A millennial, ages 18-34, according to the Pew Research Center, are notoriously known for their Instagram captions, or song lyrics in 2017. In fact, I began my millennial run posting Trey Songz’ lyrics on the initial social media website that helped define us millennials, Myspace.
At age 13, something about Myspace provided a home feel. Myspace allowed to section off your most important friends into a list of top friends. More importantly, the site allowed you to place your song favorite onto profile for people to hear when they viewed you. After searching the archive, my last song was Ludacris “Down In Tha Dirty” (Hey, it was just a phase. I listen to cool emo music now.)
Coincidentally, I felt the same vibe at the next defining website, Facebook. And eventually, I felt it on Twitter as well. Pertaining to Facebook, it was a more sophisticated Myspace to me, but Facebook just had more to offer: the wall feature, photo albums, statuses, and messaging (eventually live chat). But, Twitter was a different animal. I’ll explain in a minute.
To further define millennials’ character, other traits of millennials are that 84 percent support the legalization of marijuana, and 49 percent believe America’s best years are ahead of them, according to the Pew Research Center. Also, the center reported that millennials are detached from institutions.
However, it could’ve been my shyness that made it easy to write my words to strangers on Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web. (Please, no one tell Al Gore.)
Like I said, Myspace was just for song lyrics. Facebook was more of the same, but I also ventured into the emo teen stage,: all black skinny jeans, vans, and sad music (I don’t think I’ve left it). I’d never say any of this stuff out loud, but on the internet, as a teenager, it was fair game. Also, I could manipulate lyrics, gearing them toward me, especially lesser known music one could confuse as my own words.
C’mon, if only a niche audience, I know I’m not alone here. Anyway, fast forward to Twitter, and beyond, and you’ll blatantly see how advanced technologies, but mostly social media networks, have impacted the millennial generation. For the record I’m not talking about the older millennial born in the 80’s, but the official, true millennial born in the 90’s.
And if you don’t see the impact, welcome to the internet, or the wild, wild west, my old college department chair said.
In 2017, Twitter has taken over as the most powerful social media network in the world, in my opinion, with approximately 325 million monthly active users, and was the largest source of news during the 2016 presidential election, according to The New York Times. What makes Twitter unique is their limit of 140 characters per Tweet, providing a text message feel.
In addition, Twitter’s initial interest came, because of the site’s ability to be accessed through mobile messaging. Essentially, users could text tweets from their phone onto the platform. Knowing that, the site didn’t want users receiving a tweet to get more than one message. With room to spare, the standard length of text messages is 160 characters, according to ADWEEK.
That said, the phones most millennials used to send their tweets, and now open the app, is a smartphone. In fact, the two, apps and smartphones, go hand in hand, as the app was designed to run on a mobile device.
While I can put into words the content of Twitter, and other advanced technologies, let’s examine photos, or videos, of the content (Don’t worry, not Instagram captions.)
All in all, the life of millennials goes hand and hand with social media.
