Teens, the Internet, and Videos Gone Viral
What Do Teens Learn Online Today? That Identity Is a Work in Progress
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/13/magazine/internet-teens.html
This article follows a girl named Antonio. She would record and post YouTube videos of her talking about her day. Essentially, it was an online journal. And in one of her videos she just comments on random things. Says “I’m dying” and she asks sincerely for the viewers to not write in the comments that she is ugly. This video resulted in Antonio going from 30 subscribers to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. People started texting her and congratulating her new popularity. They would come up and talk to her and take photos with her. So, Antonio kept on making videos and eventually enrolled in school online.
YouTube is where teenagers make videos for other teenagers talking about everything. YouTube is an entirely public journal where you share everything private. You can watch videos of people just talking and you can watch all their personas.
How did Antonio’s popularity soar like this and why? The how did the video become popular is fairly simple to explain. Videos gain popularity by the idea of diffusion. One person found the video worthy to share maybe because a topic is one that a friend would like. And sharing the video to match your friends’ likes creates a network diffusion. People keep sharing a video to others thinking they will like it, and sharing videos typically is a low threshold (as long as you know a friend likes the topics, you will send it). Before you know it, a video goes viral and that person will get followers. And then the “rich-get-richer” idea comes into play. Looking on YouTube (or social media), you will go to the video (or account) of the desired topic with the highest views (or follows). So, Antonio’s account/video was shared by people to their friends and diffused through many friend groups (clusters). And as people were looking for a video to watch, hers with many subscribers/views seemed like a good option to watch, making her “get richer.” Why her video spread is harder to explain; however, it most relates to the topic of metamodernism. Where people post videos of themselves, jumping thoughts, showing different personas, and being overall “relatable” to their videos. They act in a way that expresses their inner conflict that results from metamodernism. People are ironic and cynical and search for meaning. And sometimes they find this meaning the video which is why people share the ideas to their friends.