Microblog Memes

I think it's Gen Alpha, not Gen Z.

A friend of mine teaches middle school maths, and every kid in the class is striving to be an influencer or twitch streamer, no other aspirations in life.

"chat" is this Lemmy thread, in this example. it addresses the audience. it's the streamer equivalent of breaking the fourth wall.

Your second paragraph should've been your clue. The "chat" they're talking about is the chat attached to a YouTube or Twitch stream. It's influencer brainrot slang.

This is a gen Alpha thing, please do not associate us with those creatures.

lmao I'm gonna start to say goodbye like that XD

... If you do it occasionally, when contextually appropriate... it is funny, a self aware reference to how they spend a lot of time on twitch streams, and are expressing disbelief.

When you do it all the time, reflexively, regardless of context... yeah, that may indicate that that just is your baseline norm for social interaction and you fundamentally cannot or do not distinguish between the contexts of online interaction and irl interaction.

There a whole lot of kids now who are just basically raises from near birth by screens. Parents with no free time or parents who don't give a shit just give the kid a distraction rectangle so they don't have to ... raise them.

Chat just became synonymous with readers/listeners in modern slang. I also went through my "old man yells at cloud" phase about it, but it's fine, I guess. I still get annoyed when people say the name of twitch emotes, though.

Lol bro younger generations just say random shit to sound cool.

I'm remembering how many times I said "epic" or phonetically pronounced "lulz" in every day speech when I was younger. It's just something kids do.

Munky see munky doo

Life in the social media age is one in which identity is developed performatively through profilicity. People from the earlier eras created themselves in the face of the Big Other, often as God, or as the crowd of society at large, their families, etc. Younglings of the new age have personified the Big Other as the digital crowd, imagined viewers of their life-as-livestream.

I used to be with it. Then they changed what "it" was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DlTexEXxLQ

My real name starts with Chat and since it's a little difficult to pronounce if you don't know French I use it as a nickname.people always asking me weird questions on the Internet.

hope the cloud heard you

Funny moments get shared between friends and spreads its reach -> Long form reaction content creates sharable moments -> Livestreams generate long form reaction content -> Livestreams have a chat that accompanies the streamer -> Streamer refers to chat during funny moments -> This is referenced as a meme -> Talking to chat spreads beyond the original context

Well, yes, very clearly it's a "man on screen said it" situation, but it's not like that's new.

People who repeated "ground control to {insert name}" to get the attention of someone whose mind was elsewhere didn't believe they were actually addressing an astronaut. It's an idiom born of the current cultural zeitgeist.