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• 1 2024-06-26T15:40:29-07:00 Analysis 2021: "Making sense of 'superbugs' on YouTube: A storytelling approach" 5 plain 2024-11-13T06:21:45-08:00 (The whole paper is fascinating, but if you only have time for an executive summary, here it is!)
  
  "Making sense of 'superbugs' on YouTube: A storytelling approach" (open-access PDF) by Monika Djerf-Pierre and Mia Lindgren, Public Understanding of Science (2021).
  
  Key points:
  
  "This article explores how antimicrobial resistance is communicated on YouTube. Drawing on qualitative media analyses of the most viewed YouTube videos 2016–2020, we identify seven different genres and two main storytelling approaches, personalized and fictionalized storytelling, used to make sense of antimicrobial resistance and its complexities.
  
  The study contributes new knowledge about YouTube as a platform for health communication and the types of videos about antimicrobial resistance that get most traffic. This is useful, not the least for public health experts working to improve communication strategies that target hard-to-reach media publics...."
  
  The study identifies seven genres used to communicate AMR on YouTube:
  1. Popular Science,
  2. Journalism,
  3. YouTuber,
  4. Curriculum Resources,
  5. Medical Entertainment,
  6. Public Health Campaigns, and
  7. Advertising.…
  
  In the vast majority of the most viewed videos, the communicative purpose is to 
  • educate (Popular Science), 
  • inform (Journalism), or 
  • instruct the public (Public Health Campaigns).
  In the other samples, the aims and purposes are to 
  • sell education (Curriculum Resources), to
  • entertain (Medical Entertainment, some YouTubers), 
  • advocacy (some YouTubers), or to 
  • sell products (Advertising)....
  Two main storytelling approaches are used to translate a complex health issue into something that YouTube viewers can relate to and understand.
  
  The first, fictionalized storytelling, is commonly applied in Popular Science videos but also in Public Health Campaigns and Advertising. It draws on familiar narrative elements from videogames, cartoons, and superhero and monster movies, such as anthropomorphizing bacteria with human appearances, intentions, and behaviors, and staging AMR as a battle between humans/antibiotics and cunning superbugs.
  
  The second, personalized storytelling, is mainly demonstrated in the journalism genre. Here we find stories with real-life humans as actors sharing their lived experiences, particularly as victims or survivors of resistant bacteria, but also journalists staged as actors in their own story."
  
  Full article PDF available here.