The Millennial Generation And Social Media Movements

The Millennial Generation, born between 1981 and 1999, has become a focus in the public sphere due to their widely differentiating opinions, lifestyles, and involvement compared to prior generations. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, they are the generation most observed and studied. The older generations discern them and chastise their inability to adapt to social norms developed in the past decades. Because of this, they are perceived as a generation full of promiscuity, narcissism, and failure. What is often overlooked, however, is the amount of progress and success this generation has brought in this day and age. Despite the bad publicity they receive, the Millennial Generation is a generation full of success, change, …show more content…
With this comes reprimanding and assumptions that these self-centered Millennials lack attention to current events and the matters at hand. Although the Millennials have sparked the social media movements, their intentions go beyond a retweeting of a status or a selfie. Researchers from the Case Foundation took it upon them to track Millennials’ usage of technology and found that “coming at 51 percent, the most frequent specific action Millennials took on websites in the past year was to connect via social media. The second-most frequent actions: donate (46 percent),” (Millennial Impact Project), which shows a lot. Through the usage of social media, connections are made and relationships are kept despite the close or faraway distance friends and family may have. Digital citizenship is high, with 78% of using it for positive reinforcement (Nielson), which contradicts the common idea that millennials take advantage of social media for crude and inappropriate usage. With technology, there have been an influx of donations given to charities, with a high amount of millennials geared towards donating to a cause that is on the update with social media and technology (Kingkade). This is shown through the sites such as change.org, gofundme.org , and social media actions taken such as the ALS ice …show more content…
Psychologist Jeffery Kluger calls them out for their narcissism, claiming their narcissism is accepted and inflated all over social media, with statistics showing the rise of egocentrism shown from older generations to new ones (Foster). The rebuttal for that is the unreliability for the data that was shown. “Part of the problem with diagnosing narcissism is that it’s easy to confuse it with other types of behaviors…While the younger people polled were asked about their current lives, those over 65 were asked to remember how they behaved decades ago—not an entirely reliable account of whether or not they acted in a narcissistic manner,”(Foster). What is reliably supported, nevertheless, are the footprints of their selflessness and desire to change. Although tradition is highly respected in this day and era, the close minded aspects are long gone, which is perceived as a rebellious and selfish move. Misogynistic is soon eroding, with 60% of millennials surveyed believing that gender roles do not need to be conformed (Kott). With the availability to multiple sources of information, as stated earlier, the millennials as a whole have a better practice of tolerance, shown through the support of minority groups due to availability of accurate information and broadened possibilities (US Chamber of Commerce). This is important, especially since baby boomers were