More collaboration, less seriousness: Investigating new strategies for promoting youth engagement in government-generated videos during the COVID-19 pandemic in China

Abstract

Effectively engaging citizens during crises is critical for governments to disseminate timely information and help the public to adjust to the constantly changing conditions. In particular, promoting youth engagement not only enhances crisis awareness and resilience among the young generation, but also has a positive impact on youths' social participation and responsibility. With the increasing popularity of online video services, leveraging online videos to disseminate authoritative information has become a method widely adopted by government. To enhance youth awareness and engagement, two new video-based crisis communication strategies have been utilized on a popular youth-targeted video platform Bilibili in China: creating recreational videos such as animation and music videos, and collaborating with individual video-uploaders in video making. However, their impacts and results are largely unknown, which motivates our study. Guided by Entertainment Education (EE) and Collaborative Governance (CG), we report, to our best knowledge, the first systematic study on how recreational video category and government-citizen collaboration would influence youth engagement focusing on 3347 COVID-19-related government-generated videos on Bilibili. This study reveals that recreational videos successfully promote youth engagement including interaction, feedback and sharing. Collaboration with individual uploaders in video making also has a substantially positive impact on youth engagement. Through an in-depth qualitative content analysis of user-generated commentaries, we further unpacked the unique values (e.g., trust work for youth participation) as well as latent limitations (e.g., imbalanced topic distribution) of the two new strategies. We discuss how the findings enrich EE and CG theoretically, and provide practical implications to effective and engaging communication strategies during crises.

Analysis of the Dilemmas and Countermeasures Brought by Data Analysis Based on Short Online Videos on Civic and Political Work

“…Among the existing research results, the research on short online videos is mostly focused on the perspective of media science, and there are fewer research results in the direction of students' moral education [24]. Third, the students' short online videos are mainly theoretical research, lacking relevant data and practical research, lacking quantitative analysis, and with little credibility and persuasiveness [25]. Meanwhile, the previous studies in the results often simply attribute online problems to the environment or students' own subjective factors, without being able to argue the deep-seated causes of these problems in the context of the general social background and economic development changes.…”

Collaborative Governance (Collaborative Study of Actors in Handling the Spread of Covid-19 in Indonesia)

“…To increase awareness and involvement of young people in China in tackling Covid-19, the government is working with individual video uploaders to create and distribute entertaining videos containing information about Covid-19. The video is in the form of animation and music (He, et al, 2021). Regarding information about Covid-19, people in Xiamen China value the top-down information structure in China more than informal information from social media (Boas et al, 2021).…”

Updating ‘Stories’ on social media and its relationships to contextual age and narcissism: A tale of three platforms – WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook

“…The media usage behaviour of individuals is guided by the needs that they seek to gratify from the particular media (Katz et al, 1974;He et al, 2021). Uses and gratification theory is one of the media use theories widely utilised by researchers to identify the motives behind using a particular media (Whiting and Williams, 2013;Parmelee and Roman, 2019;Bucknell Bossen and Kottasz, 2020;Scherr and Wang, 2021).…”