The research question I presented was how does Youtubers affect the mental health of their viewers. It was really hard to actually create a presentation about the topic, because I didn’t know how to portray the feelings of the viewers. After brainstorming, I ended up creating a short story with a comic strip that accompanied it. In my paper I talked about 3 main stream Youtubers, and how their followers are connected to the creators in an unhealthy manner. Many create this connection to the creators as if they know them in real life. This obsession is unhealthy especially to those who are already unstable mentally. This because the attachment causes them to rely and believe in all of the things the creators say, so when the creator say to feel anxious or have mental issue is valid, the viewers would believe them and be comforted by their words. However, when the creators states or mocks at someone who seems to have a mental instability, the viewers would feel attacked and goes into the stage of denial. Keeping this in mind, I decided to add 2 Youtubers into the comic strip to give a short, but straightforward idea of how creators affect the viewers’ mental health. The story is about a girl named Lisa who suffers from social anxiety, and uses Youtube as an outlet to relieve some of her anxiety. She encounters many nice and comforting creators on the web, who has similar experiences, and was able to talk about their feelings about their anxiety. However, there’s always 2 sides of a story. Some creators out there are insensible to their viewers’ mental health and post anything they desire without giving it much thought. As a result, Lisa creates this self doubt and has a mental breakdown. A story and a comic strip was the best way to present my project, because it gives the audience a visual idea of what could happen on the other side of Youtube.
Brainstorming ideas and having a topic to research on is never easy. Researching on a topic about Youtube was definitely hard, since there’s a lot of biases around certain Youtubers and the platform itself. It’s also really tricky to understand if the source that I’m reading is objective and is not siding to one of situation; however, with the continuous process of reading different sources, I was able to figure out which sources were better to cite. I was able to learn about Youtube and the impact the creators, normal people are able to make due to their popularity. From this experience, I was able to brainstorm the different ways of presenting. Before it was always power point slides and me talking from the power point, but this experience allowed me to step away from that and create something more creative. These two processes were difficult and time consuming, but it was worth the hard work since I was able to learn so much along the way.