Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 27 – The number
of Russians watching state television is falling by a million a year as the older
generation passes from the scene and the younger generation watches not it but
YouTube, Margarita Simonyan says, taking away from the Kremlin the channels on
which it had relied to communicate with the population.
The chief editor of Russia Today suggests
that the average age of those who watch television is increasing rapidly and
that Russians are becoming more selective in their use of television, with an
increasing number turning to the Internet and especially to YouTube (stoletie.ru/obschestvo/nashe_televidenije_244.htm).
“Our government for many years
relied on television, and television for many years was the chief instrument
for delivering information to society. But now, that is not the case. Now, the main
television in Russia is YouTube. The number of viewers of YouTube is
incomparably greater than the viewers of other programs on television,”
Simonyan continues.
As a result, an entire generation
has grown up which has never seen or heard Putin live, she says. Instead, it “sees
and hears him only in memes and caricatures.” which is something else entirely.
Andrey Sokolov of the Stoletiye portal says that statistics confirm this
and argues that this change may define the future of the country.
“The government is losing control
over society” because it is losing control over what people watch and that is
especially true of the younger generation, Sokolov argues. That is a major
reason why young people take part in protests. They don’t know the past of
Russia and they do not even know what is really going on now.
“Losing the audience for its central
channels, the state is losing the opportunity for influencing the masses and
the chance to communicate to them its policies,” the Stoletiye commentator
says. But the response of the government channels to their loss of audience may
be making the situation worse.
On the one hand, if these channels
continue to offer what they have in the past, they will retain the older
generation; but if, as is often the case, they try to compete with YouTube by
offering more popular and populist programming, they may find that they will
lose their current audience and not gain many from the younger.
Consequently, the problem Simonyan points
to may prove insoluble for a regime that has lived by television up to
now. If it can’t find an alternative to
that or find a way to regain audience share, it could die from that overreliance
on a communications channel that is ever less significant.
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