NEven up until a few years ago, one catchphrase emerged in the public debates about the relationship between young people and world events: disenchantment with politics. But that, it seems, has changed in the meantime. “The current young generation is again formulating its own claims more emphatically with regard to shaping the future of our society”, says the 18th Shell youth study published in 2019 under the title “A generation speaks up”. But while some have been campaigning for more political action for years, others may have experienced for the first time during the time of the pandemic how what politicians decide can have a noticeable impact on their own living environment and that of their relatives. And they had to feel how important it is to be informed about political decisions if they still wanted to find their way through the thicket of federally fragmented corona measures. But where and how do schoolchildren and students find out about politics, economics and world events?
You can get information mainly from the Internet. That was the case before 2019, but the pandemic has accelerated development. The JIM study published annually by the Media Education Research Association Southwest on the media usage behavior of 12 to 19 year-olds shows that in the pandemic year 2020 they basically spent more time on the Internet, as well as a “clear plus” when searching for digital information. According to the Shell study, they most often look for information on news sites. The online offers used are no longer limited to the portals of traditional journalistic providers. Even more, “Internet and social media have overtaken traditional media,” state the authors of the Shell study. Almost two thirds of those surveyed for the JIM 2020 study also state that they use YouTube as a source of information.
For comparison: only a quarter use the online offers of newspapers, and thus just as many as those who search for news on political topics on Facebook and Twitter. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 on news usage in international comparison also comes to the result that more than half of the 18 to 24-year-old Germans received news on social media. Studies by the Vodafone Foundation (“Everything on the screen? How young people in Germany get information on political issues”) and the “Use The News” project initiated by dpa and the Hamburg Authority for Culture and Media come to similar results.
A well-known example is the Youtuber Rezo
However, it remains partly unclear what it means to get news and information from social media. When young people subscribe to the Facebook pages of national daily newspapers or the Youtube channel of the Tagesschau, they continue to use journalistically curated information, they only record it in other formats.
The situation is different with content that influencers or other public figures share and in which they sometimes explicitly take a position on political and ideological issues. A well-known example is the Youtuber Rezo. Its video “The Destruction of the CDU” undermined the dividing lines between journalistically processed information, entertainment and political agenda and, after its publication, sparked a debate about the nature and limits of journalistic work.
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