At Comic Con with...Connor Ward and Dan Jones
In this Stories from the Spectrum feature, we heard from Connor Ward and Dan Jones.
On Sunday 26 May, autistic content creators Daniel Jones, Holly Smith and Connor Ward and parent content creator Kevin Chapman hosted the first ever UK YouTuber panel about the online autistic community at MCM Expo London Comic Con.
In these blogs, Daniel and Connor tell us about their ground breaking panel…
Connor Ward
On Sunday 26 May, Comic Con invited Kevin Chapman, Holly Smith, Daniel Jones and I to host the very first UK YouTuber panel about autism online. We discussed interacting with strangers online while being autistic, ethical considerations about profiting from advocacy and many other points throughout the 45 minute panel.
We worked together to create a panel that would discuss the importance and rise of autistic people’s presence on social media. Dan, Holly and I shared our perspectives as people on the autism spectrum and Kevin shared his thoughts as a family vlogger and parent of Andy, his autistic teenage son. We were all amazed that 15 minutes prior to the panel starting all of the seats had filled and people kept pouring in to stand at the sides. The audience seemed to be mostly made up of autistic people, their parents, carers and friends and a few people who work in the world of social media and content creation. I think the content creators turned up because the profile of autism has risen dramatically in mainstream media in the last few years and they wanted to find out why. We could have filled the same amount of chairs again. As we were not at a convention that was specifically about autism or social media, we were extremely impressed with the turn out.
Towards the end of the panel, we opened up questions to the audience. We had such a range of questions as people were really engaged. This included a question about how it felt for us to be making history with our panel. To answer the question again in this blog, it felt incredible and we are all very aware that the purpose of the panel was bigger than any of us.
We wanted to celebrate how social media has helped so many people in the autistic community who struggle with social isolation feel connected and understood - something that seriously changes lives.
