Tom Walker's Jonathan Pie character was a social media sensation in 2016Youtube/Jonathan Pie

If 2016 was the year of political upheaval and social unrest, it was also the year of ‘Wise Men On The Internet.’ You’ll have seen at least one. These men love nothing more than to stand in front of a camera, gesturing wildly, and giving their Very Clever hot takes on the world and its various problems. You probably only have to head over to your mum’s Facebook to find primary offender Jonathan Pie, who apparently stopped the UK in its tracks with the big ‘the Tories might actually be bad’ reveal. Pie’s favourite activity involves rebelliously flouting the orders of his imaginary producer, Tim, because fuck your rules, Tim, I’ve got to tell these guys that the news is actually a huge conspiracy of lies. Pie, however, is like an enthusiastic A-level student after his first politics lesson. He is largely benign, if a little irritating. No, the very worst of his type are those that have turned their attention away from political issues to blame the world’s woes on everyone’s favourite punching bag: the millennials. The big kids so addicted to their phones that it is now, apparently, literally impossible for them to make any meaningful connections with other human beings. At least, according to Simon Sinek, whose faux-scientific rant on ‘exactly what is wrong with this generation’ went viral around the end of December. His overarching theory is that millennials are selfish, unfulfilled, and unsociable, and it is technology, that is to blame.

“Pie’s big reveal that the Tories might actually be bad, guys.

What really irritated me about this video going viral was the veracity that viewers and sharers so readily awarded to the claims Sinek was making. Frequently during the video, he makes plain statements about millennials without any substantial evidence to back himself up, and at one point, flippantly states “their words, not mine”. Whose words? The man clearly thinks that one conversation with a 25-year-old he once had can be claimed as the voice of an entire generation.

One of the main hurdles he really stumbles at, however, is one that comes up time and time again in discussions and viral videos such as these, meaning that it becomes impossible to have a reasoned debate about technology’s impact on a generation. It is a fundamental, perhaps even wilful, misunderstanding of the way that social media networks and technology actually function. It seems that he and other grumbling baby-boomers have got the impression that when millennials scroll through their Facebook, Instagram and Twitter feeds, they are engaged in an activity of mindless self-absorption. I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but these networks exist for interacting with other people. Sinek claims that a ‘friend’ on Facebook carries the same semantic meaning as ‘friend’ in the real-world sense. But we millennials have always perceived a very obvious difference. In fact I’ve never met a person my age who would sincerely proclaim that they had ‘500 friends’; this world view has been entirely fabricated by people like Sinek and projected onto our generation. He suggests that millennials can no longer forge meaningful relationships because their friendships exist solely online, without pausing to consider that networks like Facebook are now the main platform for organising events and meet-ups in real life. One form of socialising doesn’t replace another, but augments it. This wincingly patronising man in a hat goes as far to suggest that social media has made all millennials literally want to be their idols, unable to tell the difference between reality and a filtered Instagram post.

“Networks like Facebook are now the main platform for organising events and meet-ups in real life.”  

There is one basic, universal rule of being a human being: everything in moderation. Sinek points out that likes, and attention on social media, release dopamine in the same way that smoking or having an alcoholic drink does. But doing these things infrequently does not make one an addict. Nothing made this clearer to me than a period of having no smartphone for two months last term, as I found neither the total spiritual re-birth nor the total agony of separation that much commentary had told me I would experience. I was more productive, but I missed meetings because of the incapacity to check my email. My anxiety subsided a little, but I missed being able to take photographs with ease. What this period did make me do was evaluate my own personal habits of use, and this was the really important part. I concluded that social media was a distraction, but fun to use sometimes, and that having a smartphone was vital for keeping up with the world, but that I didn’t always want to. It is lazy and hyperbolic to imply that access to the internet has demolished our generation’s capacity to socialise properly, but we can’t suggest it has had no effect.

What is clear is that technology and social media are here to stay, and indeed are often prerequisites of working life for our generation. But instead of making mass, un-nuanced generalisations about technology and its younger users, Facebook’s favourite ‘thinkers’ would do well to encourage users to evaluate their usage for themselves, to open up more productive conversations about the pros and cons of switching on and off. After all, let’s be realistic: I’m sure Sinek definitely checked his own likes at least once.