The oldest members of Gen Z began puberty around 2009, when several tech trends converged: the rapid spread of high-speed broadband in the 2000s, the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, and the new age of hyper-viralized social media. The last of these was kicked off in 2009 by the arrival of the “like” and “retweet” (or “share”) buttons, which transformed the social dynamics of the online world. Before 2009, social media was most useful as a way to keep up with your friends, and with fewer instant and reverberating feedback functions it generated much less of the toxicity we see today.[12]
