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Critical thinking
Objectivity versus Subjectivity
Cultivation theory
Empathy
Ethics
Tolerance
Adaptability
Creativity

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Machine are very good at simulating while humans are good at being. Human only traits will become extremely valuable in the future.

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Digital transformation: Are you ready for exponential change? Futurist Keynote Speaker Gerd Leonhard

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There is an increasing number of people joining the middle class population. 

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There is an increasing number of people joining the middle class population. 

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This means more disposable income.

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Millennials

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Simon Sinek on Millennials in the Workplace

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There are many factors in understanding Millennials in the workplace. Simon Sinek dives into these factors in this episode of Inside Quest. http://www.insidequest.com/

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If you spent your whole life being told you're special, you might end up believing it.

James Beck

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Sick and tired of the "snowflake" generation? You have only yourself to blame, writes Paul Little.

In the days following the election of Donald Trump as US president, thousands demonstrated against the result.

Some looked at these crowds and saw free speech at work. Others saw a pack of whiny millennials, so used to getting their own way they couldn't accept the legal result and took to the streets to throw their toys about.

We hear a lot about what's wrong with the millennial generation - roughly, those born between 1982 and 2002, so aged between 15-35.

The stereotype of the millennial includes: snowflakes who can't risk grazing a knee; minimal interest in permanent employment; inability to live apart from their parents; inflated self-esteem; short attention spans; a lack of life skills; certificates for taking part; entitlement; cellphone addiction; permanent adolescence; brand-obsession; political apathy.

How much of this is true?

Quite a lot.

Is it all bad? Not necessarily.

But what made the millennials? Three things: their baby boomer parents, new technology and the economy.

As for the first, according to US-born Professor Paul Jose of Victoria University's school of psychology the West has seen a trend toward "more permissive parenting along the lines of being warm and attentive and providing lots of opportunities for kids to develop and entertain themselves". Or as harsher critics have put it: helicopter parents have raised a generation of precious little snowflakes.

Continued below.

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But Jose gives New Zealand parents a high score for common sense.

"New Zealanders are more balanced than many of them think from a worldwide perspective," he says.

"There's a big gulf between being prudent and overprotective. I see New Zealand children and adolescents getting appropriate training and experimentation and getting permission to fail."

James Beck manages the Parenting Place's Attitude programme for schools. He has spent his life "working with millennials or for millennials".

In fact, having been born in 1986, he is a millennial.

Beck agrees the self-esteem movement has played a part in shaping his generation: "If you spent your whole life being told you're special, you might end up believing it."

And he has seen the generation gap obliterated by parents "wanting to be their kids' friends - hang out with them and share their music and clothes".

He suggests this trend may be a reaction to the "far more archaic and violent" parenting of the generation who brought up the boomers.

They have reacted by raising children to be, in historical terms, civilised Athenians, not battle-hungry Spartans.

He says boomer mums and dads can confuse kids by acting as though parents are experts who should always have the final say, "but then go, 'Can you set up my phone'?"

Telling an 8-year-old they know more than their parents isn't the best message to send.

Family counsellor Diane Levy partly blames a move to accentuate the positive. "Instead of being able to bark at them," says Levy, "you had to rephrase things to: 'I like it when you listen to Mummy.' You weren't allowed to say don't and naughty or no."

And we discovered star charts that said: if you do this good thing, this is what will happen.

"And parenting became conditional," says Levy.

"In the previous generation, if a parent requested something, then that was what was going to happen. It was unconditional. Then we moved into negotiating. So it's no wonder children expect to be rewarded for breathing."

Boomer parents sometimes forget their children are different people from them.

"I remember running into a mother once," says Jan Pryor, retired adjunct professor at Auckland University School of Psychology. "I said, 'How are you?' and the mother said, 'We're really stressed because we have our French exam this afternoon'."

Pryor describes parents who are scared of their children. "They don't want to upset them. They feel insecure in whether their kids love them or not.

"Kids for that reason don't get the boundaries they need and when they don't get them, they push the boundaries and feel pretty insecure."

This can be exacerbated by separation or divorce, when both parents are worried if they discipline their child he or she will go and live with the other parent.

