We polled Gen Z to see if they actually communicate like the kids in Heartstopper
The A.V. Club went straight source to figure out whether Gen Z even has each other's numbers saved in their phone at all
Aux Features Heartstopper
Although the cartoon leaves have settled on Heartstopper’s excellent second season, hardcore comic book fans and casual viewers alike were left with one lingering question. No, it’s not—spoiler alert—whether or not Charlie will hit send on his “i love you” message to Nick, his boyfriend, which will surely be covered in the show’s already-confirmed third season. It’s about the platform that that message may or may not be sent on in the first place.
The Heartstopper kids exclusively communicate through Instagram DMs. It’s confounding—at least to me, a ‘90s kid almost a decade out from my own angsty high school days. Much has been made of this little quirk in this generally thoughtfully-crafted show. Do director Euros Lyn or original comic writer Alice Oseman have some sort of back-door deal with the social media giant? Do these characters even have each other’s numbers saved at all? Is this how real Gen Z friend groups communicate?
We can at least posit an anecdotal answer to that third question. And that is… actually kind of yes.
I polled a small group of self-identified Zoomers (full disclosure: one of them is my little brother) to get to the bottom of things. Of the group that responded, one quarter said they exclusively use Instagram to communicate, so that’s some major points for Lyn and Oseman. Only 63% use iMessage or texting at all—lower than I and any fellow millennials might have expected. One respondee clarified that they use Snapchat and iMessage interchangeably, while another ordered their favorites “1. iMessage 2.insta 3. snap 4. tik tok.” One outlier also responded that they use Discord exclusively, and that “none of my friends use [iMessage].” In fact, the only numbers they have saved in their phone at all are “ones I’d need in a personal emergency.”
But… why? One Instagram user—who also doesn’t have their friends’ numbers saved—cited the facts that “phone numbers change” and they have “friends in different countries,” concluding, “Instagram is easy.” For another, it’s because of the dreaded green text bubble, a theory that’s been posited for Heartstopper’s Instagram habit as well (Elle, a member of the show’s friend group, uses a Samsung phone.) “I have an Android phone, and all my friends (and acquaintances and classmates and co-workers and bosses) complain about looking at green messages, so I just message them on Instagram or through email,” our test subject said.
So, how accurate is Heartstopper really? “On a scale of 1-10, a 6,” said one respondent. “I think it’s very accurate,” said another, but with a catch: “There was at least one scene where it seemed like they hadn’t named their group chat and that was wrong.” For a show that decided to decorate one of its main character’s rooms with a neon sign that just says “music,” this may be a little too much to ask.
47 Comments
hmmm… more proof that I am old and out of touch.
No. It’s the children who are wrong.
Always.#notmyfuture
Why not both?
I used to be with it…
Gen Z is killing the carrier pigeon industry.
On the other hand they are revitalizing the cassette tape industry. That’s not a joke. Cassettes are coming back, not because GenXers and Boomers who actually had them in the 1980s want them, but the kids think they are cool for some reason.
I recently dug up a few old kids books-on-tape from when I was a child and converted them to mp3s for my two year-old niece to listen to / nostalgia value with a cheap cassette-to-mp3 converter I got. There were a couple of long-forgotten mixtapes in the drawer as well and I thought, what the hell, I’ll give ‘em a try, maybe see if this ‘cassettes are coming back!’ train was maybe worth jumping on in any serious way.In this case, it is the children who are wrong. Sound quality was okay, but not nearly good or nostalgically distinctive enough to make up for all the ways in which cassettes were, frankly, a cheap and nasty pain in the ass that we really only put up with because they were inexpensive and good enough for the ‘80s and early ‘90s if you didn’t want to carry around a gramophone everywhere you went. The limit to how many songs you can carry around! The finicky and tediously slow fast-forwarding / rewinding process if you don’t want to listen to a particular song or want to listen to it again! One of the tapes had snapped at some point in the ancient past; good luck ever hearing that one again!I’m too young for vinyl nostalgia but I sort of get why people like it, and I’ve often considered trying it just to see what it’s like. I’m also old and set in my ways and will always enjoy the tangibility of having physical media, but I also get why people like having the convenience of streaming. But audio cassettes, frankly, can sod off forever. They’re the worst of all worlds.
Cassettes are dirt cheap in thrift stores including a lot of weird old mixes with hand-drawn labels, old boom boxes have aesthetic appeal and teens/early 20something hipsters go for style over more mature things like quality or convenience.I wouldn’t read too much into it like “cassettes are back and here to stay.” It’s just a trendy fad that will pass.
