Once upon a time, in a faraway land called “Before the Internet,” children climbed trees instead of TikTok rankings. They played outside, bruised their knees, told lies with their mouths; not on status updates and actually knew the taste of boredom. That was our era. The world before Google. Before Snapchat filters turned humans into rabbits, before emojis replaced emotions, and before WiFi became a basic human right.
In those ancient times, you had to earn attention. You couldn’t just pout in front of a front-facing camera and gain followers by the thousands. No, we read books with pages, not battery percentages. We stored our memories in photo albums, not on The Cloud. Gossip traveled at the speed of mouth, not megabytes. And “likes”? That was something you felt when someone made eye contact, not thumb contact.
Ah, but then came a digital Big Bang and boom! A new species was born: DIGITAL CITIZENS.
Welcome to the Republic of Scroll. Population: Gen Z. Passport: Smartphone. Language: Memes, abbreviations, and hashtags. National anthem: “I just wanna go viral.”
These are not ordinary children. No, sir. These are WiFi warriors, raised by Google, mentored by YouTube, and breastfed by Instagram. Their playground is virtual. Their church is TikTok. Their prophets? Influencers. Their morality? Whatever’s trending. Their sense of self? Filtered through a ring light.
But let’s be fair, this isn’t all doom and digital gloom. The internet has done great things for these pixel-powered pioneers.
They are more informed than any generation before them. They can learn coding at 13, run a business at 16, and cancel a celebrity before breakfast. They are digital entrepreneurs, NFT collectors, AI conversationalists, and brand ambassadors for products they’ve never used.
They’ve blurred borders. Today, a teenager in Lagos is vibing to the same K-pop song as a kid in Seoul, watching the same prank video as someone in Detroit, while commenting “LMAOOO” from Nairobi.
The world has shrunk into a smartphone, and that’s glorious.
But oh, let’s not ignore the fine print of progress.
These digital citizens now measure self-worth in followers. They refresh likes like addicts at a vending machine. Anxiety is now a push notification. Depression comes in comments. Suicide letters are sometimes posted in Stories. Their idols are filtered, their humor is dark, and their fears… oh, their fears are being “unseen” or “left on read.”
They know everything except how to sit in silence.
They are globally connected but emotionally disconnected. They are socially aware yet personally insecure. They speak out on Palestine, LGBTQ+, climate change, and mental health but can’t look you in the eye when you say “Hello.”
They are always performing. Always branding. Always watching and being watched. Even in solitude, the audience is live.
Some of them want to be activists… from their beds. Others want to be millionaires… from their bios. They live fast, scroll faster, and sleep rarely.
Parents are no longer role models. YouTubers are. Books are now optional. Tweets are gospel. Attention spans? Somewhere between a goldfish and an Instagram reel.
And what of relationships? Love now has a swipe-right option. Breakups happen via ghosting. Emotions are outsourced to GIFs. Sex is hyper-visible, yet intimacy is extinct.
But wait, don’t judge them too harshly. They didn’t build the digital world. We did. They were born into it. They are navigating a hyper-connected jungle we barely understand. So maybe, just maybe, instead of mocking their addiction to screens, we should reflect on our own addiction to control.
Because in truth, these digital citizens are us, just faster, louder, and way more sarcastic.
They are the mirror we uploaded… and forgot to clean.
So here’s to them; the meme-makers, the TikTok dancers, the Zoom students, the crypto bros, the online therapists, the OnlyFans content creators, the keyboard philosophers, the emotional emojis, the cancel culture warriors, and the dopamine-starved dreamers of this digital age.
They might be confused.
But they’re also creating.
They might be distracted.
But they’re also daring.
They might be digital…
But they are very much human.
And perhaps, just perhaps, they are the citizens who will reboot this broken world if we don’t crash their system first.
Welcome to the age of Digital Citizens. Please leave your passwords at the door.
THE DILEMMA OF THE DIGITAL CITIZENS .By Adebayo Faleke.
