At a recent interest meeting for a photography club on campus, we were given an interesting icebreaker: “Two Things You’d Bring with You to a Deserted Island."

Naturally, almost everyone answered with laptop, phone charger, wifi hotspot, and a potato to charge the latter with; let it be noted that I answered: 1. Chef Gordon Ramsay and 2. An umbrella, assuming a tropical climate. Although there was another woman who chose to bring two very fertile cats so that she could develop a for-profit knock-off of Tashirojima, an island where feral cats outnumber the human population six to one, the icebreaker unintentionally served as a snapshot of our generation’s priorities: the media, as well as the mediums through which we experience them.

As someone currently entrenched in cinema and media studies, I became increasingly aware of the fodder we were giving those political cartoonists.

While relatively recent Netflix series such as Black Mirror like to put a Twilight-Zone-esque spin on our relationship with technology, there is a plethora of academic essays that are taking this quite seriously. One major proponent of this view is Sherry Turkle, PhD, an MIT professor who is known for her studies on “the tethered self”, characterizing the millennial and Z generations’ relationship to the media we consume daily as overreliant, dependent, unhealthy. She reflects on how:

“A train station is no longer a communal space, but a space of social collection: tethered selves come together, but do not speak to each other. Each person at the station is more likely to be having an encounter with someone miles away than with the person in the next chair. Each inhabits a private media bubble. Our media signal that we do not want to be disturbed by conventional sociality with physically proximate individuals.”

Even back before phones existed, would anyone have talked to a stranger at a train station?

To be fair, her commentary about video games hits pretty close to home:

“Although the games often took the forms of medieval quests, the virtual environments owed their ‘holding power’ to the opportunities that they offered for identity work. People used their lives on the screen to replay unresolved or partly resolved issues, often related to sexuality or intimacy.”

Not her entire generation is bent on making overblown caricatures of our reliance on technology, mind you; there are many open-minded people I look up to, including my professors, who have built their careers on being able to contemplate the views of the younger generations they teach.

But, honestly, I’m tired. I’m tired of having to defend this “way of life” to the older generation. It’s boring and tedious and counterproductive. I grew up relying on technology and social networks the way you relied on indoor plumbing and electricity. I can’t help it.

No, we don’t experience identity crises. Some of us can become addicted to our online personas because of the social gratification we receive that we otherwise wouldn’t in real life – which begs the annoying existential question, what currently qualifies as “real life”?

Many people today, I find – largely the baby boomer generation – are concerned that our humanity is stranded on an ever-shrinking island among this sea of information, and the tide’s coming in. On the contrary, I believe these technological advances have tightened the bonds between us. I haven’t experienced the cliché college homesickness because I can text my parents or facetime with my dog whenever I need to. I can google how-to’s and directions so I can navigate Wellesley and Boston on my own, or figure out what the funky symbols on clothing tags mean while I'm doing laundry. I can read the Skimm over breakfast and tune my violin with an app after dinner. I can convert meters to feet because there’s no way I’ll ever actually memorize the conversion my damn self. I can watch my favorite YouTube comedians and listen to the My Favorite Murder podcast while I exercise at the gym. But I also know when to put it down and either read a book (andyes, we know how to turn it on).

Those who didn’t grow up with this connectivity look down on us with a lot of condescension, as if older generations haven’t been bitching about progress since Aristotle and Plato, who argued over whether or not the alphabet would destroy those (originally oral) Homeric epics we love to analyze so much.

In short: Please leave us alone. Trust our judgement. If there’s one thing kids of from all ages hate, it’s being expected to act like an adult without being treated like one.