For the past several years, I’ve been exploring naturalistic everyday conversational data recorded and transcribed by my own university students as part of an assignment in my classes, going back to fall 2016. My focus has been on instances when my students and their friends or family they’ve recorded (with their permission) either mention or directly quote media. This research is following my first book, Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual Identities in Everyday Conversation.

In my first book (skip this paragraph if you’ve read it or know about it), I explored media references in the conversations of groups of millennial friends. I showed how people phonetically or paralinguistically ‘signal’ media references in the speech stream so that they can be heard and recognized as such. I demonstrated the different ways people might respond when they hear a media reference in talk. Finally, I showed when and why people seem to use media references in everyday conversation—sometimes they are just for fun, but often people quote media to smooth over awkward interactional dilemmas. These interactional dilemmas often include a knowledge imbalance among participants, and they are often about unpleasant topics. So media references come in as a way to smooth over awkwardness, by reorienting the group towards shared knowledge in a fun and playful way that everyone can relate to. In turn, this constructs various interactional and group identities.

So with my current research project on Gen Z and media I thought maybe I could build on my first book with a second one on Gen Z and media. What follows essentially describes why I probably won’t be doing that, and what I’ve learned along the way.

First, Gen Z is not that different from millennials. In fact, attempting to do this research has convinced me more than ever that the entire concept of generations is bullshit. It’s a convenient idea that allows us to categorize ourselves, something we love to do. I won’t say that it’s not fun, catchy, and nostalgic, but as a scientific or research concept, it doesn’t really work. You can dive into the variationist sociolinguistic literature on the difference between age-graded change and change in progress when it comes to dialectal changes over time. I think with media references we’re dealing with a little bit of both. On the one hand, certain media references are very fleeting—they are in and out within the speech of young people, just like slang (this is age-graded change). On the other hand, there are changes in progress where gradually, over longer periods of time, certain older (media) references might be forgotten and newer, popular ones take their place.

No matter the generation though, everyone seems to reference media in a similar way and for similar functions, even though the exact kind of media might vary. Much of what I wrote about in my first book is not millennial-specific. My millennial friends might have been quoting some specific kinds of media that previous generations, especially at the same age, were not quoting as much—like video games and internet memes. But the fundamental interactional process of how and why media gets referenced in conversation remains stable across generations.

“What about TikToks? Do Gen Z reference TikToks?” This is a question I’ve gotten a lot, going back to when my first book on millennials and media references was being published in 2021. Yes, Gen Z quotes TikToks. But they actually don’t quote them as much as people seem to think, at least not in the data my students have submitted to me. It’s actually relatively rare. In fact, only 9/230 of the examples I’ve collected of Gen Z media references are to TikToks.

TikTok references are just not particularly interesting from a linguistic point of view. I predicted in Millennials talking media that likely people would continue to expand their reference base to include newer forms of media, and that is exactly what we are seeing. As time goes on, older references are forgotten, and people, maybe especially younger people, reference newer media and newer forms of media. Beyond the fact that the medium changes, again, the fundamental interactional processes do not.

To me, the only thing that might be interesting about TikTok references is that it is possible for Gen Z to quote old commercials, songs, etc. that they think are from “the internet” or “TikTok” when really they are much older. But they don’t know the original source because it has been decontextualized on TikTok. However, from an interactional perspective, this is difficult to know, observe, or ‘prove’, since we can’t get inside people’s heads and really know what they know.

A recent example that illustrates this comes from one of my own undergraduate research assistants. We were talking about an example in the data I’ve collected, where a group of boys start saying things like “would you like some tea?” And “do you want some tea little boy?” in Mock British English accents. A previous RA had coded this as a “meme”. I was conferring with my current RA about this, saying that it was probably not a reference to any specific meme. However, my RA said something like “It’s probably just from the internet”. To which I replied, “well, that stereotype of a British accent and Brits drinking tea has been around much longer than the internet and if it is a meme, it is a much more general one.”

Memes predated the internet, even if what we think of now as “memes” typically conjure ideas of the internet. So this is what I mean—a lot of young people right now seem to assume that a lot of their references are directly from TikTok, or from the internet. They don’t necessarily have a conception of these things pre-dating them or existing before or beyond ‘the internet’. And I don’t judge or blame them for that, just to be clear.

Going back to the Gen Z data I’ve been exploring: the data I have speaks more to these conversationalists being at a certain life stage as university students rather than anything unique about them as a generation. What made me realize this is that the majority of the references I collected among Gen Z are to popular songs. This might seem surprising at first—why would Gen Z be so into music? Why aren’t they quoting more TikToks?! What I figured is that besides being Gen Z, these are college students. And college students listen to a lot of music. I surely remember that from my college days.

I even talked with some of my students about this observation. One of their ideas were that students have a lot of free time, and a way to fill that free time is to listen to music. Another thought was that going to college is all about self-exploration, and music is a great venue for that. They also said school is stressful, and listening to music is a good way to de-stress. They even told me that it’s not so much that they are students per se but just that they are around a lot of young people since they are college students, so they get exposed to all kinds of music.

So, is there anything that unique to say about Gen Z’s media references based on the data I’ve collected? In my opinion, not really. However, in line with these students referencing songs a lot, they sing in this conversational data a lot too. So this is part of the reason I’m now thinking that instead of writing a book on Gen Z and media (references), I might be writing a book on Singing in Conversation. Stay tuned in for updates!