YOUNGISTAN
STARTING YOUNG SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS AND ENTREPRENEURS Children have truly become the digital generation as they navigate the choppy social media waters with ease and take to complex entrepreneurial schemes while still in school. BY SONORITA CHAUHAN MEHTA
Teenagers seem to have bypassed the social media platform’s age restriction and are comfortably using its popularity and reach.
N
inety-five percent of all teenagers ( 13-17) own a smartphone, says Pews Research Centre which largely surveys American teenagers but it is unlikely there is any significant difference with the numbers in Bahrain. The pandemic has forced people to adapt to technology with a rapid pace but setting the standards are the young. While headlines like ‘80 per cent children in Bahrain spent a third of their time during the summer of 2021 on Youtube’ did send shock waves through the community, what children were engrossed in when they were fixated on their smartphones would leave many surprised. A survey by Kaspersky, the cyber security firm and it’s safe child module found that the most visited category was ‘Software, audio, video’, followed by games - a reminder that this is what we were like at their age and that they, in essence, are passionate 40 SALAAM BAHRAIN | JANUARY 2022
about the same things we were, only in a new, digital form. YouTube is the world’s second-most visited website-the world’s second-most used social platform, right behind Facebook. People watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. A billion hours. Every day. That’s an incredible amount of content being consumed, all around the world.
New beginnings And what is it that they are watching? Data shows that view of videos with variations of ‘beginner’ in the title increased more than 50% between March and July 2020 and globally, these videos got more than 9 billion views. A whopping 82% globally used YouTube to learn to do things themselves (that was 94% in India).
