CMC and Gen Z: A Personal Essay

CW: Grooming, gore, and pornography will be talked about in this essay along with mentions of suicide and self-harm.

The internet has become such an integral pillar in today's society that some would even argue that, in many ways, the virtual space is slowly replacing the physical space in terms of importance. Much like the rest of my generation, the internet has played a huge role throughout my life, for better and for worse. We grew up with the internet, a lot of us were on it at a problematically young age. I, for one, can't even remember when exactly I went on the internet for the first time, but it's got to have been at my grandparents' house.

I think I learned how to use a computer before I learned how to read. My uncles and grandparents lived around Metro Manila, which meant an internet connection was more common compared to my neighborhood. This was back when computers had their rooms, and their computer's room was upstairs. As a kid, I went to the number one website Filipino kids ended up on: Y8. Dress-up and makeover games, platform games, multiplayer games, that website had everything. I spent hours mixing cocktails, managing Papa's Freezeria, and playing Fireboy and Watergirl with my sister. Eventually, we got internet installed in our house and soon, I was also playing with my friends at home.

Y8 was a confined space in the vast sea of the Internet, all it had were games me and my friends would play when it was too hot to go outside, but it was just so easy to drown in those waters. Soon, I started exploring, and what I found were virtual worlds or MMO's.

There was Club Penguin, Animal Jam, Webkinz, and so much more I can't even remember. I would become completely absorbed into one of these games for months on end until I get bored of being blocked by a paywall and then proceed to move to a new one. I'm sure other people from Generation Z remember these games and have played them themselves. They were incredibly fun, and the idea of being in a virtual world just felt so exciting. However, the ability to interact with real people in real time soon posed a new kind of threat to unsuspecting children.

The real world can be a dangerous place and so can the virtual one. Cyberbullying becomes the least of your concerns when there can be people determined to steal your identity or dox your location, and that's not even mentioning the predators who lurk online. Luckily, I had family members who were present enough to teach me about online safety. They would make me swear up and down that, I would never reveal my full name, the city I lived in, my passwords, and other such details. They warned me to never talk to strangers and to never meet up with people I met online. These reminders and pieces of advice soon proved to be useful because as I explored the internet some more, I discovered websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

It was here that the ball started to roll. At first, I was only on it to play Facebook games, but everyone of every age was on it. At such a young age, I didn't even understand what Facebook was supposed to be used for. By logging in and playing those games, I was putting myself in a room full of people I barely even knew, if at all. Children had become used to the presence of the internet, we became desensitized to just how massive the internet is. This does not just stop on Facebook either, this is Twitter, Instagram, and even messaging applications like Kik where grooming has become a common occurrence among people of my generation. Stranger danger is incredibly real on the internet. According to research done by Snapchat in 2024, out of 6,000 13 to 24-year-olds surveyed in France, Germany, the U.K., the U.S., and India, 23% of them had been victims of sextortion – scams that deceive people into sharing intimate photos often to be used as blackmail. As of last year, Gen Z is still a target, and that is just through social interaction on the internet. What about interaction with media on the internet?

The internet is rife with opportunities, especially for creatives. I can only remember bits and pieces from my earliest memories, but I remember the time people used to hail as the "Golden Age of Youtube". During this time, creativity and fun were king. People did not take the site too seriously and posted videos to have fun, and occasionally, something funny would go viral and everyone would be showing it to their friends. Most of it was all in good fun, even if some were a little more mean, like that coffee commercial where the camera follows a car down this hill before presenting a jumpscare. There was also content that was not for children, but because of how often children are on the internet, they still find it and they still watch it. On the milder end are probably just inappropriate language and suggestive content without anything explicitly sexual, but on the more end would be gore and extreme violence.

I hope that you, whoever you are reading this, have not seen or are even aware of gore on the internet. Gore refers to extremely explicit videos or images that depict mutilation, murder, torture, and even suicide. Gore is not even appropriate for adults to watch, how much more for children? If you are a part of this generation and have been to some shady parts of the internet, you may have heard about LiveLeak, which is like YouTube but often full of gore. It is genuinely upsetting to know so many people from the generation have been exposed to this at such a young age due to a lack of parental guidance.

