2019.02.12,

Critique

An Abyss Is Forming Between The Generations On Social Media

author_posts/samvel-martirosyan
Samvel Martirosyan
twiterfacebook

Media researcher

The Armenian social media field is going through interesting transformations. And the interesting thing is that the public doesn’t realize many of these changes.

The reason is the changes are happening in more young circles. While middle-aged and adult audiences don’t really feel the changes in social networks.

The main trends are maintained in recent months: Facebook is in stagnation, the audience sways between about 1.3 to 1.4 monthly active users, and Odnoklassniki continues to fall.

The most visited websites in Armenia in January, according to Similarweb. Odnoklassniki has retreated by another point. It was in first place only one and a half years ago.

On the other hand, Instagram continues to grow steadily and at the expense of the youth.

That is to say, new users are school children, the majority of whom do not even go to Facebook. They bypass it and go straight into Instagram.

We already noticed several months ago that social networks were breaking up into groups.  

One social platform already doesn’t exist, Facebook. Also another platform for communicating with and getting to know friends, Odnoklassniki.  

Facebook’s super-politicization, which not only continues but deepens, imposes on all those who are not involved in these processes simply to emigrate from there.

In fact, an age separation is taking place.

Most adults are not even aware that young people are leading active lives on YouTube, and that there are vloggers or YouTubers (name them what you want), that have a larger audience than most newsgroups.

Of course, this does not mean that they are creating competition. The content is very different. So far it’s unique.

Vloggers are getting older and their interests might change very quickly. Eventually, the audience which gathering around them will eventually enter into public life.

And this is that generation which will not differentiate politicians from themselves, they only know Nikol because everyone knows Nikol, and they know Galust Sahakyan well because everyone knows Galust Sahakyan’s words.

But in all the other segments this is a full social world, from which adults are completely cut off from and they are unaware of what is going on here.

The tendency to remove these social layers from one another is gradually getting deeper.  

There are many Armenians today on the, for many unknown, TikTok platform, who have more followers than most politicians, aside from Nikol.

The position of social applications in Armenia, according to Similarweb.

The average teacher would be frustrated at the content found at TikTok.

Perhaps the same can be said of the youth segments on YouTube or Instagram. Is this good or bad, it’s hard to say.

Today we can confirm something, while adults are at each others necks fighting over unbelievable political topics, the youth tries to live independently on social networks.

There have never been so many generations separated from each other.

And that gap lies deeper because adults have no time to be interested in children. There are so many important things to discuss…

For example, who smokes who’s umbrella, and who brought which fake home just for the sake of nourishment, why did Aliev smile and why the river no longer makes noise.,

Samvel Martirosyan

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.


Add new comment

Comments by Media.am readers become public after moderation. We urge our readers not to leave anonymous comments. It’s always nice to know with whom one is speaking.

We do not publish comments that contain profanities, non-normative lexicon, personal attacks or threats. We do not publish comments that spread hate.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *