Raised by the Internet: Coming of Age as a Chronically Online Generation

There have been few narrative films to take social media as a premise and capture its engrossing presence within the 21st century without feeling tired or overdone. Most of us, in and beyond the film industry, know the feeling when an image of a phone screen flashes across a movie or show, attempting to mimic the online vernacular of our generation while almost invariably butchering the cadence. It seems almost impossible to feature social media screens (and their accompanying current of online discourse) in film without “turning off” the audience in some capacity. The same logic applies to many contemporary realities in film—COVID-19, influencer culture, buzzwords dropped unironically like “rizz,” or anything, for that matter, that feels just a little too close to home.

Why are we so resistant to these (literal) storytelling devices? An exhausting number of hours are spent online anyway, monitoring a digital persona or funneling through an endless feed. Yet when this online labor breaches the cinema screen, the escapist fantasy collapses, draining its cinematic appeal.

As consumers, we passively absorb information through our devices on a daily basis. In the digital age, much of the younger generation would rather live vicariously through a five-inch screen than presently, in the real world. Think of tweens absorbing streamer content: live commentary of an internet personality playing a video game—the viewer is doubly removed from the game itself. 

The mechanical remote, a practical extension of our hand mediating both our online and offline lives, exists as an uneasy enigma in film. Whether it’s text bubbles that emanate from an iPhone insert or Instagram feeds rendered on a computer screen, these reminders of our devices often produce an unintended, discomforting effect for the viewer. By capturing the very screens through which we obligingly experience life, films force our attention onto the device, one of the rare times we interact with them against our will, thereby revealing our attachment. 

Because the digitization of our entertainment, through TikTok and Instagram, has created an overreliance on technology as leisure, we are a generation whose total sensorial experience is dictated by the ever-impeding presence of digital media. So when films attempt to contain these realities by capturing then reflecting our online dependence back at us, it risks feeling hackneyed: not because of clichéd representation, but because of its sheer proximity to our daily lives. When we witness text threads or social media clips play out, the reproduced screen is repetitive in nature. It tugs us out of the immersive spectatorial world and back into our position as consumers, the schema now exposed. There is no escape, and maybe that’s the problem. 

Of course, filmmakers have long found their own ways into the digital world of adolescence: Jane Schoenbrun’s eerie, isolating horror spaces; Bo Burnham’s tender, observational lens in Eighth Grade; and Halina Reijn’s unserious portrait of her chronically online ensemble in Bodies Bodies Bodies. Jia Zhangke’s The World actually features animated sequences amidst its live-action narrative in which characters read text messages from their flip-phones. The contrast between the characters’ drab reality of emotional estrangement and the animated messages reveals a failed promise of connection within a hyperconnected world.

Sean Wang’s Dìdi (2024) takes a more sentimental approach to the social workings of the early internet. Set in San Francisco during the summer of 2008, the film follows 13-year-old Chris as he navigates the shifting terrain of friendship, crushes, and his dynamic with his mother. However, much of the film’s tenderness stems from Chris’s evolving relationship with himself: his Taiwanese-American identity, his hobbies, and his quiet steps toward adulthood. Wang crafts a vulnerable portrait of adolescence with a naturalistic, nostalgic feel—despite capturing a decade many viewers have never actually lived through.

Chris’s outlook on internet culture is rather upbeat, a mix of nostalgia and anxiety surrounding social media in its infancy. As he toggles between the software on his pixelated Windows screen, his use of technology feels more practical than leisurely, a means to connect with his friends over the summer or summon the courage to speak to his crush Madi without actually having to face her. Throughout the summer, while trying to reconcile his drifting relationship with his middle school best friend Fahad, Chris experiments in different social circles, mingling with an older skater gang or chatting with Madi and her friends. When these phases prove to be short-lived, he finds closure by removing these characters from his Facebook friends list. As Chris departs from one stage of his adolescence to another, the film explores the swift nature of temporary relationships in his search for a genuine connection. 

For Chris, social media literalizes the very real difficulty of connecting with people in his community. His interactions with these platforms are not cynical or begrudging. Rather, as Chris customizes his Myspace profile, clicking through nicknames and icons, there’s a sense of genuine possibility in this new digital frontier, the social world reproduced onto yet another interface.

The early 2000s marked an era of digital discovery: the emergence of social media, the rise of smartphones, early YouTube, Myspace, and AIM. These nascent years of the internet were charged with excitement and intrigue because of its sheer novelty. 

Enter 2025: Overgrown and overpopulated, its exciting appeal long exhausted, users scatter to the far corners of the web in search of fleeting entertainment—platforms that can hold their attention for no more than three minutes at a time. 

Dìdi’s nostalgia for the early internet marks a key generational divide. While Millennials like Wang experienced life both before and during social media’s rise, kids born in the early 2000s came of age within it. For Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha, both childhood and adolescence are transcribed online. Born into this digital hellscape, there is no discovery phase marked by intrigue or optimism—only a slow integration into the rules of this bleak terrain. There is a footprint of your entire recorded life: trailers made on iMovie, grainy home-video footage of a four-year-old playing the piano for the first time, the over-saturated portrait of a smiling thirteen-year-old with rainbow braces suspended in an Instagram archive. It’s a timeless memory box, preserved in a digital frame, of a time we can never distinctly remember, instantly accessible at our disposal. Maybe there is something off-putting about the sheer quantity of these memories we are afforded at our convenience (though inauthentic and digitally reproduced). Sometimes I wonder: do I actually recall that moment, or was I merely shown a picture of it—not a memory but a third-person capture.

In this sense, social media and the digital landscape can never hold the same sentimentality for Gen-Z as they do for Wang and his peers. Having been raised by the internet, our coming-of-age story charts the co-dependent relationship we’ve formed with our online persona. 

Our resistance to seeing screens in film, then, may reveal less about films themselves and more about our own gaze. We recognize social media as an ingrained condition of modern life, so why is it so hard to accept as part of cinema? Perhaps the uncanniness we feel when confronted with filmic renderings of phone screens or social icons is a subconscious reaction to the reality of our dependence. As passive consumers absorbing endless streams of stimulation, maybe we resist these images because they force us into the position of active viewers, confronting the uncomfortable truth of our own digital captivity. 

Either way, phone screens and social media will only continue to gain an intrusive presence in cinema as they have in every other capacity elsewhere. If the digital world operates in pursuit of a seamless transition between reality and the online world, then perhaps these self-reflections in film are a step in the right direction, producing a momentary (though perceptible) lapse in the matrix.

Asha Ahn is a junior at Barnard College studying Film and English. She loves bakery crawls, going for runs, cooking, taking photos, and listening to the same song ad nauseam.

@ahn.asha