New horizons of digital media: video games, streaming, and social networks
The development of youth culture in the early twenty-first century went in tandem with the growing impact of digital technologies on the worlds of entertainment and communication. The market for video games, in particular, had come a long way since its primitive beginnings during the 1970s. In 2019, for example, Newzoo (leading games market analysts) estimated that in 2019 the world’s 2.5 billion gamers would spend around $152.1 billion on games, a figure likely to grow to $196 billion by 2022. And, while 2019 saw the US generate the greatest gaming revenues for an individual country' ($36.9 billion), the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region was also important, accounting for 47 per cent of global revenues ($72.2 billion) (Wijman, 2019). Moreover, as China emerged as an economic powerhouse, it also became a key player in the games industry. Indeed, between 2015 and 2018 China represented the world’s largest gaming market, a position it lost only after sales were hit by a government freeze on new game licences amid a bureaucratic reorganisation and concerns about the social impact of gaming (see Chapter 5) (Wijman, 2019). And, while demand for console games remained strong (generating global revenues of $47.9 billion), other market sectors were in the ascendant, most obviously mobile gaming - on tablets and smartphones - which represented the largest market segment in 2019, with worldwide revenues of $68.5 billion (Wijman, 2019). And, with the arrival of Stadia - a ‘cloud-based’ gaming platform, launched by Google in 2019 - mobile gaming was set for new horizons of growth.
Along with video games, the spread of online file-sharing and streaming services was also significant. Early forms of online file-sharing had quickly followed the launch of the World Wide Web in 1991. But it was the arrival of Napster that first highlighted the significance of the technology. Launched in the US in 1999 by 19-year-old Shawn Fanning, Napster was a pioneering Internet peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing site that allowed users to freely exchange digital audio files — typically pop songs - encoded in MP3 format. The service was a quick hit and, at its peak, Napster boasted 80 million registered users worldwide ([owitt, 2017). The transfer of copyrighted material, however, met with anger from the recording industry, and subsequent lawsuits for copyright infringement - dubbed ‘music piracy’ by critics - brought Napster to an end in 2001.3 But myriad imitators followed, competing against officially licensed music download platforms such as Apple’s iTunes, launched in 2001. A particular success was The Pirate Bay, founded in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organisation, Piratbyran (The Piracy Bureau). The site was an online index that allowed visitors to freely download entertainment media and, by 2014 reportedly had 40 million active users (Kottasova, 2014). Again, however, issues of copyright infringement resulted in numerous legal cases, and in 2015 The Pirate Bay’s Internet domain was seized by a Swedish court.1
Alongside the legal battles, the music industry also responded to ‘music piracy’ by supporting the growth of licensed online streaming platforms. These provide access to recorded material usually through a ‘freemium’ business model - whereby basic services are free, while additional features are offered via paid subscriptions. Founded in 2006 in Sweden, Spotify proved especially popular, boasting 248 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 113 million subscribers by 2019 (De Silva, 2019). Other streaming services also saw success, with the Berlin-based SoundCloud (launched in 2007) attracting around 175 million users and Apple Music (launched in 2015) about 60 million by 2018 (McIntyre, 2018). But even these figures were put in the shade by the rise of YouTube. Launched in California in 2005, YouTube began life as a video hosting platform, but it also developed into a popular site for music streaming. This boosted the site’s appeal, and by 2017 YouTube was available in localised versions in 102 countries, the platform attracting 1.5 billion monthly users worldwide (Shinal, 2017).
Eclipsing even the rise of video gaming and streaming services, was the phenomenal growth of online social networks.5 Internet platforms that allow users to create a public profile and interact with fellow users, social network sites are defined more comprehensively by communication theorists danah boyd and Nicole Ellison as:
... web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.
