#bookreview: What's the Tea with Gen Z

What's The Tea With Gen Z by G.Z. Manuel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What's the Tea with Gen Z is a guidebook to understanding Gen Z, written by communication students from IACT College, Gen Z-ers themselves. It's a huge effort - the book is filled with lots of information, from research and surveys, as well as personal anecdotes.

Content-wise, I'd give them an A (or 5 stars) for effort. The book covers everything from who the Gen Z are and how they grew up to what they're currently facing in the Covid-19 pandemic. It sometimes feels like the majority of the statistical information quoted has an implicit White USA bias. In a way, this makes sense because of how global the world is and what kind of information is readily available on the Internet (as well as the limits of college students carrying out surveys during MCO - this begs the question, who are they surveying?). At some points, the question "is that really true here?" kept coming up while reading, so I'd have appreciated a little bit of analysis on how this translates to the Gen Z in Malaysia. Is it absolutely the same, or would there be variation due to culture? Is there a difference in the way the same global events are perceived & reacted to by Gen Z in White/Western surveys vs the average Malaysian youth? Or is this generation truly so global that cultural backgrounds don't play as big a role as they used to?

On a more personal interest level, a lot of what was said that defined this generation was technology. Yet everything mentioned seemed very urban English-speaking middle-class - what about B40 without the same level of access to tech & the Internet? What about those whose primary language is Malay or Chinese or Tamil? Do they also fit in the demographic, or are they some sort of subculture within Gen Z? [Other side thought - do these generational analyses only apply to the English-speaking world? How does language change generational experiences?]

On a more or editorial level, the book would have benefited from tighter editorial control. If I understand the format correctly, each chapter is written by a different team of 3 students. This has resulted in varying levels of readability. There are some chapters that are a breeze to read and others that are filled with grammatical mistakes and extremely confusing sentences. Some seem to go a little more in-depth into why things are the way things are, others seem just to summarise and present whatever they found or are just extremely anecdotal.

Overall, What's the Tea With Gen Z is an informative read, though it could have benefited from more thoroughly thought out analysis. It contains a lot of information, but what it lacks is a strong narrative that pulls all this into a cohesive whole. However, as these are communications students and not researchers or analysts, I suppose I'll give them a pass on that.

View all my reviews