Our bachelor thesis explores viral trends on social media and their effect on the users,
specifically on video platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. We will be
focusing on the so-called productivity videos. These videos include content creators tidying,
cleaning, and organizing, as well as doing chores to get as much as possible done throughout
the day. For this we asked: Does productivity videos on social media influence its users, and
if so, does age change such effect? Moreover, we wanted to know if these productivity videos
made the users do the same action as shown in these videos. These questions were created
to help us understand the effect, and how these cultural trends which may be considered
toxic maintain their viral position.
We have analysed a YouTube video regarding the subject, as well as conducted a survey
with an open-ended question regarding the effect of the videos. Our analysis of the video
displays how Blumer’s interpretation of symbolic interaction and human action shows how
the content creator can influence the viewer, but the viewer itself needs to construct their
own meanings to actually act, and this was correlated to many of our open answers. We also
took Goffman's dramaturgy approach and displayed how the content creator helps maintain
the productivity culture. Our analysis revealed that the videos had an effect on the
participants in our sample. However, we found this effect to not only influence the younger
age groups, but all age groups. With this we concluded our thesis, showing that age was not
a significant variable, implying that other variables like gender, social status, ethnicity etc
can have more of a significant influence into this topic