I Asked Some Teenagers What They Think of Millennial Media
The generation that will set the tone for the media of the future
I have to start by disclaiming that, as a young millennial, I don’t encounter many teenagers. I see them on the street, in huge, teeming groups of testosterone, and they unnerve my dog. But, in general, people tend not to know the generation directly above or below them. My parents are boomers, my children will be Gen Z 2.0 (or Gen A, if we cycle back round). I don’t encounter Gen Xers or Gen Zers in my day-to-day life.
But how teenagers relate to digital media is so important to how I do business. It’s important, because they will set the tone for the media of the future. Podcasts — my industry — were invented by Gen X, handed down to Millennials, and, via much laborious normalization work, reverse-migrated back to Boomers. And we see the same process with technologies invented by Millennials: live video streaming, native to Millennials, passed down to Gen Z. And so on.
So what do teenagers think about the things that I am loosely calling ‘Millennial media’? The stuff, that is, that I take for granted. Well, I took to Reddit (so massive self-selection bias alert here) to put together a crack focus group. I trust that they are all *actual* teenagers and not just pretending to be…
