Teens and Pop Culture

A significant platform for interaction with popular culture among teenagers today is YouTube.  Young people are constantly viewing videos on YouTube - crowded around phones or other devices at school lunchtimes, at home, or even when they are out with friends.  According to recent studies, what is trending on YouTube accurately represents current popular culture trends in everything from popstars to politics (Robinson, Cotton & Shultz, 2015).  With over a billion users worldwide, YouTube influencers have been found to have a greater impact on teenagers than mainstream celebrities (Xiao, Wang & Chang-Olmsted, 2018), and in fact, 85% of US teens engage with YouTube regularly, making it today's preferred platform for teenagers (Pew Research Center, 2018).  Seeing such high levels of engagement leads quickly to the question of what  exactly is on YouTube that all of our teenagers are so interested in following! From a young age, children are introduced ...

Gone are the days of cultivating epic CD and video collections, and staying home so you don't miss your favourite TV show.  Generation Z may never know the thrill of diving over the couch to grab a snack before the ad break is over, the annoyance of someone speaking so you miss half a scene that you'll never get back, or the boredom of  watching something you're not interested in for hours because it's the only thing on. (Image from  Giphy ) (Image from Giphy ) Especially among young people today, media engagement today is all about on demand, online streaming (Xiao, Wang & Chang-Olmsted, 2018).  In fact, most teenagers are viewing and watching using methods that didn't exist when they were born (Resnikoff, 2017)!   One librarian using music as a method of bringing students into the library noted the change from CDs to downloading to streaming, as the sheer range of music on streaming services, as well as the ability to make and share playli...