Generation Z: politicised by necessity and already changing the world
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There’s also a way of seeing constant connectivity as a net positive. Futurist Mark McCrindle is in that camp. “They’re empowered by the devices they carry,” he says of Gen Z. “They’ve been given asymmetrical power, so an individual with a powerful story or a message to share has influence beyond their individual status.” Parkland, McCrindle says, is the first time we’ve seen that happen on a global stage, but in Australia, he points to the way teenagers have also waged successful campaigns about what school uniforms boys and girls can wear. In Melbourne, furious schoolboys – and their Gen X parents – forced the board and management of Trinity Grammar School to overturn the sacking of a popular deputy headmaster.
Plus, we’re still learning how to assess the impact of new technologies as a society, let alone on young people in particular. Rebecca Sparrow, an Australian writer who since 2009 has published three books for teenage girls on negotiating high school, maintains that we talk about technology use in the wrong way. In her conversations with teenagers, Sparrow tells me, “They rarely ask about Instagram or Snapchat, because why would they? In the ’80s I didn’t ask about problems with the phone. The platform is irrelevant. It’s the behaviour that occurs on these platforms.” Instead, Sparrow says most teenage girls are concerned with their friendships – relatable to anyone who has gone through the extended torment of adolescence.
This rings true to my own interactions with post-Millennials. I ask Macinley Butson, a 17-year-old from Wollongong who last year was the first Australian to win the INTEL International Science and Engineering Fair, about how she copes with the intrusions of technology, figuring she knows something about the subject. “I have a personal account on Instagram, and a public one,” she says. You can practically hear the shrug over the phone. Butson is NSW Young Australian of the Year and a long-time National Youth Ambassador for Green Cross Australia; perhaps dual social media accounts is a tactic borne out of extraordinary public exposure? That’s not the case. “My public account is quite professional in the way I administer it, but a lot of my friends also have a personal and a public account,” she says. “Memes and jokes for very close friends in their personal account, and then a public account for other people at school.”
I’m talking to Butson around the time that Mark Zuckerberg, noted Millennial, is testifying before the US Congress about privacy limitations on Facebook. Yet amid invocations of Frankenstein’s monster by her elders, Butson is adamant that social media is a tool for progress. “A lot of what I find out about is through apps like Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram,” she says. “I think my generation is so on fire because we’re able to see a lot of current world issues out in the open.”
What about the spectre of ever-shortened attention spans, blunted by viral videos and GIFs of sassy squirrels? Butson also sees this need for constant stimulation not as a problem but an opportunity. Her insatiable curiosity is shaping her career ambitions. Instead of becoming a research scientist, as might be expected from someone with her background, Butson has her eye on emergency medicine. “I’m a person who probably wouldn’t do too well spending 10 or 20 years on the same project,” she says. “It has to be different every single day for me.”
A study of post-Millennials by the branding firm Altitude, the findings of which were published in the US magazine Fast Company in 2015, underscores this idea: it’s not that young people lack concentration. They are in fact capable of intense focus for short bursts of time. They possess what the publication termed an “eight-second filter”.
Gen Zers are also savvy consumers of media. “They’re not screen addicts,” said the Fast Company article. “They’re full-time brand managers.” When I read this, I remembered how Morgan Hipworth had talked about “brand” in a way I hadn’t expected from a teenager: “I only wanted my brand to be associated with certain cafes,” for instance. Or, of his social media presence, “People don’t follow you for bad content, so I try to take that seriously.”
Still, there’s money to be made out of young people, however discerning their consumption patterns, and marketers have already begun to codify their preferences. After all, Gen Z will make up 20 per cent of US consumers by 2020. Fashion trade journal Women’s Wear Daily has called them “the next big retail disruptor”; Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of the Innovation Group at the J. Walter Thompson marketing agency, calls them “Millennials on steroids”. According to the many reports I’ve seen churned out by trend watchers, post-Millennials favour Lorde over Lady Gaga, Snapchat over Facebook, YouTube over Netflix. Their iconic toy is a folding scooter. And they like leggings more than jeans. What else do you need to know?
Well, there’s one thing. Something which might go some way to understanding the post-Millennial experience across the US and in Australia, and which happens also to have powered a lot of the group’s activism. It’s Harry Potter.
I first came across the Potter idea via Charlotte Alter, the writer of that Time piece on the Parkland students. She tweeted: “One thing I noticed while reporting on the #NeverAgainMSD students: this is not just a generation that has grown up with school shootings – it’s also a generation that grew up reading Harry Potter. Harry Potter has become their playbook: the Ones Who Lived fighting an ‘evil’ force that has infiltrated the government and brainwashed adults using only the powers they’ve learnt in school: illumination, protection, disarmament.”
Alter cited further evidence. The students called Rick Scott, the Florida governor, “Voldemort,” referring to the dark wizard who is the main villain in the J.K. Rowling series. Bill Nelson, the senior senator from Florida and a Democrat, was “a cross between Dumbledore and a dragon”: a fierce, fire-breathing force for good. There are familiar themes: useless administrators; unfair tactics employed by those in power; beloved teachers helping out children fighting for justice. Emma González identified “Harry Potter alone” to New York magazine as her inspiration. Her favourite characters, she texted, were Ginny and Luna: “Ginny is strong, level-headed and passionate (small + powerful); Luna is gentle, kind, strong, and just has a wonderful world view.”
