the use of exciting or shocking stories or language at the expense of accuracy.
What part of this article is inaccurate?
rwhitisissle
joined 1 year ago
You can say the title is clickbait, but that doesn't make it sensationalist. I feel like either you and I have totally different definitions of sensationalist, or you think the article is doing something it's not. The article does the following
- Introduce a surprising fact: Zoomers fall for online scams more than Boomers do. This is surprising because a) Zoomers are online so much and would be expected to be innately familiar with such things and b) online scammers famously target the elderly, so much so that Boomers are almost stereotyped as being the victims of internet scams.
- Add supporting details and discuss the source of the facts being discussed - specifically it introduces the Deloitte study, a 2023 report by Social Catfish, and the academic article I linked in my previous comment. These all help provide the concrete, factual basis for the article.
- Highlights important findings from these sources that explains this phenomenon, including the centrality of mobile devices to the lives of Zoomers, how many popular apps have no real safeguards against predatory users or advertisers, and cultural or societal trends that might influence how Zoomers perceive their interactions with others on the internet.
- Discusses how Zoomers can better protect themselves online and how, one can infer from the article, an adult or guardian could help Zoomers stay safe on the internet - such as by enabling safer settings or utilizing alternative browsers and ad blockers (things Zoomers might not innately think to do or know about), while also addressing some of the failures of large corporations and app developers to safeguard their users.
I'd like to know what part of that is sensationalist to you, because in my mind that is a remarkably by the numbers tech article.
Also, the data itself is not "BS" - it's something that is accurate, but has to be understood within a specific context. That's literally what the article is doing - contextualizing the information. You are saying it's sensationalizing the data. It's not. If anything it's doing the opposite. It's making the data more mundane by providing logical explanations for it.
I know people who teach high school and they say that Gen Z has both an extreme degree of personal esteem and that they won't take shit from anyone who disparages who they fundamentally are as people (like people giving shit for them being from immigrant families, being POCs, being LGBT, etc.), which is fantastic - no one should ever put up with shit like that. But they also seem to have a very hard time organizing their thoughts and making logical conclusions from structured evidence. Like they can't write a paper making an argument for something and providing evidence for why something is a certain way. It's all stream of consciousness. I think that as a generational cohort they might be more inclined towards "unstructured thought" or perhaps "stream of consciousness" than other generations. As old as I might sound because of this opinion, I do think that the fact that they interact with information almost entirely through mobile devices is a potential component of that. The mechanisms and mediums by which you consume information arguably shape how you process information.
So you agree the article is sensationalist?
The article is not sensationalist. Please quote me a part of the article that you feel is and I can address the statements that make you feel that way.
Why link me a study that is irrelevant for no reason?
Because that study is referenced as one of the primary sources the article uses to provide evidence for the phenomenon it discusses. The link to that research paper is literally in the article. It's critical to the article.
Yes, they acknowledge that as well when they discuss the sample population. Baby Boomers are literally not a part of it. The title of the Vox article is just drawn from a Deloitte industry survey. Which has no real context or judgment around it - it's purely a reporting of aggregate statistics. The Vox article just attempts to explain why Zoomers, a generational cohort that grew up with the internet, might be more statistically prevalent for succumbing to those scams compared to Baby Boomers, who were fully adult when the internet became widespread. The superficial presumption is that you would expect the opposite - the older generations have little to no familiarity with modern technology and are more easily victimized by it. That presumption is all the Vox article is discussing, really, and why it's probably not correct.
Vox is being charitable to the Zoomers, though, observing that "Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology." The original study is also in a peer reviewed journal. It's not making judgment calls about Zoomers. It's aggregating statistical data. You can read the article here: https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=ijcic
From the discussion of findings at the end of the article, the researchers observed that
"It is reasonable to assume that the safer practices the older group self-reported is accompanied by greater knowledge of information security simply because of the additional years of being engaged in a digital-technology world. Specifically, it was hypothesized that Generation Y would rank higher than Generation Z adults on the OSBBQ Cybersecurity Awareness subscale, and significant differences were observed for half of the items included in the analysis."
And also that
"From a developmental perspective, it is possible that the normal adaptations that occur throughout one’s life impacted how individuals in this study perceived the literal meaning of the items. This could be due to cultural differences inherent to their generational cohort and the individual experiences that occur over time with age. For example, people tend to lose their sense of invulnerability as hey age (Denscombe & Drucquer, 1999) and generation Y adults grew up in a world where adapting to privacy and cybersecurity threats were first becoming more commonplace. These individuals are now at an age where the realities of (online) risk have become part of their conscious awareness as it relates to their lack of invulnerability."
Like, this formal study is incredibly generous in its discussion of why Gen. Z might be shown to be more statistically likely to fall for online scams than other cohorts. It also goes into great detail to explain its own limitations as a study.
By the source I assume you mean me, and not the article. Because I'm not being sensationalist. I'm being unfair and judgmental. Very different things.
*Person criticizes Zoomers*
Random Zoomer: "Yeah, well, THE BOOMERS ARE WORSE."
Green Day is "mainstream punk." Which is as damning a description of a punk band as you can probably get without calling them cryptofascist.
Fuck desktop OS computers. You can be completely tech illiterate if you use MacOS and Windows only. Hell, even a lot of modern Linux distros are basically "Linux with training wheels." You want to get really tech literate? Do what I did and use nothing but vanilla Arch for around 3 years, constantly installing new things that broke my install and having to fix it or just reinstall at least once every two months. The greatest teacher isn't necessity. It's frustration. The second greatest is the arch linux wiki.
They're more meant to be an allegory for race, with the competing mutant organizations being the competing parts of the Civil Rights movement. Professor Xavier is MLK and Magneto is Malcolm X.