans shortened, and even watching long movies became too much. When information can be condensed into 30-second clips, why should we care to watch something for two hours? And that’s the core of the problem. Quick media has condensed our abilities, and our impulses, to retain lots of information at once. To fact-check. To research on our own (now it’s as easy as clicking the blue search button!) and come to our own conclusions. Can meaningful things really be condensed? I say, no. That meaning is derived from time and patience and passion — all of which might take minutes or hours or days. Do I think Tiktok is a terrible source of information? No, it can be helpful. But it should never be your only source, and our reliance on it has gotten insane. And because these kids were practically weaned on this kind of media, they’ve had no other choice but to shorten their attention-spans, to opt for their phones instead of a book. (You sound so pretentious and nerdy, some people might say, to which I say, you’re the problem.)
So, in this world of quick media, where are these kids left? They’re left with no desire to consume long pieces of media, and definitely no desire to think critically.
Media-literacy has become a buzz word recently, and like any other buzz word, has been misused and abused, though I think it holds merit still. A lack of media consumption, from books to movies and shows, has left kids completely dependent. Where Tiktok holds their hand to explain, movies do not. They require critical thinking, maybe just a little time. I don’t believe it’s their fault, but media-literacy and critical-thinking are vital pillars to empathy, to problem-solving, to anything really.
I’m thinking about some of the books I read when I was younger, when I liked reading “realistic fiction” as I liked to call it. One of the first books I’ve read and remembered was The One and Only Ivan. It’s about a gorilla at a mall zoo, and was one of the first books I cried about. It was that peak period of my reading life, when I never had access to a phone or any form of quick media. Unfortunately, that doesn’t exist anymore — for me or the newer generation. Now kids find entertainment not in the pages of a book, but on a screen, and are constantly watching videos and over-stimulating themselves. And no one’s there to encourage them to pick up a book, to stimulate themselves through something that deserves time and attention. Without reading, without media-literacy and critical-thinking, the next generation is failing to develop any empathy. There’s no easy solution, no one-time fix, but hopefully just as they were once weaned on quick media, they can be weaned on healthy media consumption.