How kids develop addiction to YouTube

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Children want to be in charge, this desire clarifies a lot in the behavior of children.

According to child psychologists, it also holds the key to understanding the popularity YouTube among young children writes The Atlantic.

Adults without children are hardly aware of YouTube Kids - an application that, in essence, is a stripped-down version of the original video hosting. Here the content is specifically filtered by the age of the audience. And since it is designed for mobile devices, children in a couple of clicks get access to countless videos that are selected specifically for them.

Videos that are in the app are rendered thanks to a special recommendation algorithm. YouTubewhich uses query history, statistics, views and other data. The recommended list forming algorithm is a complex chain of tasks aimed at helping the user to find personalized content from an infinitely growing layer of video. The service includes many hours of video content downloaded to the site every second. According to the team, creating a worthwhile recommendation system is an “extremely difficult test,” because the algorithm must constantly break through a staggering amount of content and instantly identify the most recent and most interesting video for the user, while knowing how to ignore noise.

So we get into a vicious circle: preschoolers watch videos on the same subject again and again, video makers watch popular trends, and then make similar content in the hope that the children will follow the link. When they select videos to watch, the algorithms YouTube remember this and recommend them similar videos. Kids continue to watch, and they continue to offer similar. This means that channel authors will continue to create such content - in the hope that it will attract children.

Viewed in a certain way, the service YouTube Kids makes a selection that takes into account what children want to see. The children themselves choose it - exactly to that second, until they lose interest and go to watch something else. In other words, the application YouTube Kids - This is the total reflection of children's desires. In this regard, he opens a special door to the world of the child's psyche.

Children's videos - one of the most popular types of content in history. YouTube. For example, this video scored 2,3 billion views, according to YouTube-to counter:

On the YouTube Kids You can find high-quality animation, animated series episodes and children's karaoke. "Papa-finger" has become almost an anthem YouTube Kids, and you will certainly stumble upon the dynamic rewriting of popular children's songs from ChuChu TV.

Many of the most popular videos are made by amateurs. There are many clips that just showcase surprise toys. In them, in fact, this is exactly what happens: adults tell about toys, and often pull them out of plastic eggs, sticky shells or sets of plasticine. Play dohto find the hidden figure.

The kids are crazy about them.

Here, for example, video from the channel Toys Unlimited, which gained more than 25 million views:

If you do not take into account the strangeness of these clips, it is easy to understand why children like them. In addition to the fun surprises, many videos are essentially toys advertisements. They give kids to get into the huge world of plastic eggs and realize their power. They choose what to watch. And children love to feel responsible for something, even from such a superficial point of view.

At the same time, according to researchers, children and preschoolers are quite different groups from a psychological point of view. A child of two and a child of four years may like Daniel Tiger or related videos on YouTube Kids, but the information they take out of them will be significantly different. Children younger than 3 have difficulty adapting the information on the screen to real life situations.

Children mostly love to watch the same thing over and over and over, until they finally understand it. In a sense, this is due to difficulties with understanding, so they will replay the video to understand the story to the end. Children often do not understand people's motives, and the motive is the main engine of the story. They do not recognize cause-effect relationships.

Small children are simply predisposed to overuse of something simple. By the 18-month old many babies develop extremely intense interests for their age. To some extent, therefore, children using applications such as YouTube Kids, often choose videos that depict familiar concepts - those that contain a cartoon character or a theme to which they are already attached. However, this is an unexplored problem. If children click a thumbnail of a video simply because they recognize it, it’s hard to say how much they learn or how much the application environment differs from other forms of the game.

Even madness on surprise toys is no longer news, according to Rachel Barr, an educational psychologist at Georgetown University: “These toys change relatively quickly, and they have something that children really like: things that open and unfold. I did not check this version, but it is unlikely that children learn from such videos, because they are not clearly constructed. ”

Researchers argue how valuable an educational tool is YouTube Kids. Obviously, it depends on the video and the participation of the person who watches the child to help contextualize what is happening on the screen. But questions about how the search program works also play a role. For example, it is unclear to what extent You Tube browsing history in the recommendations. If a kid is avidly watching videos that are of lower quality from the point of view of learning opportunities, has he got into information isolation where he will only see similar low-quality collections?

There is no person who would choose the best videos for children. Spokesperson YouTube reported that the only human influence from YouTube - this is tracking of inappropriate content in the application. However, quality control is still remains a problem.

“Accessible content is not selected, but rather is filtered into the application through an algorithm,” said Nina Knight, a spokeswoman for Youtube. —Unlike a TV where content is selected for you at a specific time, the application YouTube Kids provides each child and family with more of the type of content they like and whenever they want it, which is incredibly unique. ”

At the same time, the creators of videos YouTube Kids spend countless hours trying to make their videos viewed as often as possible: more views - more advertising dollars for the company. Here is a video from Toys and me (“Toys and Me”), which has been viewed more than 125 a million times since September 2016 was published:

“We need to do what the algorithm wants,” says Natalie Clark, co-author of a similarly popular channel. Toys unlimited and the former nurse of the intensive care unit, who quit her job to shoot a video, cannot be jumped from one topic to another. ”

It implies that if the search program YouTube found that a certain channel is the source of a video about mucus, colors, figures, or something else, and if the channel suddenly released a popular video on one of these topics, any deviation from the chosen subject is done by the creators at your own peril and risk.

There are other key strategies for creating a viral video on YouTube Kids.

“Watch them, and you will begin to understand what children want to see. I wish I could tell you more, ”adds Natalie,“ but I do not want competition. And, frankly, no one fully understands how it all works. ”

Another thing that people do not understand yet is how maturing in the era of the mobile Internet will change the way children see the story.

“There is a lot of literature in which it is mentioned that children who read more books have richer imagination,” says Calvert from the Children's Digital Media Center, “but in the age of interactivity, people not only consume what someone else does, but also create something of their own. "

In other words, the youngest generation of application users is developing new requirements regarding the narrative structure and information environment. In addition to the thrills that preschooler gets from clicking on the screen or the next view The bing bong songThe long-term consequences for kids who are always carrying a smartphone with themselves are confused with other difficulties of life in the world of electronic networks, where everything is provided on demand.

Translation of the article prepared edition Zen.

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