Noodlerella who? Welcome to our children’s YouTube bubble

SmallishBeans just uploaded a video. (No, me neither.) I know this because I have received an email with the subject line “SmallishBeans just uploaded a video”, sent to me by YouTube. I didn’t know YouTube sent emails like this but, it seems, a young person in my household has signed up to receive them.

Someone has been playing with my laptop. I round up the usual suspects and a nine-year-old immediately confesses. It wasn’t really a secret. She’s been quite a whizz with the old MacBook for some time.

Who or what is SmallishBeans, I ask, and what sort of videos does he/she make? It turns out that he is a video blogger, or vlogger, who provides running commentaries on popular computer games such as Minecraft (yes, I have just about heard of that one), along with his perhaps even more popular and better known girlfriend, LDShadowLady.

She is one of my daughter’s favourites, along with another character called Noodlerella, real name Connie Glynn, a 23-year-old graduate whose first book, Undercover Princess, was published before Christmas. My nine-year-old has already finished it.

What on earth is this mysterious online world that has been discovered by our children and seems to provide them with so much entertainment and delight? I have very little idea. But at first sight there seems to be nothing too much to worry about. The young stars play video games while humorously describing what we and they can see on the screen. All is playful and innocent. The japery is good-natured. There is no bad language and no upsetting episodes. It’s not Shakespeare, certainly, but it’s what the viewers want.

These online video stars are certainly proving to be influential. A survey of the career ambitions of more than 13,000 British schoolchildren aged seven to 11 was published last week by the charity Education and Employers. Called Drawing the Future, it found that working in social media and gaming was the fourth most popular career option for today’s primary schoolchildren, after being a sports star, a teacher or a vet, but ahead of being a doctor, a scientist or even an actor.

“For more and more children and young people, online celebrities and YouTube gaming vloggers have taken the place of TV and movie stars,” the report stated, adding that the gaming industry now pulls in more revenue than the film industry.

I asked my in-house focus group of one what it was about LDShadowLady and Noodlerella that made them so appealing. “They both have pink hair,” came the answer. But she also noted that these videos are “better than TV, the games are more entertaining”. They certainly seem hard to resist. While the grownups of the house consult the TV schedule and still try to be on the sofa at the time a programme goes out, the nine-year-old (and her cool older sister) flip open the laptop when and where they please, for a rendezvous with their favourite online stars. They are in a media world of their own.

Sometimes I think I preferred the 20th century: spectrum scarcity (ie, three, or at a push four, TV channels), analogue rather than digital technology, being offline and unreachable, reading a book quietly on your own without a chorus of beeps and ringtones bursting in on you all the time.

But that’s gone, of course. Instead, greying parents find themselves echoing the slightly mystified sentiments their parents used to utter, about the things we used to enjoy. John Cole, the BBC’s former political editor, was the father of a friend at school. His description of the work of Radio 1 or Capital Radio DJs that some of us so admired over 30 years ago? “Excited silly talk.” He wasn’t wrong, was he? We just didn’t realise it at the time.

Should we be more worried about the freewheeling technology habits our youngsters are acquiring? Maybe we should limit screen time, or even have weekday bans on the use of laptops and iPads? I’m not sure that makes much sense. This is the world we have to live in. We might as well try to get better at using this stuff.

The Apple boss, Tim Cook, visited Harlow college in Essex last week, where he said: “I don’t have a kid, but I have a nephew that I put some boundaries on. There are some things that I won’t allow; I don’t want them on a social network.”

Grumpy Uncle Tim needs to wake up to the great possibilities offered by the new technology. I bet Noodlerella would put him right.

• Stefan Stern is director of the High Pay Centre and co-author of Myths of Management