"There are awful stories of boys becoming quite dominant over mothers who won't stand up to them."

And with both parents working, there's less time to model the basic life skills that used to be acquired in the home.

Children whose parents barely have time to snatch something from the supermarket and get it on to a plate in the evening won't have time to teach their kids how to peel a potato.

Alongside the special psychology of boomer parents, society has thrown up numerous other influences in the form of new technology, often pointed to as a leading cause of the millennial malaise.

For one thing, social media makes it harder for kids to get away from helicopter parents, who follow their every digital move through cyber space. It has been pointed out, though, that many kids run parallel social media identities, one of which is invisible to parents.

Parents, in turn, bemoan their offspring's apparent inability to connect in the real world.

"Parents think it's horrible and that kids are losing social skills" says Beck.

"They don't see kids have developed a different set of social skills, in a world they're not fluent in. One linguist has said the art of conversation will be lost in 50 years. Another said this generation has come up with a new form of verbal language in less than a decade."

"I'm doing research on whether kids who text more are better or worse adjusted," says Jose.

"I'm finding adolescents in their generation who report that they text more - reported higher levels of good friendship. My data indicate texting is a means to end."

But Levy sees texting as enabling less accountability.

"It's not necessary to make a fixed arrangement and stick to it," she says. "It used to be you arranged to meet someone somewhere at three. Now whole groups can change arrangements. It's like watching a swarm of bees change direction. It makes for a lot less accountability and not sticking to arrangements."

Jose says the issues around Facebook are more concerning.

"People who are incipient narcissists can find a forum to let it bloom," he says.

"Facebook is a platform where you can have unhealthy characteristics come to the fore. The research is unsettled on that issue. My guess is a healthy individual will use it in a healthy way; if someone is depressed or angry they'll use it in those ways."

But there's no fighting the future: "The new world we're heading into is digitally mediated," says Jose.

"[Millennials] will have an advantage on that."

Improved medical technology may also be moulding the generation. Where is the pressure to grow up, pair off, settle down and conceive the next generation when you know that, as many millennials will find, your life span will be considerably longer than that of the generation before?

And what about the workers, or lack thereof, with millennials reluctant to join the workforce and settle into long-term careers? According to many experts, such careers have gone the way of MySpace and fax machines.

If you spent your whole life being told you're special, you might end up believing it.

"When I got trained to do a job, says Jose, "I expected to do it for life and it was clear cut. Today, it's less so. There may still be some professions like that, but things are changing rapidly.

"There are jobs that will disappear in five years, and new jobs that there is no credential for. That's the world our young people are facing, so I have a lot of sympathy for them."

If millennials seem to have difficulty focusing this may be because they are adaptable, which could prove to be the most useful skill of all as the jobs available continue to evolve and change.

"When you apply for a job it's credential-based," says Jose. "Do you have a credential or degree? But on top of that, or more important, is whether this is an adaptable person, because this job might change in a year."

Other economic factors include the difficulty of repaying student debt, resentment at paying for boomers' superannuation and, throwing everything out of kilter, the impossibility of buying a home in larger cities - although Beck cites "people in a place like Invercargill who have their first job, are paid next to nothing but have bought their first house with friends".

It could be just a matter of perspective.

"My impression of some of these young people is that though they seem entitled they're often self-confident," says Pryor.

"You can say they're unwilling to work hard, but they're also quite good on work-life balance."

"They're great at thinking of a better way to do things," says Beck.

"An organisation may have done something the same way for 20 years. The millennial knows there's an app that can do it."

Or perhaps it's just the eternal cycle of one generation bemoaning the state of the next.

"I don't have a lot of time for people who bash generations," says Jose.

"People are basically doing the best they can. It's not like they are inherently lazy or malicious. Young people today have a range of difficulties we need to empathise with."

The last word should probably go to Diane Levy's daughter, Deb. "I was grizzling about something going on in the family," says Levy, "and she hugged me and said, 'Don't worry, Mum. It's either nature or nurture, and either way that makes it your fault'."

- Herald on Sunday

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Snowflake millennials: are they all that bad? - Lifestyle - NZ Herald News

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Sick and tired of the "snowflake" generation? You have only yourself to blame, writes Paul Little. In the days following the election of Donald Trump as US president, thousands demonstrated against the result. Some looked at these crowds and saw free speech at work.

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Social media have had a truly revolutionary effect, enabling film-makers and citizens to disseminate their own stories

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With built-in video cameras now the norm for mobile phones, anyone can be a film-maker - a fact proven by the role social content played in TV news coverage of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. As the dust settles, however, social media is influencing documentary-makers, too.

"Social media is an enabler - allowing people to communicate in states where repressive regimes have restricted them from doing so," says David Alamouti, a film-maker and development director of inSight Education, a not-for-profit organisation championing diversity in production. "Now, however, it is also re-writing the conventions of documentary - fuelling the development of a new style as surely as the advent of TV re-shaped the documentary film-making that existed before."

At one level the power of social media is about access - enabling ordinary individuals to tell and disseminate their own stories as well as traditional documentary-makers. "Social media has given us unprecedented access to individuals eager to tell their stories," says Brandon Litman, executive producer of One Day on Earth, a participatory documentary using the internet to amass footage from around the globe.

Connecting directly

The One Day on Earth project, where a variety of amateur and professional videographers shot footage during the 24-hour period of 10 October 2010, has since evolved into an online community of film-makers with plans to document important, global social issues moving forward. A project currently in production called Libya: True Story, is a documentary following a handful of activists' struggle to declare independence from the Gaddafi regime. "Social media also allows a film-maker to offer those interested to get closer to a story as it unfolds over time by connecting directly with those involved - something we are now doing with the social community we are building online at LibyaTrueStory.com," Litman adds. "Though what we are making is a traditional documentary in that it will follow a linear storyline, the project will also involve content that sits online within a social community so the documentary can be organic and interactive, too."

Social media also enables a different approach to story-telling. "The internet has allowed a new form of documentary to emerge - a form involving multiple narratives and array of different types of content spread across different platforms," says Alamouti. "Rather than allowing the audience to sit back and listen it can enable them to lean forward to navigate their own way around a particular subject."

The emergence of new formats - such as cross-platform documentary "projects" such as #18DaysInEgypt - could redefine the traditional role of documentary-maker and they could also help solve some of the pitfalls of using social media to gather footage. Alamouti says that verification of images is crucial but he says that social media and online communities can also play a role in authenticating content as part of the production process. And besides, he adds, the challenges social media content presents the film-maker are outweighed by its strengths. "True, the next generation of media users will need to be more savvy because of the volume of content readily available and variety of sources from which it will originate," he says. "But the internet is all about pluralism and democracy. And in a democracy people need to be both informed and free to make up their own mind." This article was produced in association with Crossover Labs and Sheffield Doc/Fest

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With built-in video cameras now the norm for mobile phones, anyone can be a film-maker - a fact proven by the role social content played in TV news coverage of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. As the dust settles, however, social media is influencing documentary-makers, too.

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"The socially and politically charged atmosphere of the 1960’s and 1970’s and the rise of political, social, and sexual activism also provide historically marginalized communities—among them, women, people of colour, gays and lesbians--with unprecedented opportunities for presenting their views of themselves and the world to larger and more receptive audiences. "
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/docexhibit/docuchron.htm

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Before the Internet, documentaries typically reached the public’s attention once they were featured in a film festival. Social media may have made it easier for filmmakers to get the word out about their work, but now even festivals are using social media to connect with filmmakers and their audiences.

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Alexander Hotz is a freelance multimedia journalist and public radio junkie based in New York City. Currently he teaches digital media at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Follow Alex on Twitter at @hotzington.
When filmmaker Andrew Lampard began promoting his documentary Two Summers in Kosovo last fall, he didn't pay much attention to social media. Lampard used his personal Twitter and Facebook accounts to keep his friends informed, but he didn't use any social media tools to promote the movie - something he regrets today.

"We could have used social media to connect with more audiences," said Lampard, whose film focuses on the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict. "After the war, Serb and Albanian diasporas popped up all over the West - in Europe, North America, even Australia. Beyond raising awareness among festival programmers, I like to think we could have set up our own independent screenings within the Balkans and these diasporas."

While Lampard's film generated some attention in Kosovo, it went largely unnoticed outside of Europe. Could social media have made a difference? Lampard isn't certain, but for his future films, he plans to do what many filmmakers are already doing - using social media to aggressively promote their work.

Outreach

Like Two Summers in Kosovo, most documentaries are produced by a small team on a tight budget. Since social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are free, it makes sense for documentary filmmakers to take advantage of them. But that doesn't mean that just anyone should be doing the outreach.

"You can tell when someone sits down once a day and just blasts a bunch of stuff, having little relevance," said Viki Psihoyos, who developed the social media strategy for the Oscar winner The Cove.

Psihoyos, whose husband directed The Cove, stressed that social media tools work best when the people behind them have a genuine passion for what they're sharing. For Psihoyos, The Cove is "her baby," so its online presence is something she takes very seriously.

"I have a style that I have developed so I bristle when I see the tools used badly," Psihoyos added. "Blatant marketing bothers me...Yes, I remind people that The Cove will be on Animal Planet, but I also ask who is live blogging it? I like to grow and feed a community."

Different National Networks

The Cove was successful in the United States, but it was made primarily to change whaling policies in Japan. Psihoyos used Facebook and Twitter to promote The Cove at home, but in Japan she used a platform called Mixi to ensure she reached the Japanese public. "We had to hire translators to set us up on Mixi, which boasts 80% of the market there," Psihoyos said. "From the start, we have been hoping to get the Japanese people aware and active on the issues taking place in Japan."

Funding

Aside from the ubiquitous Facebook and Twitter, Kickstarter, the online funding platform for creative projects, should be on the radar of every filmmaker short on cash. Despite being barely over a year old, the startup has proved itself an impressive resource for documentary funding.
The Delta Smelt (working title), a documentary about the precarious fate of the largest estuary in the western United States, recently reached its $3,500 goal with contributions from 36 backers. Another film, Keepers of the Earth, easily surpassed its goal of $20,000 by raising over $2,500 thanks to over 300 backers. Amazingly, these successes aren't unusual on Kickstarter.

Connecting With Other Filmmakers

It's no secret that filmmakers choose Vimeo, the high-quality video hosting site, to share their clips. But the platform is also a great network for professionals to chat about their craft. Philip Bloom, a veteran filmmaker who has worked for Lucasfilm, BBC and others, uses the site regularly for feedback on his work and to explore the films of his peers.

"Many of the colleagues I work with these days I've known from social media - that's how we've become friends," said Bloom. "It's a great way of learning about things and helping each other out. I think it's absolutely essential."

Festivals

Before the Internet, documentaries typically reached the public's attention once they were featured in a film festival. Social media may have made it easier for filmmakers to get the word out about their work, but now even festivals are using social media to connect with filmmakers and their audiences.

Jennifer Nedbalsky, the Program Manager for Human Rights Watch's Film Festival, said the social networking site for group meetings Meetup is important for her community outreach. "It's a wonderful way for audience members to involve friends," said Nedbalsky. "It also multiplies the amount of people you can reach, while taking less work from audience members to share."

Theresa Riley, the Interactive Director for the PBS documentary series POV, often learns about the films submitted to POV through everyday social media tools like Facebook, but POV is also experimenting with new methods to promote their filmmakers' work. Recently, POV asked viewers of Food Inc. to host a post-film potluck dinner with friends at their homes. About 130 potlucks were held, and viewers uploaded pictures of their experience on Flickr. POV also hosts live chats with the filmmakers via Cover it Live the day after a film screens.

A New Approach?

Arguably the most ambitious use of social media by a documentarian is Vaquita.tv, a free web-based documentary project entirely reliant on social media for its promotion. The documentary itself, which is broken into seven web-friendly parts, sheds light on the dire situation of the Vaquita, a Mexican porpoise on the brink of extinction. With about 250 porpoises left, filmmaker Chris Johnson "felt there was no time to spend years making a film to only watch the Vaquita go extinct during [the film's] production and finding a market."

