After a discussion with self-publishers last week, I had an idea: to use my actions to raise awareness among more people. Self-publishers need to give themselves some space Self-publishers need a break!

The reason for this is simple，the work of self-publishing requires a lot of filming of life’s material, and creativity needs to be inspired by life. This leads to the fact that, in reality, a lot of time, that seems like a break is actually a state of work. Keeping up the tension instead makes it more mentally strenuous.
Especially in the past few years, there have been more and more netizens in China who pose in public with no regard for others’ feelings. In coffee shops, young people can often be seen changing into multiple outfits to pose for photos, seriously affecting the mood of those who actually want to have afternoon tea. In many famous spots, tens of hundreds of girls dressing in the same outfit, wearing the same make up, and doing the same posing can be seen. Netflix shots are posted on social media so that more people can copy and learn from them. Many people choose to follow suit even though they don’t make money from the content they post. When will people be able to enjoy their holidays when they should be taking time off to take pictures and post them on social media?

So not only do I want more self-publishers to focus on their time off and plan a good work-life balance, but I also want more social media users to realise that creators’ photos and videos are often just part of their work and they don’t need to squeeze their time off for it.

Because my starting point was to critique the current state of social media in China. So I decided to use a comical and humorous persona to act out people taking photos in public and interacting with passers-by on the road. When someone wondered what I was doing, I would use a plastic microphone to explain my purpose for doing so.

During my conversations with passers-by, they told me that they hadn’t thought about the conflict between what the self-publishers were shooting and their time off before. But I could also sense from the conversation that the average person did not have strong empathy for my performance. For the average person, the life of a self-publisher is not at stake for them. And after I posted the performance video on the internet, people’s attention to the video was not as precise as I thought. Chinese netizens were more focused on why it was possible to live abroad without wearing a mask. So, how to use a stronger style to evoke the viewers’ awareness is something I need to improve in the next intervention.