My generation, GenZ, has been characterized as the generation who does not remember a time without Internet, but how does that change how my peers view "being present"?
A couple of days ago I was part of the United Nations Foundation's Girl Up Leadership Summit; a slew of polished, inspiring women came to speak to a crowd of eager teenage girls ready to impress upon them their messages of empowerment and lessons learned -- I spent the entire time on my phone. From live tweeting to Facebook Live-ing and covering the event on Periscope, and Snapchat, I was determined to spread the conference to Girl Up supporters worldwide and my personal friend group. But it still felt unsettling to be looking down at the little screen in my lap, rather than the woman in front of me. From weddings to conferences, it is not uncommon for events to come with their own special hashtags -- as if the organizers want you to be sucked into the world of social media during their event. Yet at the same time, we hear again and again, the importance of being present.
Am I really being present when I listen to a speaker only for a tweet worthy soundbite or article feature, versus actually engaging with the speaker? At the same time it is what speakers and conferences want -- for you to carry their messages back to your community or to be a trending event on Twitter.
While at the Girl Up Summit, I was asked along with a couple of my colleagues to dance around with signs of the Sustainable Development Goals while the new Global Goals "Wannabe" video played. The girls loved it, they danced and sang with Victoria Beckham but overwhelmingly they captured it on their social media accounts. I was dancing around and not capturing the moment on social media, and found myself feeling disappointed that I missed capturing a moment and sharing it with my own social network.
My peers produce an incredible mass of content from our daily lives. We seemingly think that every moment has to be an Insta-worthy photo, a sound bite for twitter, or geo-filtered snapchat. All of this content we put out, we hope is consumed by our peers. But our peers are also being consumed by all of the content. Despite the fact that most of my friends and I are currently on opposite sides of the country, I am pretty up to date on their lives. I have one good friend who abstains from the more instant, off-handed social media sites like Snapchat, and have felt many times over the course of the summer that she and I were disconnected, when all I had to do was pick up the phone and give her a call.
Yet in the same vein, I hear my friends complain about other friends who won't put their phones down, and often times hear "hang up so you can hangout" in group settings. If we are not putting out content, we are consuming it. It was be futile to put out content that no one reads (sometimes how I feel about my blogging career) and we measure our social media success in retweets, likes, shares and views -- so someone must be disconnecting from their lives to be absorbed with yours.
Globalization and the advent of technology has often been cited as the "great connector" and that now more than ever before we can reach people from all around the world -- but in doing that are we leaving behind the people right in front of us? Maybe.
Apparently my generation spends nine hours on the plugged-in every day. But maybe that is just the world we live in. Friendships and relationship are maintained by this connectedness. As a generation I think we need to redefine what being present while also being engaged looks like. And maybe everyone has their own hybridized model of what that looks like.
For me -- I have found most left out of group settings when we are in a social setting and people are absorbed with the lives of others, but find it perhaps more appropriate to share big moments like speakers, concerts, and big moments while also cherishing the moments right in front of me. So while we should be mindful and present, but also the tools we have available to us can be utilized. But in the larger sense -- we need to start redefining the social appropriateness of being both social media content creators and consumers.