Saudi Gazette FAISAL Alsaif, founder of Tell Pills Productions East, said that self learning was the driver as to why Saudi youth uses social media platforms and technology for entertainment only during the "Optimizing the Impact of the Digital Native" session at the UNESCO NGO Forum 2017 that is being organized in partnership wih the MISK foundation in Riyadh. Alsaif believes tha tone of the reasons behind this is that the Saudi youth are introduced to technology through self-learning. "There is no actual guidance from adults to tell them about tools, uses, how to influence through effective use of technology especially social media, since it is taking over. "Unfortunately, there is no direction to reinforce effective use of technology. That could be the reasons why we do not have much valuable content that individuals put on the different social media platforms. Most of the content put and posted online are fun and entertainment, there is no enough awareness and education put to youth to make them aware that these platforms of social media are one of the best means of education and self-development, to be heard, to interact with people who can add value to your life or you can add value to them. Entertainment is good part and it is an industry in itself but it is NOT everything. We need balance between valuable content and education, and entertainment," he said. He believes that the initiatives to reinforce effective use of technology are individual initiatives. "We still need to focus more on content. We also have seen a good step which is digitalizing the curriculum that we have in Kingdom. It indicates the placement of valuable content in this digitalized curriculum," he said. "As far as we have started, we have kept uploading valuable technology related content on our YouTube channels along with our other social media networks. All is provided in Arabic language. The interaction is great. We generated more than 217 million minutes of valuable content. We provide our information in easy simple way that can excite subscribers and viewers to learn more and expand his knowledge either with us or in different other platforms and channels," he said "The interaction is great, one of our YouTube channels generated more than 26 million minutes over the past 28 days. We reached 5.8 million views. It means that Arab and Saudis in specific are hungry for valuable content," he added.
