Growing up in an age of technology, I’ve come to realize that what defines my generation is, for better or for worse, our constant access to information.
“Don’t use Wikipedia,” my teachers said, warning that it was an unreliable source of information.
“Politics are for grown ups,” adults told me, believing I was too young to have an opinion on the topic that determined my future.
Yet every time I was told to stay away from information, I only wanted to understand the world more. My generation grew up with answers at our fingertips, but also with constant reminders that we were too young, too uninformed or too naive to participate in conversations that mattered.
Technology has given my generation access to perspectives my parents never had at my age. I’ve been able to watch world events unfold in real time, hear stories directly from people affected and learn about cultures, identities, and struggles beyond my own community. But somewhere between absorbing all of this information and trying to make sense of it, I started to question how I saw the world around me.
When I was younger, I thought growing up meant suddenly having all the answers. I watched my brother speak confidently on subjects I had yet to touch, thinking to myself, “I guess I’ll learn that next year.” Instead, by the time I reached high school, I realized age does not equate to wisdom. Technology exposed me to opinions that challenged my own, ideas I disagreed with, not just coming not just from the mouths of adults, but from people my age as well. In doing so, it revealed to me that wisdom was not determined simply by age, while also forcing me to question my own worldview and why I believed certain things in the first place.
I have always felt that adults often underestimate what young people are capable of understanding. As I grew, they saw teenagers as enamored by frivolous trends, but failed to realize the value of the screens my generation seemed so enthralled by. While we were exposed to political division, social movements, and global crises through our phones in minutes, the idea that children were ignorant and uniformed continued to be perpetuated.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve lived in Arcadia my whole life, effectively disconnecting me from understanding perspectives beyond my own community. But as I sat in my room at 1 a.m. last week, conversing with a friend sitting in her room quite literally across the world in Korea, I found our lives hardly differed in the fundamental ideas we held. Despite oceans, languages, and cultures separating us, we spoke about the same fears, hopes, and uncertainties for the future. In that moment, I realized technology has done something extraordinary that many adults fail to see. It allows us to see people not as distant strangers, but as fellow human beings, struggling to find our places in the world.
At Arcadia High School, I’ve spent my time watching people with differing opinions, political or not, be able to connect over technology. Whether it was through a shared love of video games, instagram posts, or scrolling through the same memes and reels, technology has brought fellow students together despite our differences. During my few years at AHS, I’ve come to appreciate the influence of technology more and more, as I watch students who originally would have never been friends come together to understand each other.
Now, as graduation approaches, I find myself thinking less about the amount of information I’ve been exposed to, and more about what I’ve learned to do with it. Growing up in this generation did not simply mean having answers instantly available, but also learning how to question them, challenge them, and decide which ones I could trust.
