By: Brinda Barcelon

           Generation Z has been named the generation of technology, the generation of lost childhood, the generation of ambition while lacking hard work.

There’s speculation about where generation Z begins, but some say the oldest members of Generation Z are this year’s high school seniors. Being a high school senior, I find it odd to be labeled in this way, but I do see why we’ve accumulated these names. While we may be the last in the alphabet we are the first for almost everything else. Gen Z has been deemed the most technologically advanced generation, which isn’t necessarily a blessing. We’ve all grown up with technology, playing video games, computer games and having any kind of movie at our finger tips, so it would make sense that we’re more accustomed to and educated in technology.

Due to our early introduction of technology few people want to go outside, they’d rather tweet or play a video game. Because of how enticing the inside life is we traverse outside less and turn away from physical activity, explaining why one third of youths are overweight and one fifth are obese.

We can text, read, watch, talk and eat all at the same time, a talent that stuns adults. Any answer we need to find, any news we need to know and any person we need to talk to is just a click away. With all of these answers and information so easy to access, we’ve become more impatient. To us five seconds feels like hours while a search is loading in front of us; the thought of reading through a book to get an answer would feel like an eternity.

Mental health experts are even saying that all the technology is causing an “acquired attention deficit disorder.” I have literally checked my phone five times since beginning this article and this is me focused; maybe they are right. If we aren’t doing five things at once, we feel like time is being wasted. But all this multi tasking makes each task we complete have less of an effect on us and takes more time than if we had just done one task at a time. This is causing us to lose our ability to analyze complex information; we get impatient if it takes too long to figure something out. I bet fifty percent of teens who began this article haven’t finished it due to its length. And thirty percent refused to read it just because they saw it was this long.

Length is something that greatly frightens Gen Z. We don’t like taking our time to read, do or say anything. With texting becoming more popular so are abbreviations. Youths texts an average of 2,900 times a month. Cyber communication is deteriorating our language and social skills.

Generation Z’s short attention spans have made us harder to teach, so teachers turn to more technologically advanced forms of teaching. We’re all adapting to this new form of life alongside technology, because society isn’t going to go backwards. We’ve come so far and now people need to cope with these advantages, while still keeping our work ethic in check. With developing technology we have lost the patience and work ethic that older generations had. Now the next step is finding a way for both of these to coexist.

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