Generational and digital identities

Identities are also generational. Depending on your age, you may be a baby boomer or a millennial, or a member of Generation X or Generation Z. These identity bundles, so to speak, are brimming with meanings that are of interest to social analysts and marketers alike.

Let’s consider the generational labels “millennial” and “Gen Z”. The term “millennial” is usually understood to include people born from 1981 to 1996, who in 2023, at the time of writing this book, are aged between 27 and 42. The oldest millennials became adults at the turn of the millennium in the year 2000. Generation Z, in turn, is the label for those born between 1997 and 2012.

Both these demographic labels come with their own understandings and assumptions about the practices, behaviours, and attitudes of young people. In particular, young adults are often defined in relation to digital technologies. The young people of the twenty-first century are sometimes conceptualised as “digital natives”, a term popularised by American writer Marc Prensky in 2001. Prensky described digital natives as the first generation to grow up surrounded by digital technology and as “‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet”, unlike digital immigrants, who “speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age)” (2001: 1-2).

You’ve probably heard the term “digital native” before. It’s become a convenient descriptor for the way young people use – and, increasingly, rely on – digital media tools and platforms. In her study of the news practices of 18 to 30-year-olds, Kirsten Eddy (2022) further differentiates between “digital natives” (25-34-year-olds) and “social natives” (18-24-year-olds), the latter having grown up surrounded by social as well as digital media.

But as an identity marker, the term “digital native” is fraught with problems. Most notably, as boyd (2014: 176) has pointed out, it is problematic to assume that children who grow up surrounded by digital technologies and devices have the knowledge or competencies to make the most of them. To assume that all young media consumers are engaging equally with digital content is to lose sight of the digital divide (see Chapter 8) and the related understanding that one’s geographic location, cultural background, education status, and family environment can limit or enable digital proficiency, even if one is young.

Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that both millennials and Generation Z have grown up with access to digital, interactive modes of communication. For many young people today, new cultural systems enabled by social networking media mean that identity is no long stable, nor singular, but continually transformed through the ways we are represented online.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

No matter our age or affiliation with (or rejection of) a particular generational label, digital practices play a role in the construction of our identities. Even if we abstain from digital media, we define ourselves through that deliberate act of resistance. If we do engage with digital practices and digital cultures, and if we perform ourselves in virtual spaces, we can explore this aspect of our identities by asking ourselves questions like these:

Does social media help us express, articulate, or perform certain aspects of our authentic selves?

Does social media help us perform or participate in aspects of our culture?

Is there a difference between real and virtual identities? We might have an “online self” and that self might be carefully curated – is this online self less authentic and real than our offline or embodied self? Can we even distinguish between the online and the offline self? Is there a spillover between real and virtual worlds?

Are digital technologies a disrupter or an enabler of our identities? When you ponder this topic you might be automatically drawn to the way social and digital media have strengthened your identity – but are there any instances when digital technology has disrupted or upset your sense of self? Maybe there are types of digital media that you avoid for this reason. You might have built your own patterns of media consumption strategically around what supports and confirms your identity.

There is no longer a neat divide between our private and our public selves, and there is no longer a neat divide between our personal and our professional lives. What impact does this have?

What about the information that is collected about us by others – what aspects of your identity are owned and controlled by others including media companies? Our cultural tastes can contribute to our identity, but they can also help to identify us in a way that benefits others. So who are you according to Google, Facebook, Netflix… or Spotify?

Every year since 2016, millions of Spotify subscribers have had their identities formulated, packaged, and re-presented to them in the form of “Spotify Wrapped”. At once a service and a marketing campaign, Spotify Wrapped is a summary of its users’ behaviour during the year, typically presented in December.

Spotify describes this service – somewhat paradoxically – as a “deeper look into your listening”, and invites users to share their “wrapped” profile with friends; indeed, the identity package is made for social media sharing, in a way that furthers the Spotify brand while also allowing users to exercise self-branding (in this case, identifying oneself by revealing one’s musical tastes). The process benefits and furthers the brands of musical artists, and has also become something of an end-of-year ritual for both Spotify users and media commentators: a quick Google search will show you that Spotify Wrapped is the subject of many a year’s-end news story. For example, in 2023 the ABC asked us to identify ourselves as a particular type of Spotify Wrapped user, while this article for The Guardian describes the process as a “creepy, meaningless” reminder of “just how much data big tech has on you”.

What does this tell us? There is a tangled relationship between identity, communication, digital cultures, fan practices, and commercial brands. We’ll delve more deeply into these tangles in the case studies ahead.