How long does something need to be “in” for it to no longer be a fad? Does it need to never wane in popularity again? Cassettes are one of the few ways to create affordable physical media that also takes weeks to turn around instead of 6-8 months like vinyl. Artists have been ultilizing cassettes for at least a decade at this point in place of, or in combination with vinyl. I just came from a record store where I saw most of Taylor Swift’s releases on tape. Maybe they’re hitting the peak now, but dismissing outright as a fad ignores where the market has situated a need for cassettes.This isn’t a defence of this product’s functionality, just some background as to why they are coming back.
Take it easy there, Lord of the Pants!
Nah I’m gonna get more extreme!
Cassettes are coming back is the exact same thing as Vinyl is coming back. No one actually listens to them, they’re just cute little keepsakes that so happen if you have the setup also play music. But much like how most people don’t actually listen to their vinyls most people don’t actually listen to their cassettes.Also cassettes are a LOT cheaper than vinyls.
“ complain about looking at green messages”I have ALWAYS thought that is the stupidest shit ever. Doubly so when you consider Android phones out number iPhones world wide. It’s this stupid classist shit like oh you don’t use an iPhone, you must be a poor, and while yes I get it that iMessage has neat features, if the type of phone someone uses you bothers you that much, you might want to reevaluate your life.
Personally the annoyance is not about classism but functional incompatibility. Mixing platforms makes everything in Messages behave unreliably, especially with a group chat. It’s not just tapback reactions and replies, but sharing media and even just sending links. Both my parents have Samsung phones and I’m constantly getting minuscule postage stamp resolution photos and links that turn into grey mystery boxes. Also the inability to send messages via wifi without cell signal can be an issue.Of course Apple could likely solve most of this if they wanted to, but unfortunately I think the whole us vs. them / blue team green team mentality is fully intentional
It makes perfect sense to me. I was a senior in college when the Iphone first hit, that fall it was the thing for the cool&trendy kids at my private college to have. I still think the 1st gen was overpriced junk that only kinda-sorta worked as promised when (at the time rare) having reliable access to quality wifi.The next year when I came back, the first serious Android was on the market (RIP my slideout keyboard) and second gen iphone was out, the 3G network was finally functioning as promised in some areas (again, colleges were basically a perfect enviroment for these at this stage). Number of smart phones had proliferated fast and already there was condescending classist stupidity about how iphones were for the cool kids.Steve Jobs marketed the iphone and Apple in general as a status symbol. That shit sank into the collective unconcoius.
For sure. Like, the only reason to prioritize iPhone users I can actually see as someone who switched from Android to iPhone is group chats. Most of my extended family has iPhones, but my mom and dad are on Androids. When my aunt sends out birthday notifications to the family, it’s always in the same group thread and keeps everyone together.If my dad tries to send out a group text, it shows on my phone as a group message, but it sends as individual texts, and every time he sends a new group message instead of opening up that specific thread, it creates a new one. Sometimes. Other times it opens up the previous group thread instead. It’s all sorts of a mess, but getting my family to adopt a specific messaging service like WhatsApp or LINE or Kakao would be even more of a headache. But the weird fixation on the fact that a message is green? Yes, iMessage has features that normal text messages don’t, but other than just joking “yay your messages are blue now”… I don’t fuckin’ get it.
I use an android, and in my group chat for work, every single time someone likes a comment or “laughs” at a comment, I get the entire comment again. It’ll say something like “Adam liked ‘Hey guys what time is the meeting today?’
iphones are annoying as hell is what I’m saying.
I feel ya, my mom has me in a family group chat, well kind of family, it’s me her, and her hubby and his kids (they got married when I was in my 40’s so that group will never be “family” to me) and they chat a LOT. I have it muted but yeah stuff like that is annoying.
That’s some weird projection when the issue is clearly with the Android?
