Digital Media Literacy
The internet is a maze, a spider web woven of hyperlinks and algorithms that stretches farther than one might think. A major contributor to the overpopulation of the internet is the commercialization of the digital landscape through pay-per-click advertising. This is where children’s videos come into play. Most are largely designed to catch the naïve eye of the child to rack up as many views as they can. Because children can’t discern between media of substance and clickbait, companies are successful in this. Young children seem to be especially vulnerable to these tactics as can be seen when you search for children’s videos on YouTube. These videos have become so popular they have memes and digital folklore surrounding them. The billions of views collected by these channels represent missed opportunities to engage children in provocative conversations like ones that teach them digital media literacy.
With the development of the internet and the general move from physical to online learning, we are getting closer to an age where nursery rhymes are no longer relevant and people everywhere are having to learn new skills in order to stay competent alongside the rest of the population. With the invention of YouTube, came children’s entertainment that you do not have to do yourself, pay anyone to do, or pay the cable bill for the television to do. This is very beneficial and accessible for some people. The internet has made sharing and searching for information infinitely more accessible and studies show that parents believe the internet to be a mostly educational resource. However, the issue with YouTube’s children’s videos is that they are not trying to teach our children anything relevant. Lets be real, what is a 6 hour “Baby Shark Song” loop going to teach them other than the monotonous rhythm and a basic but not universal family structure? Let’s go more specific now. The YouTube channel called “Webs & Tiaras — Toy Monster Compilations” is a channel filled with nonsensical children’s videos. To be frank, these videos are random, strange, and sometimes just downright inappropriate. Most analyses of this channel have concluded that it was created by utilizing the same advertisement algorithms they use to find popular buzz-words online and including those themes within their videos to ensure the most amount of views possible. Combined, this creates comedic yet disturbing visuals, and not to mention that there is not any dialogue to accompany. This is neither educational, nor beneficial entertainment for the intended audience.
We are only now in the digital age thinking about the digital media literacy and what that means for our youth. It is becoming more important for people to be competent at using the internet because our society depends so heavily on it. Take the troll farms in Russia for example. If you don’t know what those are, they are places in Russia where people get paid to sit in front of a screen and become internet “bots”. Their function in 2016 was to throw off the U.S. elections by manipulating social media to make it seem as though more people were for Trump. This no doubt was harmful in the election process and their functions in the future could be even more harmful. It is important to teach our youth to be able to see through these digital bots and determine for theirselves if the source is credible or not, not to mention to teach our adults the same.
Channels like “Webs & Tiaras — Toy Monster Compilations” are becoming more and more popular and are more accessible to parents than books or other forms of learning. To keep up with the digital age, we are having to change and adapt what we used to think was educational for youth. Capitalizing on nursery rhymes and nonsensical children’s entertainment is harmful for a child’s development as it does not actually teach them anything relevant. What we ought to be showing kids as far as education goes is digital media literacy which is becoming exponentially important. Considering our transition into this digital dominance media focused world, we need to carefully assess the way in which we raise the next generations and how they interact with the deep pool that is the internet. Using the ignorance of parents and children alike in these mock YouTube videos has allowed the creators to capitalize off these useless videos in which we do not know the long term psychological effects of childhood development yet. Once the general population catches on to the tactics of viewbotting, will we attempt to continue to profit off of it, or eradicate it for the better of our populace?
