Social Media Dominates Mexican Media Landscape

Social-digital networks are the main source of information for youth and all Mexicans, due to the lack of balance of people to obtain information through other means such as television, radio, written press or books, in addition to the lack of media literacy and the financial or credibility crisis that some traditional media are experiencing.

This is what Luis Ángel Hurtado Razo, an academic from the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences (FCPyS) of the UNAM, explains, who highlights that these elements make the ideal environment for the Internet and its online platforms to have that presence.

“That is not why I am saying that it is more effective, nor that it is the main source of influence in people's decision-making, I am simply pointing out that it has become the main source of information,” the university student specifies in an interview.

According to a report from the Federal Institute of Telecommunications (IFT) for 2023, Mexicans spend eight hours and 53 minutes a day browsing the information superhighway, versus television, to which we spend approximately two hours and 30 minutes, reports the digital communication specialist, on the occasion of World Social Media Day, to be commemorated on June 30.

In this context, it is worth remembering the National Survey on Availability and Use of Information Technologies in Homes (ENDUTIH) 2023, prepared by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography and the IFT, which states that:

Until that year, there were 97 million Internet users, which represented 81.2 percent of the population aged six or older; the network of networks was used as the first option “to communicate”, and secondly for consulting networks.

What do we call youth in the field of internet browsing?, the university academic asks. And he answers: “they are no longer the millennials (generation that was born in the period from 1980 to 2000 and came of age with the beginning of the new millennium), they are the so-called centennials, those who were born after the year 2000 and who have a great presence in cyberspace.”

Hurtado Razo assures that the platforms that this last population group consumes the most are those that provide further information in less time, such as short videos on TikTok and Instagram.

They are the ones that they currently use the most to express themselves publicly and openly about their daily lives, this has allowed young people to have greater participation in the generation of content. Centennials are more proactive in production, mainly of videos and images planned and created by a single person, he explains.

We are talking, he continued, about people under 25 years of age. And it is that as a result of the pandemic, the need to connect more to the internet has increased. Centennials have been appropriating this digital language since they were five or six years old, in contrast to the previous generation who did so until adolescence, meaning there is a digital gap of almost ten years.