I totally agree, I don’t use an iPhone, I used to but they are a nightmare when or if you get locked out of it. I am by no means poor, drive a tip of the range convertible, but use an android that has a cracked screen and types what it wants half the time lol. Does it bother me, not at all, it’s a phone that calls people and sends messages, job done. As for all that social media BS, it’s not for me, I’m a 40 year old chap and reading the drivel people often write on social media, I find boring and really quite nauseating. Kids don’t know they’re born, are way too materialistic, and whilst I said I have a nice car, I worked hard for it, so why not. All those odd filters on social media to alter one’s appearance, or give the impression of looking better than they actually do, it’s odd, causes body image issues, and has young people thinking they have to look and act a particularly way to be socially accepted within their peer groups, it repulses me as an object doesn’t define a person, and these kids today would do well to remember that, get off social media, quit texting when in the same house or room, and use their vocal cords to communicate. I feel sorry for millennials and their false hood ways of life, boomers or whatever they call themselves. I’m glad I was born in the 80s, and lived a happy and normal childhood, when people spoke and hung out, as opposed to confining oneself to a box room and texting or playing video games. It’s sad!
Thank you for at least explaining it.I love how communications technology moves so fast now that us olds aren’t “out of touch,” we’re just more like the weirdos who use Discord exclusively.
Well I think it’s likely that us olds, just don’t give a fuck. I have an android phone it does EVERYTHING I could possibly need, as would an iPhone, but because it’s android I can if Iwant configure it however the hell I want to suit my taste/use case, which is something you can’t do on iPhone.
People who use apple products like getting ripped off.
I think my sociopath sister and her kids all use them. Macbooks too. They’re farm people (well, they don’t actually farm) and they’re obsessed with appearances (and paranoid af).
I don’t like proprietary stuff.
If Apple would quit being little shits and support RCS, that would be nice. But they seem to be quite happy inconveniencing and annoying millions of people, including iOS users, if doing so occasionally drives a switch from Android to iOS. Most iOS users do not seem to understand that iMessage is its own closed-off chat network app between iOS devices, and an SMS/MMS client between iOS and Android. If Apple adopted RCS for cross-mobile-platform communication, that would make things nicer for people on both sides, but particularly on the Apple side.
Hell, I thought they were the same thing. I never look at people’s phones. Or their shoes either.
Do the yoots of today still “a/s/l”?
Meanwhile, I exclusively communicate via semaphores delivered through a magic lantern.
Get off my lawn.
23 here in the US, and I use Whatsapp for 95% of my communiciation. Anyone who doesn’t have Whats, I just use regular text messaging. I have an android phone and no social media. Granted, I’ve never been considered popular, and these choices might reinforce that, but I’m satisfied with that choice.
Oh yeah? Well I strictly use standard text messages and end all my texts with proper punctuation. Suck on that, Zoomers.
Same. I think I’ve included a couple semi-colons in my texts withing the past month.
The only ‘gram I’m on is the telegram. Still the most reliable mode of communication STOP
In the naaame of looooove.
Still waiting for that moment like the end of Independence Day where you have to bust it out to communicate plans to save the world with people far away, huh?
I still don’t think it’s accurate – it’s Snapchat that’s by far the most popular social media amongst the teenagers I teach (albeit the school I work in isn’t much like the Heartstopper ones). Snapchat is gamified with “streaks” for how long you keep conversations going, which incentivises constant messaging and appeals to the teenage dopamine hit. Take a dumb photo with your face blurrily half in it, incoherent short caption, theoretically it’s deleted pretty quickly after sending. That and using Snapmaps to work out where they are.
I feel Snapchat is when ur being a lil naughty or careless, instagram when ur making plans or need to send something a little more serious.
I find that Snapchat is more popular with my sample group… which is exclusively my brother, who is only 5 years younger than me, but it still makes a surprising amount of difference in how we communicate/use social media/etc.My only problem with Snapchat is that it auto deletes, which I guess is great if you’re sexting or something but if you’re just sharing some funny pictures and/or memes, it’s a pain in the ass having to download them or worse yet if you think your conversation is funny and you want to look back on the memory later, you have to screenshot it which also sucks.
Is the “small group” of pollees exactly eight people?
The Heartstopper kids exclusively communicate through Instagram DMs. It’s confounding—at least to me, a ‘90s kid almost a decade out from my own angsty high school days.A “90s kid” is someone who grew up during the 90s (and is thus tediously nostalgic for 90s culture and aesthetics). If you were born in 96/97, as I’m guessing, you spent most of your formative years during the early aughts. Ergo, you’re a 2000s kid.
Thank you, I noticed this too and found it (irrationally of me, tbh) annoying. And wouldn’t this DOB make HER Gen Z, albeit an elder one?
90s nostalgia > 80s nostalgia.
Straight up no sus!
er-eh…what if they all started talking like Kennedy’s?