My nightly routine consists of three layers of blankets, an episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” playing on my laptop, my phone, and my doom-scrolling rotation of TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram — in that order. But this is only after I finish — or attempt to finish — my schoolwork as a diligent journalism student.
I’ve been studying media and the habits linked to it for five academic semesters now, but I’ve been chronically online for much longer. My generation is one characterized by the Tumblr girls and Music.ly users of the 2010s. We’re succeeded by the VSCO teens and iPad babies of the 2020s, each of us fighting brain rot allegations and are constantly unsuccessful at defending ourselves – until now, that is.
Three social media-related internships precede me — one in local news, one in sports, and one in entertainment. I’ve seen and been exposed to nearly every sector of it, and one thing has become increasingly apparent to me: I have a firm — or firm enough, for the sake of humility — finger on the pulse of digital landscapes: the trends that inhabit them, the diction with which its content is written, the habits of its users and what they find funny (but most importantly, what they don’t).
There are multiple major publications, like the New York Times, for example, dubbing TikTok the “new search engine for Gen Z.” TikTok’s search bar — which has been updated since its inception to account for suggested searches and search engine optimization (SEO) — provides an experience akin to WikiHow in action. Users can watch bite-sized tutorials, straight-to-the-point reviews, and short-form explainer videos at their leisure — which, as a generation raised on platforms like YouTube, is just what Gen Z needs. According to Pearson, research conducted by the Harris Poll revealed that 59% of Gen Z participants preferred YouTube as a learning tool.
Social media is a means of public education and a cultural hub connecting generations while also being a breeding ground for misinformation. That’s right — two things can be true at once. I’ve opened many a TikTok or Twitter/X comment section to find one that reads, “This is how I found out about ‘xyz.’” The apps are catalysts for informational rabbit holes, from ones as mundane as Paul Mescal’s affinity for Daisy Edgar-Jones to ones as major as how the recent onslaught of immigration raids under Donald Trump’s presidency has hurt affected families and society’s perception of them.
This isn’t my personal soapbox to tell you that you actually can believe everything you read online. No, the internet is filled with parody accounts whose literal mission is to spread false news (whether satirical or not) and ones who aren’t so transparent about that fact. But lo and behold, social media offers a solution to this, too.
Independent journalism is on the rise, a revelation made evident to me at first by my father’s unwillingness to watch the news as told by mainstream media. He watches Steve Lookner, an independent broadcaster with a YouTube channel called Agenda Free TV. Lookner prides his platform on leaning neither toward the Right nor Left. A former professor of mine left his job at NBC and Telemundo to pursue a YouTube channel of his own, In The Hyphen, to focus his efforts on telling the stories of the U.S.’s Latino community while fully owning all of its ideas and content.
Some TikTok creators, like Kelsey Russell (@kelscruss), have taken it upon themselves to preserve media literacy. I came across Russell in 2023 on my For You Page when she got a subscription to the Sunday New York Times physical copy for her birthday. Her account is primarily dedicated to telling her audience what she’s learned from each edition in a summarized and digestible way, encouraging them to embark on print media endeavors on their own. As someone who regularly urges their friends and family to read the news, not just consume it passively by tuning into a morning broadcast 15 minutes before running out the door to work, I can confidently say that if Russell has no fans, I’m dead.
So, all this to say, I’m chronically online and proud of it. I’m proud of my ability to read digital rooms and successfully take a situation's temperature on the internet because I’ve spent so much time on it myself. I’m proud of journalism’s transition into a more social space, in some cases more independent ones that restore people’s faith in the media. The internet is a classroom — so long as we proceed with caution and share (as well as trust) content accordingly.