Georgie Stone spent her teenage years fighting for a change in law for other Australian trans children. Photo: Kristoffer Paulsen
When I talk to Australian post-Millennials, the Harry Potter passion is also immediately apparent. Georgie Stone is a 17-year-old from Melbourne who became, at 10 years and nine months old, the youngest person in Australia to be granted permission by a court to take hormone blockers, which is the first stage of medical treatment for transgender children. Until December 2017, Australia was the only country in the world which required transgender people under the age of 18 to apply to court for access to the second stage, hormone therapy; along with her family, Stone spent her teenage years campaigning to change the law for other transgender children.
Stone tells me she didn’t have any trans role models growing up with whom she could identify. But, she volunteers, “I was a massive fan of Harry Potter and Hermione” – the character played by Emma Watson in the movies, which Stone first remembers watching at the age of six or seven. “I loved how she expressed herself and how bookish she was and how smart she was.” The fact that Watson herself went on to advocate for women’s rights at the United Nations didn’t hurt, either.
The initial Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in 1997, the year after the oldest Gen Zers were born. But the first of the wildly successful Harry Potter movies came out in 2001, when they were turning five. (The eighth and final movie was released in 2011.) Kristin Gill, the publishing manager of Penguin Young Readers in Australia, says that the Harry Potter series, which has sold more than 400 million copies worldwide, “changed the landscape of kids’ books”. Young readers “grabbed onto something that makes them feel valued, relevant, and like they are part of something bigger and able to affect change”.
Gill is quick to point out there are plenty of classic books which tackle injustice. But “if there’s a film attached to it” – as with the Potter series – “there’s a real movement.”
Ajantha Arpy, who at 22 sits on the cusp of Millennial and Gen Z, is studying a combined bachelor’s in science and arts at the University of Sydney, majoring in ancient history, Latin and neuroscience. He somehow also finds time to serve as president of the university’s Quidditch Society. (Quidditch is played by the wizards and witches studying at Hogwarts School in Harry Potter but has been adapted into a popular contact sport in real life, combining elements of rugby, dodgeball and catch.) Why does he think Harry Potter is such an important touchstone?
“You learn from those characters to be unafraid of who you are,” Arpy says. He was into “nerdy things” as a child, and he credits the online Harry Potter community for pushing him into science and, in particular, psychology. I was interested to hear that his two favourite characters – Hermione and Luna – were girls.
“Both Hermione and Luna had valuable lessons for anyone growing up,” Arpy says. “One of the big causes that is closely allied with Harry Potter is equality – not just of gender, but also sexuality.” He points to Hagrid, a “giant, buffoonish, wonderful man” who is revealed as a half-giant. Although he’s stigmatised by some, Arpy says, “we’re invited to see him as an equal. He is someone who matters to us.”
Quidditch itself, I learn, is a sport which demands inclusion. The rules state that of the seven people on the pitch, there can usually be no more than four people of the same gender. Since its real-life invention in 2005, Quidditch has become popular on university campuses worldwide, and is now played in more than 26 countries. “A lot of people come to Quidditch and may be iffy about the idea of girls playing sport or tackling girls,” Arpy says. “Then they get absolutely decked by one and they come ’round to the idea that everyone’s equal.”
Quidditch player Ajantha Arpy, 22, says the Harry Potter series helped shape his values: “You learn from those characters to be unafraid of who you are.” Photo: Wolter Peeters
In considering the tumultuous world into which Gen Z has been thrown, and which we hope they will sort out for us, I kept thinking of something Georgie Stone said. I’d asked her how she balanced activism with schoolwork, but it turns out the premise of the question was wrong.
“I didn’t set out to be an activist,” she said. “Trans kids are really politicised and our bodies are politicised and we have to go to court to access treatments. I didn’t want that for others.”
Stone hit on a parallel with Rowling’s books. “That journey Harry goes on, he doesn’t really have a choice. He has to kill Voldemort.” It was like what Emma González had said in her now-famous “We call BS” speech in Florida. “Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and president can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see.”
Mark McCrindle cautions me against comparing Gen Z with the youth insurgency of the 1960s. “They aren’t protesting for protesting’s sake,” he says. “They’re linked up and connected when the need occurs.” That feels right, in that the current crop of young activists have had their circumstances thrust on them. But equally, isn’t tuning in to the injustices of the world something which happens with every generation? The difference now is that young people have a bigger platform than ever before.
Arpy, the Quidditch champion and budding neuroscientist, explained it best. “You get hooked on a wonderful story about a magical faraway land. But then as you progress through, you start to realise that magic has its own problems, as well. And that this wonderful world isn’t as wonderful as it seems.” He’s describing the Harry Potter series, of course. But it also happens to sound a lot like growing up.
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