Every generation receives some level of get-off-my-lawn-ism—the unavoidable battering of older generations upon the young about work ethic, lifestyle, and morality. As Gen Z myself, I’ve become well-adjusted to it. And not to be a generation traitor, I do think I’m a bit brain rotted. The prevalence of fingerwagging at Gen Z doesn’t surprise me anymore, so when I started at Stack, I wasn’t surprised by the 415th episode of the Stack Overflow Podcast, entitled “Gen Z doesn’t understand file structures.” The title makes the episode sound more critical than it is—the conversation is a fun ride through getting ratio’d by KPop Twitter and how age-old institutions like higher education are having to adjust to the way Gen Z thinks. But it highlights a reality: that Zoomers navigate the technical world very differently than generations past.
How Gen Z accesses information is at the very crux of this. Beyond not putting files in folders (or naming files at all, according to the `unnamed_100` file I have in my downloads), we’re a generation that has had every possible answer right at our fingertips, basically since birth. Pull out your phone and instantly find the answer to anything you might wonder; open Instagram and see exactly what your friends are doing right now; open YouTube and let a wise tutorial creator teach you how to fix things around your house. Gen Z has never had to guess or figure it out themselves; they could always just check. We’re digital natives, born with iPhones in our pockets and forced to go to online school for two years. I attended my college commencement ceremony over Zoom; my best friends and I wore our gowns over FaceTime.
This consumption of every fact, everywhere, all at once, has had both positive and negative effects on our ability to thrive in the real world. There’s a growing body of research on the effects prolonged usage of social media has on the mental health of young people. That’s not even touching the prevalent messaging that Gen Z employees are “hard to work with” or “lazy,” with one survey finding that 74% of leads found Zoomers more difficult to work with than their older counterparts.
On the other side of things, the real and digital world has had to bend to Gen Z’s particular kind of personality, including our allergy to delayed gratification. It’s no secret that our attention spans have shrunk, even as our time online has increased. Anecdotally, I’m seeing many of my peers turn to AI chat bots because of the easy, almost instantaneous access to answers, solutions, and knowledge it gives us. 93% of Gen Z knowledge workers surveyed by Google report using two or more AI tools per week at work. We want to work faster and smarter, and not harder. Young developers, aged 20-24, report higher levels of trust for almost all types of AI models as compared to older developers, as per our recent Stack Overflow Knows survey.
For the first time in history, Gen Z makes up more of the US workforce than Baby Boomers, according to a 2024 Department of Labor report. Gen Z is projected to make up almost a third of the workforce by 2030, so whether people like it or not, the future of tech, and the workplace wholly, is Gen Z. That means the tools and processes being built now will have to include and even prioritize the Gen Z experience, goldfish-like attention spans and all.
How Gen Z consumes knowledge
How Gen Z approaches information is in part dictated by our digital-first lifestyles. We aren’t beholden to traditional knowledge gatekeepers, instead seeking out the most immediate forms of information that don’t take us too out of our everyday flows, in contrast to the dedicated information seeking of the past.
Unsurprising to anyone, Gen Z gets most of their information from social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. A Pew Research study found that around 40% of those under 30 regularly use TikTok to get their news. This number has more than doubled since 2020, when the pandemic made Gen Z become not just digital-first consumers, but digital-only. For Gen Z, the ideal way for us to digest information is to get our news and instantly within the flow of our lives. In fact, 60% of TikTok’s one billion users are Gen Z, according to McKinsey.
Smart phones have been ever-present in the lives of Gen Z, and with our phones at our fingertips at all times, instant gratification is not only a want but a need for young people. This has translated directly into how we seek out not only our solutions and knowledge, but our entertainment: Gen Z uses streaming three times more than television. Even when it comes to buying physical products, over 75% of Gen Z use their mobile devices for purchases, with Forbes estimating that Gen Z is two times more likely to shop on their phones than Millennials. This desire for immediate access and frictionless experiences with our shopping and entertainment are indicative of Gen Z’s larger need for immediacy in everything we do. If the thing we want or the answer we’re looking for isn’t readily available at one click away, we’re more likely to move onto another option that’s faster.
This digital-first attitude extends to the way we build community, with a focus on online connection, with vibrant communities for any niche interest available on Discord. The rise in popularity of closed communities like Discord highlights another trend in Gen Z: the desire for more genuine, less-performative interactions. Gen Z has retreated from social media feeds, instead choosing to participate in passive consumption. According to a Pew Study, only 25% of TikTok’s user base creates about 98% of the content. This passive consumption is the highest of any age group, coming in at around 6.6 hours a day and most often in short-form video content.Thus, Gen Z’s purported 8-second attention span.