(boyd and Ellison, 2008: 211)
Generally credited as the Internet’s first social media site, Six Degrees was launched in the US in 1997. Taking its name from the aphorism of‘six degrees of separation’ - which posits that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by no more than six degrees of separation - the site’s innovation lay in the way it allowed users to create personal profiles and add friends to a personal network. The site, however, was probably ahead of its time and, while its user numbers peaked at around 3.5 million, Six Degrees struggled with the fact that many users still did not have a large number of friends online, consequently it folded in 2001 (boyd and Ellison, 2008: 214). Nevertheless, other sites quickly followed. Launched in 2002, for example, Friendster allowed users to save contacts as part of a personal network, but it also allowed them to share messages, photos, and videos with other members. Within months Friendster had over 3 million users, but it struggled with technical difficulties. As a result, its appeal in the US waned. Friendster’s popularity elsewhere, however, skyrocketed - especially in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia -and its user numbers peaked at around 100 million (boyd and Ellison, 2008: 216)/’ Even more successful, however was MySpace.
Launched in 2003, the Californian-based MySpace began life as a file-storage platform, but it quickly transitioned into a social network that was a major hit with young users. Quickly gaining a reputation as a hub for rock bands and their fans, MySpace was attracting teenagers en masse by 2004 (boyd and Ellison, 2008: 217), and by 2006 it had 47.3 million members (Goff 2013: 32). MySpace, however, was dogged by technical glitches and many users were alienated by the increased presence of advertising. As a consequence, users drifted away to the new social media success — Facebook.'
Originally founded in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and four friends, Facebook began as ‘Facemash’, a social media site exclusive to Zuckerberg’s Harvard peers. Renamed ‘The Facebook’, the site was opened to other colleges, then high schools, before being made available to the general public (aged over 13) in 2006. By the end of that year membership had risen to 12 million, and was growing rapidly as users shifted away from MySpace. By 2011 MySpace membership was still 63 million, but Facebook’s exponential growth had seen it become the world’s biggest social network site, with over 500 million members (Goff, 2013: 32). As MySpace declined, Facebook’s rise seemed relentless. In 2012 Facebook became the first social network to surpass 1 billion registered accounts, and by 2019 it boasted almost 2.38 billion monthly active users (Statistica, 2019i).
But other social networks also found success through their distinctive features. Twitter, for example, was launched as a micro-blogging and social networking service in 2006. Distinguished by limiting users to only 140 characters in their messages or ‘tweets’ (raised to 280 in 2017), it had attracted 321 million monthly active users by the end of 2018 (Statistica, 2019ii). The WhatsApp messenger service, meanwhile, was launched in 2009 and ten years later boasted around 1.6 billion active users (Statistica, 2019iii). Instagram also rose rapidly. Launched as a photo and video-sharing social networking service in 2010, by 2018 Instagram’s active users numbered more than 1 billion (Statistica, 2019iv). And the multimedia messaging service Snapchat — whose distinguishing feature is that it allows users to send photos that self-delete shortly after opening — was launched in 2011, and by 2018 was reporting 186 million daily active users worldwide (Statistica, 2019v).
Most social networks with more than 100 million users originated in the US. Nevertheless, these are usually available in multiple languages, and enable users to connect with others across the world. But regionally-based social networks have also thrived through addressing local contexts and content. In Russia, for example, VKontakte (also known as VK.Com) was founded in 2006 as an online social media service akin to Facebook. It proved especially popular among Russian speakers but was available in several languages and, by the end of 2019, was the largest European social network with more than 100 million active users (SimilarWeb, 2019).
In China, meanwhile, access to foreign social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is blocked by the ‘Great Firewall of China’ — as the Chinese government’s Internet censorship is often dubbed. Instead, homegrown sites flourished. In 2005, for example, the Chinese conglomerate Tencent (the world’s largest gaming company - see Chapter 7) launched Qzone, a social networking website which laid claim to 645 million users by 2014 (Bischoff, 2014). Meanwhile, the Renren Network (formerly known as the Xiao-nei Network), was launched in 2005. A social networking service sometimes dubbed the ‘Chinese Facebook’, it became especially popular among Chinese students and, though its appeal was waning, it recorded around 257 million active users in 2017 (Statistica, 2019vi). Perhaps the biggest success, however, was WeChat. Originally launched by Tencent in 2011, WeChat began as a simple mobile messaging app but subsequently evolved into a multi-faceted platform encompassing e-commerce, gaming, and shopping services. Alongside its functionality, WeChat’s userbase also rapidly climbed, growing to over 1 billion monthly active users by 2018 as the company steadily pushed into overseas markets (Iqbal, 2019).
