Despite Adorno's culture industry theory being formed in the early to mid 20th century, I found myself constantly applying it to modern day social media- specifically the short-form content introduced by apps like Tiktok and Youtube. Because these platforms generate revenue based on views, channels often referred to as content farms churn out mass amounts...
... Of low effort, short videos centered around whatever the hot topic of the week is. A big example of this is kids content on Youtube, which has become saturated with bright, loud, and super fast-paced videos. Given the relatively new phenomenon of parents giving children iPads to entertain them without needing to give them attention, unsupervised...
... Children are exposed to mindless content slop, where the motivation behind their creation comes from profit incentive as oppose to education and development. I feel this quote from the Daisie blog on Adorno's theory, "[Adorno believed] the culture industry keeps us too entertained to question or challenge the system", captures the harm content like...
... This poses to children- especially considering how impressionable they are. In many cases, these types of videos contain violent or sexual content hidden behind popular characters meant to draw kids in. I'll link a video that better explains this below for anyone interested- and I encourage anyone with children in their lives to watch it especially.
The nightmare videos of childrens' YouTube — and wha...
I agree with all of this. Kids are extremely impressionable and all of these viral tiktoks and youtube shorts lately have made things worse. I had always known this and tried my best to caution the parents of the kids I babysit, but they never truly listened up until an incident recently where the kids started saying inappropriate stuff they had heard-
-from some tiktok video that their classmates showed them. After that, their parents finally started to monitor what their kids are watching, so hopefully it's not too late for them, but it's wild to me how much worse things are for the kids that don't have their parents checking to see what content they're absorbing.
It's especially crazy to me how much worse stuff like this has gotten in general, like not even just the violence and sexual content thrown into stuff meant for kids. I remember when I was younger, I used to watch Minecraft youtubers like DanTDM and Aphmau and played with Barbie dolls. Now, however, stuff like Sephora Kids are a thing and an actual issue 😭