Screens are everywhere, always within reach. Their very ubiquity has helped fuel the meteoric rise of social media personalities, but it’s the nature of the content itself that fans the flames. Direct, personal, seemingly unscripted, this is content that offers viewers a window into the lives of real people, people (for so viewers feel) “just like us.” And that, for the primary audiences of much of this content — the teens and tweens — is what it’s all about: connection. It’s not so much that there’s a screen always within reach, it’s that there’s a close friend always within reach. The promise of social media and its content is not simply constant contact. It’s constant companionship.

Nowhere is this more evident than in how the young respond to YouTubers. These viewers are not watching “celebrities,” and they themselves are not “fans.” The relationship is far more personal and, yes, it is a relationship. If teen audiences in the past sought to tear down the barriers erected by a media that both ushered their idols in and kept them distant — think Presley, The Beatles, or any number of pre-digital-age celebrities appealing to a young demographic — today’s teens have no such barriers to surmount. Today’s digital media doesn't create barriers, it dispels them. People, just like us, have become famous, and they’re sharing their lives, openly. Sharing their lives and inviting us in.

Small wonder, then, that young audiences think of these social media stars as friends, that they relate to them as friends and trust them as such. In fact, users overall place great trust in the sincerity of influencers: in a recent study, 56% said they rely on recommendations from friends, while 49% said they rely on influencers. In a separate survey, 70% of millennials said they value endorsements by noncelebrities over those by celebrities, particularly when those endorsements came from influencers they thought of as peers.

This phenomenon has been called the evolution of celebrity — an evolution ushered in by the increasing intimacy of shrinking screens, from theaters to television to mobile — but if so, it’s an evolution akin to a revolution. The distance between viewer and viewed has collapsed. To young audiences in particular, there's no more us and them. It’s all just us. And some of us have become famous, just by being ourselves. Which is why in large numbers, today’s digital audiences believe that they too can become YouTube creators, YouTube stars. Fame and influence is within reach, in this ever widening circle of friends. In fact, in their own social media accounts, the young experience something akin to fame within their own smaller circle of friends.

This changed context means too a completely different relationship between young viewers and the content they consume. It’s woven into their lives, as natural to them as the air they breathe. “Media” as a concept fades into the background. The closest equivalent to this kind of content predates media altogether: this is friends, neighbors, family swapping stories, sharing thoughts and ideas, reaching out to the like-minded, showing off, playing, bonding. It’s — life. Richly extended, by means of technology, beyond the reach of our own senses. Today’s digital media represents a return to community, only this time it’s global.

Originally published on a social media services site.