Clearly, then, digital technologies have transformed the worlds of communication, media, and entertainment. But they have also altered media relationships, with a trend towards the ‘convergence’ of various media forms.8 This has entailed greater degrees of integration and interconnection, so that there is a ‘blending’ between the worlds of online media, TV, movies, music, print, and mobile devices. We might, for example, watch a movie or read a newspaper on a mobile phone or tablet. And, for some theorists, this amalgamation of media platforms has been paralleled by a convergence of media ownership (see Chapter 7), along with a binning between the roles of media producers and consumers (see Chapter 9).
Changes wrought by digital and online technologies have impacted across society, but young people are often seen as being in their forefront. Indeed, communications researchers John Carey and Martin Elton argue that age is a key factor determining the early adoption of new media technologies, with younger people most likely to be ‘early adopters’ of media innovations (2010: 42). And the growth of social media networks, certainly, seems to have been spearheaded by young users. In 2014, for example, 38 per cent of worldwide users of Tumblr (a micro-blogging and social network site, launched in 2007) were aged between 16 and 24, while a further 32 per cent were aged between 25 and 34. Instagram’s global users were also markedly young, with 37 per cent being aged between 16 and 24 and 30 per cent aged between 25 and 34. Facebook’s users were generally older but still relatively young, with 25 per cent of worldwide users being aged between 16 and 24, while 29 per cent were aged between 25 and 34 (Statistica, 2014). Snapchat users, meanwhile, were especially young. In 2017, for example, 50 per cent of Snapchat users were under 25 years old, while and 23 per cent were still in high school (LSE, 2017).
In some regions, moreover, the youth of social network users has been particularly pronounced. In Russia, for example, over 77 per cent of VKontakte’s users were aged under 34 in 2018 (Statistica, 2019viii). And in China 50 per cent of the nation’s social media users were aged under 30 in 2013 (Go-Globe, 2013); while in 2017 more than 69 per cent of Chinese people aged between 15 and 19 were social media users compared to around 34 per cent of those aged between 50 and 59 (Statistica, 2019vii). Some Chinese platforms, moreover, had particular youth-appeal. Launched in 2016, for instance, Douyin billed itself as ‘a destination for short-form mobile videos’, and was a digital app that allowed users to create and share short video clips (of3 to 15 seconds) on mobile devices. A quick sensation, Douyin had garnered 100 million users within a year, with more than 1 billion video clips viewed every day (Graziani, 2018). But the app was especially popular among the young, with 75 per cent of its users being aged between 18 and 35 in 2018 (Nanjing Marketing Group, 2018). The youth of its userbase was sustained when Douyin’s Chinese owners, ByteDance, launched the app for international markets in 2017. Renamed TikTok, the app was — again — rapidly a success, and had been downloaded nearly 800 million times worldwide within a year (Yurieff, 2018)? But, as in China, the app had particular appeal for the young, with around 41 per cent of its global users being aged between 16 and 24 in 2019 (Beer, 2019).
Undoubtedly, then, new developments in entertainment and communication technologies had come to play a big role in the lives of many young people. And, for some theorists, the affinity between young people and digital technologies was so significant it represented nothing less than a generational transformation. Like Strauss and Howe, these theorists saw young people in the early twenty-first century as qualitatively different to earlier generations. In this case, however, the difference was configured as a ‘digital generation gap’ — with young people set apart from their forbears by what was seen as their confident engagement with the world of new digital technologies. Such views were widely promoted, and often gained popular traction. But they were also open to criticism.