The urgency of Johnson's cause is evident throughout the site, and in a recent blog post he even asked, "can social media save a species?"

"Social media is a great ally during the production of a project, the marketing of it, and potentially keeping the issues addressed in your film in the media for a long time after someone has watched it," Johnson said. "I believe that you never finish making a documentary film."
More Social Good Resources from Mashable:

- The Real Value of Social Media for Social Good [INTERVIEW]
- 5 iPhone Apps to Help Fight Poverty
- How Non-Profits Can Maximize a Foursquare Account
- 5 Cool Non-Profit Uses of Location-Based Tech
- Are Social Media Giving Contests Good for Non-Profits?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, craftvision

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How Social Media has Changed the Game for Documentary Filmmaking

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Alexander Hotz is a freelance multimedia journalist and public radio junkie based in New York City. Currently he teaches digital media at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Follow Alex on Twitter at @hotzington. When filmmaker Andrew Lampard began promoting his documentary Two Summers in Kosovo last fall, he didn't pay much attention to social media.

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In exchange for all of our personal data we get media platforms catered to our individual tastes.

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A Decade of YouTube Has Changed the Future of Television

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YouTube's first video was uploaded on April 23, 2005

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ONLINE IDENTITIES Facebook, Instagram, reality TV, constructed truths,

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•Editing- allowing to manipulate the truth

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•Capitalizing – selling yourself

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•Rise of big business AND CONSUMER CULTURE who want to sell stuff to you as an individual and need your identity online.

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We all get to have our say in comments online which makes us feel like our ideas matter.

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More and more people have access to technology in the form of a smartphone. Therefore anyone has the technology to make and share a documentary presenting their ideas and views of the world. We need to teach students to be aware of the difference between subjectivity and objectivity.

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"The internet has allowed a new form of documentary to emerge – a form involving multiple narratives and array of different types of content spread across different platforms,"

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"YouTube acts as a platform for expression, a home for multiple audiences, a marketplace for media products, a place for debate, a navigable library of information and a source of inspiration, all at once. It reflects, highlights and amplifies popular culture and media, and as a result it has played a critical role in how our shared culture has evolved over the past decade."

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YouTube is celebrating its 10th birthday this month

Cultural trends develop organically and in a distributed way, and can rarely be attributed to a single originator, but there are always protagonists and critical sites and moments of change

At first you might consider it a pretty bold premise that YouTube has changed the world, but it is hard to underestimate the impact that the free video streaming platform has had on popular culture. Many of the changes I am going to talk about here aren't solely the product of YouTube; cultural trends develop organically and in a distributed way, and can rarely be attributed to a single originator, but there are always protagonists and critical sites and moments of change.

YouTube acts as a platform for expression, a home for multiple audiences, a marketplace for media products, a place for debate, a navigable library of information and a source of inspiration, all at once. It reflects, highlights and amplifies popular culture and media, and as a result it has played a critical role in how our shared culture has evolved over the past decade.

So herewith, ten ways that YouTube has changed the world, one for each of its ten glorious years. Happy birthday YouTube.

The rise of the Prosumers

Legendary futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted the rise of the producer consumer in their 1980 book The Third Wave, although the idea was first mooted by Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt in the 70s. The Tofflers imagined prosumers more from the perspective of mass consumption and industry but, from a media perspective, prosumption has been most significant in terms of creativity and self-expression. The barriers to entry for the production and distribution of media content are now so low that almost anybody can take part, and platforms like YouTube mean that all the world's a stage. Young people are so comfortable with making and sharing their own content that boundaries between maker, user, owner and customer become increasingly blurred.

Convenience trumps quality

Until fairly recently, online streaming meant sacrificing quality for convenience. Music and video content streamed online is easy to access and plentiful, but the quality is often poor compared to physical media like DVD or CD. YouTube has a much stronger HD offer these days, and is playing with UltraHD, but so much user generated content is low fidelity to start with that often HD just isn't relevant. The important change here is that fidelity isn't a number one priority, and with UGC we see factors like immediacy and intimacy become more important.

