Grandmother and Grandson Share a Screen, but Not the Same Serbia
In a living room in Mirijevo, a grandmother of seventy-nine and a grandson of thirteen sit on the same sofa, looking into their phones at almost the same hour, with a gap in content greater than the gap between two centuries.
A few weeks ago, visiting the family of an older friend in Mirijevo, I noticed a scene that did not leave my mind after that weekend. Friday evening, around quarter past nine. A grandmother of seventy-nine sits on the sofa with her thirteen-year-old grandson. They sit so close their shoulders touch.
Both look into their phones. The grandmother has a Samsung from 2019 with large icons. The grandson has an iPhone 14 mini, a birthday present from his aunt in Germany. The difference between the devices is minimal. The difference in content goes beyond every difference we used to attribute to generations without screens three decades ago.
Two feeds in the same room
The grandmother scrolls Facebook. Three kinds of content dominate her feed:
- photographs of relatives and godparents from family celebrations, posted mostly by the older generation
- sponsored posts from the Serbian government and local political parties, especially clips from Pink and Happy TV
- articles from Kurir about celebrity scandals, diet tips, news of chronic illnesses among pensioners
The grandson watches TikTok. His feed is dominated by clips of Serbian sports commentators on the NBA finals, video essays cut from Joe Rogan clips with Serbian subtitles, edits with Travis Scott tracks, all of it mixed with a few streamers who speak mockingly about Croatia in a way that is only entertaining to him, presupposing no historical frame.
Grandmother and grandson, in the same hour, in the same room, a shoulder’s distance apart, live in two completely disconnected media worlds.
Margaret Mead is no longer enough
I pivot to the sociology of media and the algorithm. This is not a generational gap in the traditional sense. The generational gap as American anthropologist Margaret Mead described it in 1970 (“Culture and Commitment,” Doubleday) referred to differences in values and norms between older and younger.
Mead argued that the 20th century brought a historic shift in which the young no longer learn from the old, but the old learn from the young (hence the popular phrase “prefigurative culture”).
The Mirijevo grandmother and grandson are not in a prefigurative culture. The grandmother does not learn from the grandson. The grandson does not learn from the grandmother. They simply live in two parallel worlds that meet at moments like dinner and Sunday laundry, but sociologically do not overlap.
4 percent and 6 percent
The figures matter here. According to research by IPSOS Adria in April 2026, the average Serbian teenager (age 12-17) spends 4 hours and 22 minutes a day on social networks, with TikTok and Instagram as primary platforms. The average pensioner (age 65+) spends 2 hours and 41 minutes a day, with Facebook as almost the only platform.
This is sociologically significant, but less so than what follows. The same studies show that only 4 percent of teenagers and 6 percent of pensioners share at least one social network. In other words, they do not meet in digital space even by accident. The algorithms that serve them content work by completely different criteria, optimised for completely different affective profiles.
What Serbian society loses when generations do not share the news
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in a 1996 interview published in “Sur la télévision” (Liber-Raisons d’agir), warned of a phenomenon he called “what television creates between two members of the same family.”
Bourdieu argued:
Television has a specific capacity, even when watched in the same room, to divide a family into different emotional clusters.
Exactly thirty years later, applied to algorithmic media, Bourdieu’s insight grows stronger. What television did in part, algorithms do more strictly. The Mirijevo grandmother does not merely watch Facebook instead of watching RTS with her grandson. She watches a completely individualised Facebook, shaped by her clicks, her attention spans, her dietary profile in the algorithmic medium.
The grandson watches a completely individualised TikTok, shaped the same way. They are statistically near-parallel absentee viewers, in the same room, with the same DNA, but with different symbolic universes.
Fisher and the slow cancellation of the future
Sociologist Mark Fisher, in “Capitalist Realism” (Zero Books, 2009), describes a phenomenon he calls “the slow cancellation of the future.”
Fisher argued that 21st-century capitalism cancels the shared imagination of the future by turning every cultural product into a niche of individual taste. Fisher’s analysis was written for the Western cultural setting, but in Serbia 2026 it gains a new layer.
The Mirijevo grandmother and grandson do not share a future, because they do not share the present. The grandmother thinks the present is what she sees on Facebook, which is not far from the present of Pink TV. The grandson thinks the present is what he sees on TikTok, which is something else entirely. When at dinner one evening someone asks what happened “today,” they differ even on the data, not only on the interpretation.
The technocratic counter-argument does not hold
A counter-argument should be entered. There is a reading, common in technocratic circles, that the media generational gap is a problem solved by digital literacy. By that logic, if grandsons and grandmothers were trained to understand algorithmic filtering, they could live with their screens more consciously and bridge the differences in content themselves.
The argument has weight, especially for Western democracies with developed media literacy in primary school curricula. In Serbia, however, the counter-argument is hard to sustain.
Media literacy in Serbian primary and secondary schools amounts to one or two lessons across a five-year homeroom programme. Pensioners, of whom Serbia has around 1,700,000 (Statistical Office, 2026), have almost no structured access to education about algorithms. Without parallel structured education, the gap between grandmother and grandson will not be bridged technocratically. It will continue, until grandmother and grandson find themselves in a space that is not a screen.
A piece of pastry, two different ways of looking
I return to Mirijevo. Around 22:00, the grandmother got up, went to the kitchen and made tea. On her way back she offered her grandson a piece of pastry, which he accepted and went on scrolling.
She sat down again and, after a few minutes of silence, said to him a sentence I copied into my notebook: “If all that is so much better than what you watch with me, fine, I am old, I have watched enough.”
He raised his head, smiled kindly, and replied: “Granny, you did not watch less than me, you just watched differently.”
Both are right. In seventy-nine years the grandmother has seen more than the grandson sees in thirteen. But what the grandmother watches on her screen is not the same screen as her grandson’s, even though the devices are similar.
The question that remains belongs to all of us who can still see both grandmother and grandson. Is a family that shares a sofa but not the content still a family in the sense we knew thirty years ago. And what do we do with the family, if its shared room is no longer a shared world.
