Mediating the Apocalypse: Understanding Zillennial Attitudes Towards Social and Ecological Crises Through Digital Rhetoric

Raymond, Emmett M.

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Mediating the Apocalypse: Understanding Zillennial Attitudes Towards Social and Ecological Crises Through Digital Rhetoric Público Deposited

Analytics

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/3x816p23d

Alternative Title

Mediating the Apocalypse

Abstract

Zillennials (members of Generation Y and Z) today face an unprecedented array of global and domestic crises poised to reach critical junctures within their lifetimes. As “digital natives” who’ve grown up in or after the dawn of digital technology’s ubiquity, social media plays a central role in how Zillennials communicate and form identities. Using an interpretivist, qualitative methodology, interviews from eight Zillennials were analyzed towards understanding how these generations communicate their anxieties, values, and identities via digital rhetoric in relation to the crises these generations will collectively inherit responsibility for solving. This study answered the research question “how does Zillennials’ usage of digital rhetoric function in their relationship with the calamities facing humanity?” Findings indicate that our digital media apparatus, cultural polarization, and Zillennial lack of belief in our capacity to enact social/political/ecological progress have created a “matrix of rhetorical dysfunction” which stifles digital engagement with the crises that matter most to these generations. Zillennials caught between concern for global/domestic “crisis-anxieties” and a perceived lack of agency in contributing to their solutions enact practices of care which help them mitigate the dialectic between conscience and personal wellbeing in relation to these issues. Findings from this research problematize public discourse narratives about Zillennials’ generational roles, societal value, and orientation to “doomerism,” and open avenues to further research into the dysfunctions of digital media hampering Zillennial civic engagement, and the digital rhetoric practices shaping, and shaped by, the ideologies and identities of Zillennials.

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