Everything you say can and will be used against you without context.
Every generation believes themselves to be free of normal panic until it happens to them. While Gen Z’s moral panic is nothing compared to something of the satanic panic, it still is a moral hysteria. Gen Z is full of critics who want control, who use their own personal preferences as moral standards, and in that everyone is policed and watched.
In the modern day and age of media that we live in now, everything you say, like, post, or save is out there forever. Everything can be policed. Comment cops and overanalysed discourse makes it impossible to share a slightly different idea, everything has some sort of discourse because we can agree on nothing. The hyper-personalised algorithms are doing serious damage. They play directly into what you respond to, and in that you only hear one side of everything, disregarding nuance and discussion. These algorithms drive people even further into their personal echo chambers under the guise of allowing you to tune your feed.
These echo chambers have resulted in a loss of nuance. To understand nuance you need to have integrative complexity, the ability to dissect, evaluate, and resolve. Recognising multiple perspectives and potential angles on specific issues. When you lack the ability to see a discussion from multiple sides, you cannot grasp nuance, and everything becomes this echo chamber of one side, living in black and white. Everyone is isolated on islands of their personalised algorithm. These spaces allow for the morality police and judgemental ideas to grow even further.
Gen Z equates personal taste to morality. These ideas are fostered in places of their own algorithmic creation, where they can only understand their own moral thoughts and not see anything outside of those. In this, Gen Z has created a personal style of judgment, a projection of personal taste onto anything that is created. Any media’s disregard for their personal taste is seen as a moral failing. The thinking shifts from, “I don’t like this, it’s not my thing”, to “who asked for this and why is it a thing.”
Any new media that is created is painstakingly overanalysed and dissected as to why we might not like it, because of personal beliefs, turning it not into a matter of personal taste, but instead a matter of morality. It’s not catered to my personal preferences, so it must be bad. Through that, Gen Z has become privileged. The media has to go through the dissection, and if Gen Z doesn’t approve, it gets altered or changed inside these hyper-personalised echo chambers of the same exact thought and personal beliefs.
Gen Z sees itself as a generation that is so morally just and always correct, but that isn’t true of anything, nothing is so black and white. This moral panic and justification of altering media due to morality is not an actual moral issue but a matter of personal belief. Gen Z cannot fathom the fact or idea that something might not have been made without their personal preferences in mind. This is an expression of our own entitlement, tearing down a piece of media even when there was or is nothing inherently problematic about it as a punishment for not meeting personal moral standards and preferences. Media and morality are very rarely black and white.
Gen Z is definitely not the first generation to project personal beliefs in the name of morality, but they are the first generation to have it amplified on such a big stage. We live in an era of constant new technological advances and ways to spread your personal beliefs disguised as moral obligations. Apps like Instagram give everyone a platform, or TikTok journalists. Even websites like Substack allow everyone to publish their ideas in a way that makes it seem like the law of moral standing. Anything that someone wants to be published and put onto the big screen can be, and it’s fed to thousands, if not millions, of people in the same echo chambers, spitting the exact idea right back at you to give the illusion that everyone thinks that way, so it must be the correct thought.
Gen Z has lost the ability to agree to disagree, or discuss things without it turning into a moral panic. You don’t always need a reason not to like something; you can not like it and move on. Not turning everything into a moral discussion about why I’m right and you’re wrong for enjoying it. There are definitely some things that deserve this discourse and discussion of true morality, but it does not need to happen to everything. Not everything has to be dissected and overanalysed for personal moral beliefs. That is why nuance and integrative complexity are necessary. Not everything is so black and white. Agreements can be found, but also the ability to move on from something you don’t enjoy. You can always scroll away.
