Feeling that you are strange at this time is not a good thing, because most of what is around you does not match your taste or interest. Or you may feel that you are the only sane person in the midst of madmen. In the cinema, one taste is dominant, and when you look at the people around you, you find everyone “shaving” on the screen .. each according to his interest.
Videos from the famous Tik Tok app come to teenagers and adults who dance to songs, this application created a state of mania until I imagined that everyone wants to dance and sing, and I do not mind showing joy and happiness, but one must maintain a degree of dignity, otherwise the prestige will be lost. In "Tik Tok" everyone without prestige, even the old woman and the maid portray themselves dancing and singing.
But the teenager remains the dominant player of Tik Tok, the dominant social media outlet, and the dominant news site. As a result, adolescents' interest in reading news has declined globally, not just at the country level.
Enter any café and count the people who read the newspapers, and compare them to the number who look at their phone screens, and often these too read the news from the communication platforms. Enter any library, you will find the best selling is the closest to the entrance and is the most important place for everyone to see. But search for newspapers. If the employee does not tell you that they are no longer sold, you will often find them in the back. At an isolated corner, count how many copies of each newspaper, and you will find it is less than a fifth.
Today, 80% of teenagers draw news from communication sites, not newspapers, and this means as a direct result that they prefer to use the news in a video format and not as reading material. Just 5 years ago, 25% of teenagers read the news from social media, according to a report published by The Economist.
Consequently, the percentage of newspaper reading among young people has decreased to 20%, because they have the belief that technology gives them more strength and self-confidence, in addition to the advantage of alerting them to the news that matters to them, and not necessarily society. More dangerous than this is that the teenager reads the truth and believes it without paying attention to the source, because he searches for what attracts his attention to read or watch it, and not about what matters to people in general, and this may be the reason for spreading some rumors on a global scale.
On the other hand, the publisher’s focus was on how to attract this category, by publishing the news that interests it, and since the audience is changing rapidly, and its interests are controlled by one category, we are facing a dangerous precedent in the media industry, which is that the public no longer cares.
In Arabic: 10 years ago, people crowded newspapers in cafes, and numbers ran out of libraries and gas stations, and the latter completely stopped selling newspapers. If you see this naturally, then you are from this time, or you have succeeded in adapting to it, and if the situation is unusual for you, you are strangers of this time!
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com
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