The YouTube Generation, Creative Maximalism, and the New Chaotic Cultural Order

Today, the relationship young people have with culture on the internet is distinctly different from previous generations. Culture is organized around digital universes that are constantly expanding, being patched, broken, and rebuilt. Their daily language, sense of humor, and habits are being established through new references on the internet.

One of the most concrete indicators of this transformation is television losing its claim to being the cultural center. According to Deloitte's 2025 Digital Media Trends report, Gen Z spends an average of 26 percent less time per day on television and movies compared to previous generations. In contrast, they spend 54 percent more time on social media and user-generated content. In other words, the center of gravity for the screen is clearly shifting toward social media. YouTube's own research confirms this. A significant portion of young people wait for a new video from the content creators they follow rather than a series or a movie.

According to YouTube's 2025 Culture and Trends Report, the 14-24 age group views the internet as the primary medium where culture is produced, transformed, and shared, alongside entertainment. This generation is the first to have grown up with global references, which can be defined as "post-Gangnam Style, post-Minecraft, post-YouTube." The landscape in Turkey is largely similar.

The language of this new culture, where cultural references are fed by platforms, content creators, and gaming universes, is shaped by an aesthetic YouTube calls "Creative Maximalism." In creative maximalism, the goal is to evoke a strong emotional response in viewers by combining a wide variety of visual and auditory elements into a single video, using intense and vivid storytelling. With a chaotic, fast-paced, layered, dense, and constantly reference-producing audiovisual narrative, it has become common to see music, text, emojis, cuts, and visual jokes all at once in short videos.

According to the research, 62 percent of young people use words they learned from videos and memes they see on the internet in their daily language. The rate of those who say their sense of humor, habits, and even personal style are influenced by online content has approached 60 percent.

The most distinctive feature of this new era is the argument that culture is increasingly produced "collaboratively." In this model, which YouTube calls "Public-Generated Entertainment," content grows with the contributions of communities. Examples like Skibidi Toilet, Backrooms, or Italian Brain Rot form collective universes that thousands of people expand by adding to them. Indeed, according to the research, 34 percent of young people stated that they have directly contributed to a content series or project within the last year. It is argued that these channels open up a more flexible, direct, and global space of expression for young people. For the "post-Gangnam Style" generation, foreign language or cultural distance is no longer seen as a barrier in global content.

However, another point that stands out in the Deloitte report is that this intense digital consumption also causes a serious shift in time and attention. While young people watch about 45 minutes less television every day, they transfer nearly an hour of their time and attention to social media and video platforms instead. In other words, the speed of cultural production and circulation has increased dramatically.

The proliferation of AI tools further accelerates this process. Examples like Italian Brain Rot show that layered aesthetics can be produced directly with AI. While creating becomes easier and reproducing becomes faster, how permanence and collective memory will take shape within this entire flow remains uncertain.

As it is argued, how deep can a culture that is so participatory, so collective, and produced so quickly go? Can this new digital creativity, which we also see very vividly in Turkey, turn into a more permanent cultural accumulation over time? The answer to this question lies in what kind of world of meaning the produced content can establish. After providing the general picture regarding these concepts and phenomena today, let us consider: is it only the screen that is changing, or is it the story itself, or perhaps another version of the same story?