Is the youth icon loosing its label to reel icon in today’s society
Last month, a teenager who filmed a sixty-second dance video was mobbed by cameras and introduced at a public function as a youth icon.On the other hand, countless and unseen students in rural India spent years in building a low-cost solutions to everyday societal problems. What they receive, a certificate, a photograph in the local newspaper, and nothing more. Almost no one outside theirdistrict knows theirname.
This is not an isolated contrast. It is becoming the default one. As a society, we have quietly started using the words popular and inspirationalas though they mean the same thing. They don’t, and the gap between them is widening every year that a phone camera and an algorithm remain the fastest route to recognition.
There is nothing wrong with virality itself. A dance reel, a comedy sketch, a lip-sync video, these are legitimate forms of entertainment, and entertainment has always had a place in public life. Nor is this an argument against social media, which has done real good, it has let doctors spread health information to millions, helped small businesses find customers they never could have reached, and given genuine artists an audience that once depended entirely on gatekeepers. The problem is not the platform. It is what we choose to crown on it.
Consider the asymmetry directly. India produces, every year, hundreds of young innovators through platforms such as the Atal Tinkering Labs, the National Innovation Foundation, and school-level science fairs, students building affordable prosthetics,soil-testing kits, assistive tools for the visually impaired. Their work is judged, replicated, sometimes patented. It changes measurable outcomes in the communities it touches. Yet it rarely leaves the district it was made in. Compare that to the reach of a viral video, which can cross the country in 48 hours and generate brand endorsements within a week. One form of achievement takes years to build and quietly outlives its creator’s fame. The other can be manufactured in an afternoon and forgotten within a month. We have inverted the reward structure between them.
Critics of this argument will say virality is itself a skill, that timing, charisma, and an instinct for what an audience wants are not nothing, and that dismissing them as lesser is its own form of snobbery. That is fair, up to a point. Entertainers deserve recognition as entertainers, and plenty of them work hard at a craft the rest of us underestimate precisely because it looks effortless. The trouble is not that we celebrate them; it is that we have started using the same word , icon, for a viral moment and for a body of sustained, useful work, as though the two required comparable substance. They do not. A title carries weight, and when it is handed out for reach alone, it stops signalling anything except algorithmic luck.
There is also a difference between fame that is earned through craft over years, a classical musician, a sportsperson, a stand-up comic who has performed for a decade, and fame that arrives in a single viral instant with no track record behind it. The former has already demonstrated the discipline we claim to admire. The latter has demonstrated nothing except that a piece of content travelled well, which is a property of the algorithm as much as of the person. Collapsing these two very different kinds of visibility into one label, icon, is precisely the confusion this argument is trying to name.
“India stands on the brink of an innovation revolution, powered by one of the largest talent pools on Earth. Yet, progress hinges on a critical shift: we must stop celebrating viral performers and start elevating true role models—because the icons our youth emulate today will define the society we build tomorrow.”
This matters most for what children absorb, not what adults debate. Children notice who is invited to schools and public functions, who receives state recognition, who gets asked for advice. They calibrate their ambitions to what is applauded. If the clearest, fastest path to being called a youth icon is a viral video, it becomes a harder sell to tell a fifteen-year-old that four years of a science olympiad, or two years teaching in an evening school for migrant children, will get her there instead. Recognition does not just reward achievement after the fact, it shapes what young people choose to attempt in the first place.
None of this requires policing what young people post or watch. It requires that parents, teachers, journalists, and institutions be more deliberate about which achievements they choose to elevate, and how loudly. When a student engineers an affordable device for the disabled, that story should travel as far as the dance video did. When a college volunteer spends a year teaching in a village school, local media should treat it as news, not filler. State award functions, school assemblies, and Republic Day and Independence Day honours lists are all existing platforms that already do some of this work; the question is whether they are used consistently, or only when a viral case forces the issue. The imbalance will not correct itself; it has to be corrected by editorial and institutional choice, deliberately and repeatedly, until it becomes habit rather than exception.
This is not unique to India, though the scale of the country’s youth population makes the stakes higher here than most places. Other democracies with large, online-first youth populations report similar patterns, a widening gap between what circulates and what is verified as true achievement. But India is also home to one of the largest cohorts of young innovators and problem-solvers anywhere in the world, precisely because of the scale of its challenges. That should be an advantage. It becomes one only if the recognition apparatus catches up with the talent it is meant to reward.
Before the word, icon, is handed to anyone, there is a simple test worth applying, if a generation of young people modeled themselves exactly on this person, would society be better for it? If the answer is yes, we have found a youth icon. If the answer is no, we have merely found another reel icon. The difference is two words. What we choose to do with it may shape a generation.
(The author is Assistant Professor Design Innovation Centre –DIC Islamic University of Science & Technology (IUST) Awantipora, J&K. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
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