Parents, teachers, homes, societies, institutions are increasingly becoming defunct for Generation Z natives or Zeners [children born in or after the year 2000 ]. A new book says millennial kids evoke great degree of curiosity not only because they depict a completely different mindset and attitude, but also because after millennials they hold the key to the future of planet earth. The older generation, on the other hand, seems reluctant to accept, manage or engage the millennial generation.
The Life of Z: Understanding the Digital Pre-teen and adolescent Generation [Sage Publications 2020] by award-winning author Debashish Sengupta is packed with extensive real-life narratives and thought-provoking analysis to help understand the generation born 2000 and after to engage with them for a better future for them and for all of us. It works as a ready reckoner for parents, teachers, corporates adolescent counsellors and anybody and everybody who wants to understand the challenges and opportunities of Gen Z in today’s digital age.
The pre-teens and adolescents are the largest generational cohort and together with millennials, they make nearly two-thirds of the world’s population. However, their life issues are often grossly misunderstood or ignored by the older generation. A generation of world-changers like Greta Thunberg or Wolf Cukier, a 17-year old who discovered a planet on his third day of internship at NASA, they live in a world and times that make them equally vulnerable”. “The catch-phrase ‘Ok Boomer’ is a voice of their growing frustration and anxieties,” writes Sengupta, who is the Asia Editor of a London-based leading global business magazine The Future of Earth: Environment, Economy and Society. He presently teaches human resource and strategy at the Royal University for Women in Bahrain.
When Sengupta shared his childhood stories of radio buzzing in a corner of his house and him constantly trying to adjust antennae to hear cricket commentary or his mother going to a post office to book a truck call to speak to her mother to his son, the youngster could not help asking, “Why were you listening to the radio and not streaming live cricket over internet?; Why did your parents go to the post office to make a call and not use their mobile to make a video call?”
Sengupta argues that his conversations with zeners, parents, teachers, private tutors, pediatricians, child counsellors, child psychologists, entrepreneurs often stunned and amazed how the younger generation viewed things so differently. It brought him closer to the younger generation. “ I saw how homes, societies and institutions had become mostly defunct for them that were not ready to accept, manage or engage this generation. The ironies in their life made them confront with bane too wherever they searched for boon. They were powerful yet vulnerable. They can become the most influential generation that the world has ever seen yet could be lost in a waft of smoke, flamed by ignorance and arrogance.”
Finding faults with the young generation is not helping either. The millennial kids have been born in the cradle of technology and rocked by social media handles. “They are born in a transformed world where on one hand rapid advancements in technology have opened the realm of possibilities, including space tourism, whereas on other hand the same technology threatens our very existence. On one hand the world has been brought closer than ever before with networks that defy limits of distance, on the other hand it has been fragmented by economic, political and religious conflicts. Everyone has more friends than before, yet there is dearth of human to human connection. Today they take more photos than Kodak films would ever allow, share them over Instagram, yet they will never know the nostalgia of opening an old dusted photo album” rues Sengupta.
It has been twenty years since then year 2000 and today millennials, pre-teens and youngsters constitute the biggest chunk of world population and the one that has lived a very different time than ours during their formative years deserves both attention and exploration, pleads the author.
The good thing about Sengupta’s work is that it primarily relies on millennial voices make others aware of the responsibility towards the younger generation that is capable of bringing the change that we wish to see.
Sengupta holds dual PhD in management from Central University of Nicaragua (UCN) and Azteca University, Mexico. His previous book,The Life of Y: Engaging Millennials as Employees and Consumers (SAGE Publications) earned critical acclaim
[Author-Journalist Rasheed Kidwai is a visiting Fellow of the Observer Research Foundation. He tracks government and politics and considered a specialist on Congress party affairs.]