YouTube is the new MTV

When MTV launched in the early 80s, it heralded the rise of the music video. The 80s saw music videos become ever more elaborate and more important a part of music marketing, but 20 years later, MTV was screening hardly any music content at all. Today MTV doesn't even pretend to be 'Music Television'. Nine of the ten biggest YouTube videos of all time are music videos for global artists like Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and Psy, who appeal to the global youth demographic that were MTV's heartland. YouTube is the new MTV. The question now is how to make it effectively pay (see The Expectation of Free).

Music is borrowed not owned

Many people just don't own music any more. The rise of digital formats, iPod and MP3 around the turn of the century, shifted us away from handling physical musical products and got us used to consuming music content in a more virtual way. With a richer online

experience from around 2005 (remember Web 2.0 anyone?) and an even more connected public came the abundant streaming era we now live in, where everything seems accessible at any time. When the product becomes virtual and always available, what's the point in owning it any more?

The expectation of free

To date YouTube remains almost entirely free to view, offering billions of hours of video content, vast archives of music, film and TV footage, for nothing. A Spotify-style paid subscription offer is coming, but the ad-funded model will remain. The impact of abundant and shareable content on the rest of the media industry has been enormous. The corporate music industry is having to rethink its entire business model, and traditional news media has changed irreversibly. We are moving towards a two-tier system, whereby free views are ad-funded, and subscriptions are ad-free and higher quality, but the premise that everything is available for free somewhere will remain.

Short-form content for shorter attention spans

The question of whether attention spans are becoming shorter is hotly debated (and you should read Faris Yakob's brilliant book Paid Attention for a proper immersion on the topic), but lots of scientists and thinkers say they are. Although YouTube hosts videos of all shapes and sizes, the average video length is between three and four minutes, which is the same length as the average pop song has been for the past 100 years. But lots of YouTube clips are much shorter than this, and the proliferation of digital video more recently across Facebook, Vine and Instagram has seen seen short-form content spiral.

Self-made celebrity

With the rise of YouTube has come the rise of the YouTuber - vloggers with personal channels and huge audiences who have built careers on the back of their YouTube content. Through makeup techniques, gaming reviews, fitness guidance and all manner of lifestyle-related content, YouTubers have shot to fame without the support of paid promotion and traditional marketing services, and in the process have redefined our ideas of celebrity and talent. Brands and traditional media have started to take notice, and these two worlds

have recently collided in a series of collaborations and partnerships. I am excited to see what happens as the YouTubers begin to move further towards the mainstream.

Mass intimacy

One trait that typifies the work of YouTubers is an intimate relationship with their audience. They shoot content in their bedrooms, discuss personal issues and the ups and downs of their lives, introduce us to their mums, and show us inside their handbags. Part of what's interesting here is a fascination with the minutiae of life, and part is about a sense of honesty and authenticity that aims to share 'the real me'. Beyond YouTubers, a great deal of YouTube content embraces public displays of affection and raw emotional outburst that chime with audiences the world over.

Citizen journalism is standard

Mobile phone video capture and easy video upload have helped to make eye-witness reporting so ubiquitous that it is an increasingly common part of the news we consume. 24 hour rolling news services have an insatiable appetite for new content and perspectives, and citizen content allows us access and perspectives that journalists often can't provide. Millions of us watched the Arab Spring unfold on YouTube, and the Occupy movement gained traction and global scale precisely because activists could publicise events despite a virtual blackout in traditional media. Perhaps the revolution won't be televised, but we will definitely watch it live.

Cats are king (and babies)

In the end, almost everything that happens online eventually boils down to cats and babies. YouTube is full of videos of cats and babies doing funny things, and this trend shows no signs of disappearing any time soon. Anthropomorphising animals is a timeless human behaviour, and YouTube's passion for cats is partly a consequence of this, and partly about our delight in the naivete and playfulness of babies and animals, which sits at stark contrast to the increasingly managed and tailored feel of much professional YouTube content. Hundreds of millions of us want to see the latest Katy Perry promo, but nearly as many of us want to watch 'Charlie bit my finger, again'.

