Trends in youth behaviour change in the face of the media: Millennials vs Generation Z

Abstract

The media consumption of those who are between 18 and 25 years old in 2020 marks the frontier between the old and the new in content production and access, but also points towards new patterns in future social and media behaviour. Through face to face open-question surveys, 1908 young people from two different generations, millennials and generation Z, have shown how this change of communication paradigm is taking place. Susceptible, intelligent, precocious, individualistic and pragmatic, generation Z is a reflection of the globalization that the internet has supposed and the end of a media era where different media and languages coexisted dominated by the millennials. The analysis of their responses reveals that the turning point is in the new generation –under 21 years–that is consuming information and entertainment by Internet-connected devices at the same time, abandoning conventional media.