Youth and social media: Power to empower?

• Main Author: PRANKUMAR, Sujith Kumar
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Social Media; Social Psychology and Interaction
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2469; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3726/viewcontent/youth.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Much has been written on social media and how it has positively revolutionised communication and information transmission. The infl uence of social media is indubitable—it reaches anyone with an Internet connection, no matter their geographic location or socioeconomic status. This means information that was previously out of reach for isolated and less well-off communities is now accessible by more people than ever before. For example, University College London’s “Why We Post” social media anthropology project—conducted by nine researchers in nine different communities over 15 months—found that communities that have traditionally received comparatively lower levels of schooling now have access to unprecedented amounts of information that allow them to improve their literacy and to receive informal education.1 The democratisation of media has given rise to new occupations, such as YouTubers, digital marketers and bloggers, who—with some basic social media literacy—can enjoy viable and lucrative careers. For example, Felix Avrid Ulf Kjellberg, a 27-year-old Swedish video gamer with nearly 53 million subscribers on his YouTube channel “PewDiePie”, made more than US$15 million in 2016.2