These ten cultural trends have risen in prominence with the rise of YouTube, in the landscape of broader media and technological innovation. Of course for every trend there is a counter trend; whilst music content becomes increasingly immaterial and declines in relative value, the vinyl market is growing year on year, and hit an 18 year high last year. As with any kind of cultural analysis and commentary, take everything I say as one perspective on a complex and nebulous set of phenomena, and get in touch to continue the debate.

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YouTube turns 10: ten ways YouTube changed the world

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Cultural trends develop organically and in a distributed way, and can rarely be attributed to a single originator, but there are always protagonists and critical sites and moments of change At first you might consider it a pretty bold premise that YouTube has changed the world, but it is hard to underestimate the impact that the free video streaming platform has had on popular culture.

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Historical reasons-Backlash to Vietnam war, civil rights movement, women's rights movement, rise of the teenager, life casting.
Cultural reasons-Celebrity culture, Youtube, rise of reality TV.
Technological Reasons-Easy access to smart phone with high resolution camera and user friendly editing software.
Web 2.0 has allowed easy access to platforms to share.
Economic Reasons
Digital funding platforms like GoFundMe can support the individual.

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We live in a celebrity driven culture - celebrities have as much power as politicians. 

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We live in a celebrity driven culture - celebrities have as much power as politicians. 

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British vlogger Zoella has just reached the milestone of 10m subscribers to her main YouTube channel, but she has a long way to go to catch its most popular creator PewDiePie, who is about to pass 42m.

They're just two of the most prominent YouTube stars. In October 2015, online-video tracking firm Tubular Labs reported that there were more than 17,000 YouTube channels with more than 100,000 subscribers, and nearly 1,500 with more than 1m.

How have these YouTubers become so popular? It can seem baffling to people outside their main viewing demographic: smartphone-toting "millennials" who spend as much time (if not more) watching shortform video online as they do traditional TV shows.

Yet the top YouTube stars aren't just popular: they are genuinely influential figures for their young fans. A fact that entertainment industry magazine Variety has been confronting its readers with since 2014.

That year, it published a survey of 13-18 year-olds in the US conducted by Jeetendr Sehdev of the University of Southern California, asking them to rate the 10 most popular English-language YouTubers and 10 of the most popular traditional celebrities across a range of qualities representing "influence".

YouTubers took the top five places in the resulting chart, with Smosh, the Fine Bros, PewDiePie, KSI and Ryan Higa deemed more influential than Paul Walker, Jennifer Lawrence, Katy Perry and other celebrities.

When Sehdev ran the same survey again in 2015, YouTubers took the top six slots, ahead of stars including Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift.

When Variety asked teens to compare the influence of YouTubers with traditional celebrities, the YouTubers prevailed. Photograph: Variety

The surveys provided some useful evidence on why the online stars are so popular.

"YouTubers were judged to be more engaging, extraordinary and relatable than mainstream stars, who were rated as being smarter and more reliable. In terms of sex appeal, the two types of celebs finished just about even," explained Variety in 2014.

"Looking at survey comments and feedback, teens enjoy an intimate and authentic experience with YouTube celebrities, who aren't subject to image strategies carefully orchestrated by PR pros. Teens also say they appreciate YouTube stars' more candid sense of humour, lack of filter and risk-taking spirit, behaviours often curbed by Hollywood handlers."

That's one of the key things to understand about the popularity of YouTubers, if you're struggling to see it in their content - for their fans, the contrast with stars from the world of music, film and television has been a big factor in their rise.

Their very ordinariness - their relatability - is what makes them so appealing. The "girl or boy next door" who is "just like us" is not an unusual trope in the entertainment world but on YouTube, it's heightened.

Variety's 2015 study suggested that teenagers' emotional attachment to YouTube stars is "as much as seven times greater than that toward a traditional celebrity" for these reasons.

Many YouTube stars foster this sense of connection in the way they talk to their fans in videos, from the coming-out announcements of stars such as Connor Franta, Ingrid Nilsen and Shane Dawson to Zoella vlogging about her experience of anxiety attacks, or PewDiePie addressing speculation about his earnings.

