A Professor Who Taught a Course on 'Adulting' Says Many People Have the Wrong Idea about Millennials and Social Media

Posted January 17, 2019

External Article: Business Insider

Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Brittain Fellow in the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Literature, Media, and Communication, was recently featured in a Business Insider article entitled “A Professor Who Taught a Course on 'Adulting' Says Many People Have the Wrong Idea about Millennials and Social Media.”

Read an excerpt here: 

Young people are the biggest users of social media in the US.

But that doesn't mean they're on the same platforms as the rest of the US population. And in some cases, they don't even know how to use the social media platforms older people might be more familiar with.

Rebekah Fitzsimmons, and English professor at Georgia Tech, learned that the hard way in 2016 when she taught a class called "Adulting: Coming of Age in 21st Century America," which looked at notions of adulthood throughout history.

While her course had students use historical texts and digital media to define what it meant to be an adult, Fitzsimmons hit a road block when she realized some of her students didn't know the first thing about how to use Twitter.

Read the full story here.

Georgia Institute of Technology School of Literature, Media, and Communication is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.