Twenty-five years ago, most young Britons wanted a career in law, to be a doctor, or, if they were creative enough, to take up singing. But today, things stand differently.

According to a survey by Tesco Mobile, a UK company, the “dream job” of young people aged between 16 and 25 in the UK is a video blogger, or “vlogger”. The survey, carried out among 1,002 people, found that as much as 40 percent of them put the vlogger as their number one choice on a list of ideal careers.

This change is undoubtedly as a result of the Internet and social media. They have made it so much easier to reach audience of the world, without having to enter a career in show business in the traditional way.

In the past, the biggest stars were trained by the Hollywood studios. Now, anyone with a camera can become a star. Vloggers are the big stars of today because they are normal people communicating with their fans about everyday lives.

However, what people see is only the bright side of being a vlogger and they fail to notice the fact that only those who are successful earn fame and money. For every success there are hundreds of others who never get off the starting line. There are the dreams that come true and the dreams that remain dreams forever.

Although being vloggers is popular, some young people choose to follow careers that don’t necessarily earn them fame, but allow them to make good use of the Internet to share their hobbies. Young Israeli David Leshaw, for example, runs a business called the Finishers Club. It’s an online platform for runners to keep a record of their races. His job allows him to express his enthusiasm, and is always a learning experience. And that’s enough for him.

The fast spread of the virus has led most Chinese citizens to wear face masks in public to help reduce infections. The Beijing-based Hanwang Technology Ltd. says it has created a new facial recognition system that is the first to effectively identify people even if they are wearing masks.

China is recognized as a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence and facial recognition system. The new system is based on the existing technologies developed over the past 10 years.

“When wearing a mask, the recognition rate can reach about 95 percent, which can ensure that most people can be identified,” Hanwang’s vice president, Huang Lei, said. He added that the system’s success rate for people not wearing a mask is about 99.5 percent. However, the new system struggles to identify people wearing both a mask and sunglasses. “In this situation, all of the key facial information is lost. In such cases recognition is tough,” Huang said.

Hanwang is now selling two main kinds of products that use the technology. One performs “single channel” recognition and the other is a “multi-channel” recognition, which can identify individuals in a crowd of up to 30 people “within a second”.

Huang said officials can use Hanwang’s technology to compare images with ministry (部门) records on individuals in order to identify and track people as they move about. The system can identify crime suspects (嫌疑人), terrorists or make reports or warnings, he added.

While some citizens have expressed doubt to such tools, more people seem to have accepted the methods as a way to deal with the current health emergency.

So far, Huang says most interest in the new system has come from within China. But he sees the interest likely expanding if the virus continues to spread and the use of face masks increases.

The popularity of Chinese-owned video-sharing service TikTok (抖音) continues to grow among young people in the United States. In 2019, experts say the service more than doubled its American user base to 37 million. TikTok is especially popular with teens and young adults.

The service lets users create and share their short videos that they think interesting and useful, and many of them are under 15 seconds. The TikTok app offers a wide choice of sounds, brief parts of songs and special effects tools to help create a video. Some TikTok-based memes are very popular. Videos often include popular songs from well-known artists and TikTok has even helped launch the careers of new music stars.

TikTok is considered a competitor to the video-sharing app Snapchat, as well as Facebook’s Instagram service. Snapchat and Instagram also mainly interest young users with a wide mix of photos and videos centered largely on fashion, pop culture and humor.

Last year, TikTok was the second-most downloaded app from Apple and Google stores. Only WhatsApp was downloaded more. Research company Sensor Tower guesses people have downloaded the TikTok app 1.65 billion times.

TikTok has been used by many major companies to reach young people who use little or no traditional media. One of those companies is American-based e. l. f. Cosmetics. The makeup company’s chief marketer, Kory Marchisotto, said that TikTok is “where the Gen Z party is”. Gen Z is a name used to call the generation born between the late 1990s and the early 2000s. “That’s where they’re all hanging out,” Marchisotto said.

Companies appearing on TikTok can make money through advertising. Often, the companies create user “challenges” as part of their ad campaigns. In challenges, users are invited to publish their own videos in which they perform similar dance moves. One campaign by e. l. f. Cosmetics, for example, asked people to wink and move their lips while following a song. TikTok users created 3 million videos that received more than 4 billion view.