To many adults, it may only feel like yesterday when kids would go outside to enjoy the fresh air as they played football with their friends or messing around with their siblings. Nowadays though, the only thing that runs through their mind is confusion as they watch their 7-year-old yell out the phrase “6-7” as they play on their iPad. The internet has had a profound impact on our society with how fast information is able to spread, which also applies to modern day trends such as the six seven fad. But how can these trends appear to begin with, and how do they have an effect on the newest generation?
For many kids who have been born since 1997, technology was a close companion they’ve grown up with that allowed them to have access to information that their parents or older siblings never had when they were young. John Kabel, a senior at Horizon explains, “When my mom let me on her phone as a kid, it let me see a lot of stuff that I wasn’t able to before, and that kinda let me experience internet humor.” It’s from this gateway that kids find videos online they find as entertainment, which exposes them to modern trends about what people find funny. Some adults may be concerned about how the content may affect the younger generation, but as Davian Bedford, a sophomore at Horizon put it, “The amount it affects them depends on the household, since most of the jokes won’t affect them at all, but if you’re raised in a place where you won’t be able to tell the difference, it’s gonna affect you.”
A different phenomenon which has its roots driven from the internet is slang which originally started out as jokes eventually transformed into people’s everyday vocabulary. Words such as “GOAT”, “rizz”, “aura”, “cap”, and “skibidi” are terms that didn’t have any sort of meaning before the internet began, but now hold special meanings that could become more relevant in the future. Ashlyn Idol, a freshman at Horizon said, “It’s probably just gonna become a part of our everyday vocabulary and they’re gonna come up with different ones to make things easier to understand.” While at first the humor may be funny to some though, like every other joke, they can start to lose their impact pretty quickly, causing many individuals to find them annoying after hearing them repeatedly. Lisa Saunar, an Assistant Principal at Horizon said, “It’s annoying because I don’t understand the context behind it and I’m sure I’m in that space with many adults who don’t have a super deep connection to kids to understand it like they do.”
The modern evolution of humor has evolved to a degree where it’s almost entirely unrecognizable to how millennials remember their own past. It is important to recognize however that at the end of the day, the jokes aren’t meant to be taken seriously, even if it may seem at first glance that it’s deteriorating the minds of the younger generation. Eventually there will come a time when all the current trends will eventually die out and be replaced with new ones as time progresses, but at least then many individuals will be prepared for the newest run of jokes.
