Millennial Pause

Taylor Swift is on the screen, about to speak. A split-second later, she flows right into her script, a consummate professional.

There it was, though: that momentary pause.

Millennials (those born in the 80s or early- to mid-90s) have made an awful lot of social media content in recent years, but Generation Z (late 90s and beyond) have almost put them to shame.

This brief but telling pause from Taylor Swift captures the essence of what has been termed the "Millennial Pause." There’s usually a moment—maybe it’s a tenth of a second, maybe half a second—where there’s no sound at the start of a short-form video.

Contrast this with how Generation Z handles things. Born into a world where digital technology is not just prevalent but the norm, this momentary pause has been deemed unnecessary. Appropriately dubbed the "Gen Z Shake," this approach involves a “startled” beginning to the video, where the camera is just being set down to record.

What’s going on here?

Eva Rinaldi, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The "Millennial Pause" is a perfect reflection of a generation with one foot in the analog past, and one in the digital present. Taking a moment to think, even for a split-second, is admirable in today’s Candyland world, where instant gratification is just a click or swipe away.

There’s a technical reason for this, too. If you hit “record” on a device during the 2010s, there was generally a little pause before your phone (or camera, if you had a dedicated device) started recording. This meant it was simply prudent to allow a little time that would be cut out, and the perception evolved that it was better to have a quiet pause than to miss some of the content.

In contrast, the "Gen Z Shake" represents immediacy and authenticity. For Gen Z, the digital world is a stage they've been born onto, and they are natural actors. Their approach to content creation—instant, unfiltered, and raw—mirrors their broader attitudes towards life: a burning desire for immediate gratification, and a demand for authenticity.

The technical problems Millennials faced when creating a roadmap on new social media sites like TikTok had been solved. There was no technical need for a pause, but now it started to seem weird not to include it, so Millennials continued the proud tradition, and a new cultural marker was created by accident.

I made a short-form video of Dink-Dink doing math in her head before executing a complex jumping maneuver, and I shot and edited the video like a Gen Xer. Notice that way too much time goes by before you see the payoff: utterly unacceptable for Gen Z, and probably eyeroll-inducing for most Millennials:

Now, here’s a Millennial-friendly version, where I give a little pause at the start, allowing the viewer to become acclimated with the scene, then diving right into the action:

I can almost hear the snoring of Gen Z. That interminable pause before the action is unacceptable! Here’s a more Gen Z-friendly video:

For my Millennial and Gen Z readers: let me know how accurate this editing was. Remember, I’m just a Gen Xer trying to study today’s culture, driven forward by people who could be my children (and maybe even grandchildren).

I know that the trends of shorter and shorter content are nothing new, and if you want to explore these trends through the lends of social media history, here’s something I wrote not terribly long ago on this:

I also recognize that this is a much broader historical trend. Generations ago, folks could sit around for hours at a time listening to stories being told and poems being recited. Printing demanded a limited number of characters, and so folks like Ben Franklin drove forward the concept of concise headlines. Over time, these headlines began to influence opinions all by themselves.

When radio was introduced to the masses, time was money, and announcers and advertisers began to speak faster. This trend only continued with television, as 30-second sound bites grew to prominence during my lifetime.

I watched as the internet experienced a similar phenomenon. During the days of dial-up, patience was a virtue. The web was barely even fast enough for Generation X at first! In fact, it was the domain of (mostly) nerds like me until cable internet became more common.

Early social media wasn’t conductive to video, but as internet speeds continued to increase and gargantuan amounts of data were now able to be downloaded and uploaded, shorter and shorter videos became the norm. After all, you could now load and watch the next video immediately.

Think of the speed of your smartphone compared to five or ten years ago. The processing speed is mind-blowing for folks who grew up without it, but fully expected for those growing up today.

And, here we are!

What do you think we can conclude from these observations? What are the long-term implications? Did I do all right with editing those videos?
Let me know in the comments.