The world now pays special attention to young people, often viewing them as the most critical group in the building and development of societies. In the Arab world, they make up the largest group, representing a qualitative advantage that requires investment to achieve desired growth. Increasingly, there is an urgent need to empower youth to generate atypical ideas and to novel solutions to the many problems and urgent challenges that must be addressed. From this perspective, attention should be paid to youth in the context of media studies. These days, unlike a few years ago, the relationship youth have with media has become reciprocal. Imposed by the nature of digital media young people participate in the development of content—or at least interact with it—often determining preferences and patterns of exposure.

The rapid development of youth culture and desires is a clear challenge for media content creators, even in the most professional institutional settings. The media landscape has been transformed by technology, which has given young people unlimited choices in terms of communication, selection, and evaluation. Free media platforms like Facebook and YouTube offer venues for expression that were previously unavailable, where young people interact with networks of followers constantly engaging with the content provided.

Our role in the field of research and academic work is to try to keep pace with this development by monitoring and analyzing, whether in terms of content in its various forms, or the audience and users, their attitudes and tendencies, what they are exposed to through different media platforms, and their impact in turn on culture. This issue is an attempt to highlight the subject from multiple perspectives as they pertain to the Arab region and the world at large, and provide a much needed contribution to the academic media library.