There are technical aspects to this too. By necessity, vlogging started out as a format with a person talking into a webcam - and thus directly to the viewer - often close to the camera and filming in their bedroom.

It created a sense of intimacy, and one that many YouTube stars have tried to maintain even as they got better cameras and editing kit. But it even extends to how many of them address their audiences.

In December 2015, the Atlantic investigated the phenomenon that it dubbed "YouTube voice" - which relates to the linguistic characteristics shared by many top YouTube stars. It was parodied by the journalist Julie Beck, who wrote in the introduction to her article: "Hey guys! What's up? It's Julie. And today I want to talk about YouTube voice."

The piece outlines how overstressed and long vowels; extra vowels inserted into words - "terraping" instead of "trapping" for example - and aspiration (audible breaths) are common to many popular YouTubers.

To non-fans, these tics can be irritating. The linguist Mark Liberman described them as an "intellectual used-car-salesman voice" akin to "high-energy sales pitches" or even a "carnival barker".

But that's another point about the popularity of YouTube's stars: the way they divide fans from non-fans is a big part of their appeal too.

Music industry analyst Mark Mulligan explored exactly that idea in a blogpost in September 2015, explaining to labels why teenagers seemed to care more about YouTubers than musicians.

He suggested that teenagers struggle to "find music that they can own, that their mum and dad aren't going to sing along to too" - but have realised that their parents probably won't be quite as open to YouTubers.

"With no music subculture to cling to Generation Edge has instead gravitated to YouTube stars," wrote Mulligan.

Generation Edge is one of the many phrases bandied around to describe "people younger than us" in recent years. See also: Generation X, Gen C and the ubiquitous "millennials."

Mulligan wrote: "For those not in the target demographic, it can sometimes be difficult to grasp exactly what the creative value is of many YouTubers. But that generational inability to grasp the essence of YouTube talent is exactly the same dynamic that music always had when it was the spearhead for youth rebellion.

"A kid trying to explain to his mum why Stampy Does Minecraft is worth watching hours on end is simply a 21st century rerun of kids trying to convince their parents of the musical worth of Elvis, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and so on. That is the entire point of a youth culture - older generations aren't meant to get it," he added.

Is Stampy the new Elvis, Beatles or the Sex Pistols?

To summarise, then: to their fans, YouTube stars feel more authentic and relatable than many traditional celebrities, and that's something that is intrinsic to the videos they publish. The fact that this may annoy or baffle non-fans - parents in particular - is part of the appeal.

It may also be a pitfall in waiting, though, for any YouTubers whose fans perceive them to be drifting away from that authentic, relatable status.

Staying relatable when you're earning a high six- or even seven-figure annual income is one challenge, albeit hardly unfamiliar from the traditional entertainment world. But there are other trends that could change the relationship some YouTubers have with their audiences.

Many are working more with brands to sponsor their videos, for example. The risk is less that fans think they've sold out - many YouTubers are refreshingly upfront about their reasons for taking the cash - and more that some may end up making bad branded videos that turn their viewers off.

One of Variety's online influencers, the Fine Brothers, have been taking flak for another reason in early 2016: they attempted to trademark the word "react" and license out their reaction-video format to other creators.

Format licensing is standard practice in the television industry, but as the Fine Bros now know, it's capable of sparking a backlash in the YouTube community. It also risks being seen as another step away from their roots.

In 2016, the distinction between YouTubers and traditional celebrities is becoming increasingly blurred, not least because the former are no longer flying below the radar of the mainstream media. Some will struggle to stay connected to their fans in that spotlight, but not all.

The key thing to understand about YouTube stars is that the content of their videos - whether it's Let's Play game commentaries, makeup tutorials or personal vlogs - is only one half of their appeal.

The connection to their audiences is the other: they have grown up with the tools to forge and strengthen that connection, and many will use that as their anchor to keep their feet on the ground.

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British vlogger Zoella has just reached the milestone of 10m subscribers to her main YouTube channel, but she has a long way to go to catch its most popular creator PewDiePie, who is about to pass 42m. They're just two of the most prominent YouTube stars.