Children captured by the screen: The boom of the YouTube social network in children's television consumption
Abstract
Children spend hours in front of screens attracted by quick and easy entertainment, transforming the social platform into a transitory solution to the problems of an increasingly technical and less humanized society. The article analyzes the consumption of YouTube in children between 10 and 11 years old through a quantitative methodology where, through a survey carried out in the first semester of 2019, 314 girls and boys from Concepción Chile are surveyed in order to know the audiovisual content of YouTube that they view, characteristics of their consumption (hours, contents, number of hours and means of access) and needs that they satisfy with said viewing; Among the findings, it stands out that almost all use multimedia and that the lower the socioeconomic level of the school they attend, the greater the number of hours on the screen. Lack of parental control and open TV with little children's offer are among the causes identified by the study. This, added to a programming algorithm that has not finished a video, already offers the child 5 or 6 similar videos, turn YouTube into an audiovisual formula that can have children “captured” for hours in front of a cell phone or computer screen.
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