And there is also, of course, the fear of all parents: pornography. I will not be getting into my very complicated opinions on pornography, but I will make it very clear that I think children should never be exposed to it. The problem is not even that children look for such content, it's that they find their way to children. Exposing children to what is practically dramatized sex is a lot more sinister than just children watching something they shouldn't. Children and by extension, teens, are impressionable, and showing them unrealistic and toxic ideas about sex and gender is a recipe for this disaster. This of course does not stand alone, and much like everything, it does not exist in a vacuum, but throwing toxic ideals into an already problematic mix only exacerbates it, which brings me to another point: the antagonization of the internet.

It seems to be a rite of passage for every generation to have everything new about them criticized to hell, and for us, it's the internet. It doesn't help that the internet is so fast-paced either, this just makes the older generation's alienation with the internet even worse, which means they hate it more, they don't understand it. The older generation is so quick to blame everything on the internet, but they just need a scapegoat. In my eyes, it seems that nobody wants to be blamed for the state of the world right now. Poverty, crime, and exploitation run rampant, but accountability is not blame. The 13-year-old girl being groomed on the internet is not the internet's fault, it's her surroundings that made her feel like she needed to look for validation elsewhere. The young man who now feels the need to oversexualize himself because he was exposed to inappropriate content as a child is not the internet's fault, it's the family who slapped an iPad in front of him at the age of four instead of raising him. Children are children and they need supervision, and the internet is no place for a child to be alone.

The way I see it, the internet merely gives dimension to our social landscape, it's not some malicious and dangerous predator in your children's pockets, there's just now the virtual and the physical. You don't leave your children unattended in the street or the park, you shouldn't do so on the internet either. The internet isn't all bad either, the internet can do a lot of good. Whole communities have been founded and fortified on the Internet. Marginalized groups who have long been discriminated against by the people around them found support through people online. The reach the internet provides grants its users incredible flexibility. I would be a fool to deny that the internet can do good.

I was an incredibly lonely kid growing up. I had a lot of difficulty socializing and making and keeping friends. It seems that everyone found me to be too quiet or too odd and none of my interests were anyone else's. I met one of my closest friends one uneventful day while scrolling on my phone back when I was twelve years old. I was in this app called "Amino", a name that might just be enough to bring war flashbacks to every other weird kid on the internet. That app was a mess, but among that mess, I found friends I still cherish to this day. They made a post that mentioned the city I lived in and their age was in their bio, which is where I found out we were the same age. Such a small thing to be the catalyst of a years-long friendship.

The internet also played an important role in my creative exploration as well as my social awareness. With such massive reach, social media platforms can boost artists and activists to everyone's faces. Everyone's on their phones, if you could get yourself or your cause on their phones, they have got to see it. For me, being surrounded by people who wrote because they were inspired by their favorite bands and artists pushed me to do the same. My passive interaction with other people online reignited my love for writing. The assorted array of content presented to me also showed me important events that kept me up to date on social and political issues. I've even become interested in video essays that went in length into topics that are more entertaining such as pop culture and media, some philosophical, and some as serious as politics.

Generation Z has such a complex relationship with the internet. To Generation X, it was most likely something introduced to them as a young adult, and for Millennials, it was something that exploded into popularity when they were teenagers. Every generation has something culturally significant to define them across the board, and for us, it was the internet. I have so much more I want to say about the internet, and I struggled a bit thinking about what angle I'd take in tackling computer-mediated communication. Sometimes the internet feels so rapid and hectic yet somehow it's also so empty and lonely. I think that the internet tends to "flatten" social interaction leading to little proximity and connection. I also find it ironic that a device supposed to connect us all manages to only connect us superficially, but that is a topic for another day. I feel strongly about how our generation had been raised by it, I am incredibly disappointed with how such damage can be done to a whole generation that could have been avoided with just a little bit of supervision. We now know the good and the harm the internet could do, we need to be smarter.

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