And not even entirely by choice, a boomer - fairly well off financially - can reasonably spend years without touching the internet if they don’t work.

Imma fail my classes if I don’t sign on once a day, and depressed as fuck in my apartment if I can’t even watch Netflix lmao

Its awfulness is at least 81%

Amen. I remember in high school and my early 20, I was gullible af.

It’s an age issue. Not a generational one.

Breaking news: many Gen Zs’ grand parents are not boomers, but Silents.

early 2010s as ending birth years

Which means, depending on what exact years you’re going with, the youngest gen z are roughly 13 years old, possibly younger, and roughly half of them are minors, I think it’s fair to call those parts of the demographic children in a lot of contexts. Most of them aren’t old enough to drink, only a handful of them are old enough to rent a car from most companies. Most of them are still in school, still living at home with their parents (not that I’m throwing shade, I was still living at home at their age, my wife didn’t finally graduate until she was in her 30s, that’s just kind of the way things are these days for a lot of people)

Teenagers and younger 20-somethings are capable of a lot of things, but they have little to no firsthand experience with the real world. They know enough to get themselves into trouble, but not enough to avoid trouble or get themselves out of it. That’s just part of growing up.

I know plenty of people the same age as me who fell for various kinds of scams in their teens and 20s, a lot of craigslist scams, MLMs, various phishing emails, sending money to random online “friends” only to have them disappear afterwards, every week someone’s Facebook was getting hacked, etc. And while we grew up with the internet, a lot of the potential avenues for scams hadn’t really fully matured yet, so it was easier to sort through the noise. There wasn’t a whole lot of user-generated content and many websites didn’t need any kind of account to use, so after you learned not to click the flashing banner ads saying you won something and ignore weird emails, you were mostly pretty safe, and we adapted to all the new stuff as it came around and mostly learned how to sort out the good from the bad.

If we’d been thrown headfirst into the internet of today, I’m sure we would have fallen for just as many if not more scams.

There’s probably also a lot more research now into who is falling for what kinds of scams and how frequently. If you got scammed in 2003, there’s a good chance not too much came of it, maybe you had to close some bank or credit card accounts that got compromised, but cops often wouldn’t really know what to do about it, you couldn’t really post about it anywhere unless you had your own blog, Myspace was just getting started, Facebook wasn’t out yet, maybe your 12 friends on xanga would read about it. And unless some survey taker at the mall or at your college or something asked you about it, there probably wasn’t too many good ways for researchers to gather data about your experience from you.

Nowadays everyone has their own little soapbox, there’s a lot of ways for people doing research on this sort of thing to find you and reach out, and overall it’s a lot better understood.

I’m not old enough for most early computers but I do remember changing an IRQ channel once.

Yet still not wise enough to understand time means nothing if you do nothing with it

This right here. More poignantly perhaps since the Boomers (not everyone in that age group, obviously) ruined Gen X lives first, before they destroyed the futures of subsequent generations, so we’ve been watching this dumpster fire for decades and warning about how bad it could become.

What might be unique to X-ers is that we witnessed the social fabric in the U.S. falling apart in the 80’s under Reagan–when the likelihood of a blue-collar worker having a solid career at a good company for life, supporting a family on one income, and being able to retire without living in poverty went from being a common thing to more of a lost dream.

So yes, to be lumped in with the same generation that pulled the rug out from under us is adding insult to injury.

It would be nice to see their sample grouping though. If someone leaves a finding statement to fit something as broad as an entire generation, it leaves questions as to who exactly was polled. I don’t just mean overall, I would like assurance that every age group has it’s own equal representation.

I would expect that a very large number of people across various countries, ethnicities, education levels, health levels, and more for these findings to be at all legitimate. It would be silly to try to define the entire planet’s worth of a generation off of a relatively small sample size, like 500 people from across 3 countries.

I would also love to see if the actual questions were biased or not, and if this group has any incentives for certain findings. I can’t really say that VOX is one of my go-to sources for serious stuff either, though.

Learning about media bias was HUGE when I was in school. It’s everywhere.

I think you give them too much credit.