A desire for instant, in the flow consumption and privacy signals that many means of knowledge consumption from older generations are no longer serviceable for the Gen Z experience. 75% of Zoomers have never posted a review on Yelp, instead turning to more private, curated apps like Beli. According to a Google Survey, Gen Z ranks Google Search third (61%) when it comes to researching things like restaurants or local shops, with Instagram (67%) and TikTok (62%) taking first and second, respectively. In a way, chat bots are gatekeepers of information, the same way traditional search is, but the friendlier interface and personalization almost mimics that of a friend online. I can’t tell you how many of my peers use Claude as both a search engine and a therapist. So it’s no wonder that one study found that 82% of Gen Z at least occasionally uses AI for search.This number will likely rise as AI becomes more ubiquitous; the youngest Zoomers, high schoolers, have the highest percentage of weekly, if not daily, AI usage.
How does AI fit in?
A friend—Gen Z, like me, of course—put it simply, “We are a generation of lurkers.” When you put together the various pieces of how Gen Z consumes knowledge, from the desire for instant gratification, to the need for less visibility online, it becomes clear why. Being a lurker is easier, quicker, and more invisible than posting a question online, especially when so much information already exists on the digital platforms we spend 6.6 hours a day on.
Past that, there exists a deeper desire for privacy stemming from what some may call (spookily) The Rise of Cancel Culture. For a Zoomer like myself, this is just the internet culture we were born into. Many of us were being cyberbullied – or cyberbullying, I assume – from a very young age, which meant we knew the pains of being called dumb on the internet by a pre-teen. If you thought that would make us indifferent to the words of online strangers, you’d be wrong, proven in part by the correlation between poor mental health and social media usage in youths. Meanwhile, many well-meaning parents or older siblings were warning us, nearly constantly, that our digital footprint would be forever. Being a lurker became a layer of protection between the Zoomer and the troll, so many of our interactions online are kept to Finstas, disappearing Snapchats, or coveted close friends lists.
In the age of AI, turning to a chatbot that can spit out personalized information quickly seems more in line with these values than posting on a message board or scouring Google for information. GenAI provides a more efficient experience for young people, delivering all the answers they need in a matter of seconds. And, for better or worse, if we don’t like the answer, we can ask the chatbot to tweak it.
That’s why it’s so important for companies to move forward in their AI ventures using the best data available while making every effort to keep that data private and secure. Even as Gen Z leans on less traditional methods of knowledge acquisition, they still need that knowledge. It’s how many of us are upskilling and developing, in both our careers and personal lives. And, in line with our desire for privacy and anonymity, we do not like getting our data stolen by nefarious means. As young people, Gen Z has seen news story after news story about huge data breaches, and so are sensitive to unethical usage of our data. However, Gen Z is more likely than past generations to share their data, with consent, for a more personalized experience on websites and social media, with around 88% saying they would share personal information with a social media company.
This creates what some are calling a “privacy paradox” where Gen Z both wants a more personalized experience but a deeper feeling of security around their data. Even with a rise of AI usage among young people, anxieties about privacy, the replacement of humans by AI, and the ethics of AI training means that tech companies have to build their tools of the future with visibility and governance, making sure their collection of data is coming from vetted sources through ethical means.
Building the future right here, right now
Gen Z’s digital-first lifestyle means that, compared to past generations, we’re more likely to align with tools that can give us everything we want right away. Plus, bucking traditional methods of interactions with technology and information is a hallmark of Gen Z. Why wouldn’t it be the same for how we consume our knowledge? Gen Z has, for years now, been part of the early adopters of many platforms and tech. That’s why we’re seeing a stark increase in AI usage for young people, with the youngest of the generation leading the charge.
This is where knowledge-as-a-service best caters to the younger generations. AI tools and chatbots trained on validated information give Gen Z the quickest, most personalized knowledge—while also giving them the right knowledge. The pervasiveness of AI use by Zoomers will only increase as the tools become more powerful, perhaps feeding into and increasing Gen Z’s desire for instant gratification and anonymity. That’s why it’s necessary to build these tools ethically, and with the best data available. Gen Z are the leaders – and honestly, probably still the lurkers – of tomorrow, so when you build for us, you’re building for a better future.