Listen to Australian and world news and follow trending topics with SBS News Podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Ashjayeen Sharif is 24 and treats his phone like a landline.
He does not access social media and uses an iPod with 16 gigabytes of storage to listen to music.
Mr Sharif has been keeping up this lifestyle for the past year and a half.
“At first making significant changes to my relationships to different technologies is something I did out of curiousity. Of wanting to know, how different things could be. Then after a month it was like wait.. it's serious, like, wait this is kind of so good, and I want to keep this up indefinitely. After about 6 months it just became how I lived, I didn't even have to think about it at all."
He's noticed a boost in cognition as well as social life, despite many members of his generation depending on socialisation online.
Generation Z has the highest social media usage, but is also the generation that is the most likely to purchase a dumb phone.
“The grass is so much greener on the side with real grass.”
Generation Z is the first of the digital native generations, with most not knowing what a world with no smartphones looks like.
21 year old Albert Malloy is diagnosed with ADHD, however he believes that his symptoms have been exacerbated by a crippling life long phone addiction.
“I see people like my room mate, her phone died the other day and she still went out the house, just without her phone, and i was like 'how the fuck do you do that' it's such a foreign concept, like not having your phone with you, at all times.”
“If I wasn't on social media during high school, and I wasn't trying to shape how people see me online as in comparison to real life. If it wasn't such a prominent part of my youth, I'd be much better off and I wouldn't be as dependent on my phone.”
A 2022 McKinsey report said that Gen Z doesn't distinguish between online and offline life.
For many digital natives, social media becomes their reality, even if it isn't.
21 year old Julian Khachan went down the 'alt right' pipeline when he was 10.
“It's very easy to listen to engaging online personalities and join groups that agree with you, because you feel like you're apart of a community, which is a nice feeling, especially when you're younger, and you're feeling a bit ostracised maybe in your real life. So online you join this group , where they agree with you, or there's this community, even when they start talking about these toxic concepts, you start beginning to rationalise it in your head.”
Dr Brittany Ferdinands is a Digital Media lecturer at the University of Sydney. She believes that algorithmic cultures have trapped people online.
“So echo chambers, are one thing that are a byproduct of algorithmic cultures. It gives us a real filtered idea of the world. Particularly for young people who get the majority of their news and their current affairs through social media, you can train your algorithm, but at the end of the day the algorithm acts as a cultural intermediary.”
In the past year, trends have emerged that subvert the functions of the algorithm.
Trends such as "newtro", digital minimalism, and the concept of the "chronic offline"
According to a 2025-26 tourism survey, over 76 per cent of Australians aged from 18-25 considered a digital detox over the summer.
24 year old Ben Smith works at an analog media store in Sydney.
He listens to music on CDs.
“Personally I like to use CD's in the car, Vinyl, I kind of don't use as much because I'd spend my whole paycheck here if I did.”
He's noticed a change in customer demographic in recent years.
“There's a lot of young people buying CDs I've noticed, sort of like high school age and like early uni. That's probably our main audience really and it's really nice to see, especially in this day and age.”
Dr Ferdinands has noticed that her students are beginning to adopt a more analogue lifestyle.
“Gen Z are so smart. They're so aware of world issues. They're so in tune to things that are well beyond their age, in my opinion. So, I think that they've noticed the negative side effects of being online all the time and they're taking matters into their own hand.”
“You're so used to instant gratification and instant exposure, and now you're trying to go towards the other end. You want to wait and you want patience and you want to develop your photos and you want to laugh if a photo has a photo of your friend blinking or you're blinking in it. It's quite sweet, it's actually really, really wholesome.”
Desire for face to face interactions have also led to a growth in social clubs.
Dr Ferdinands herself runs a book club.
“I don't think that the reason these social clubs are becoming so big in sydney is because we have digital fatigue, we are yearning to meet people and connect with people offline, and that's the whole thing right? People aren't just looking for community, they're looking for connection that feels intentional and embodied.”
But digital fatigue doesn't necesarily mean that young people would want to go offline altogether.
Mr Sharif believes that spending time offline has helped his relationship with the online world.
“The internet is so much more than social media and streaming websites. I feel like over the past few years I've come to find niches in the world wide web that I really like, and websites that remind you of when we were kids, and say you have to learn html coding in year 7 or year 8 and you were kind of okay but kind of really bad at it and you make this ugly looking website. People still make those websites and they are making the coolest things ever. I found this website where someone will teach you to code a java script where you code anything that you hover over into hearts on any website.”
“It's less about the rejection of technology, but more of a recalibration of how we live with it. We don't want to live in media anymore, I think we want to live alongside it.”
