What I Learned From YouTube (10 Years Ago)

considering a still largely unsatisfied desire for substantive engagement with ideas that drives the work I do

In the course of doing a search on an unrelated topic, an article I wrote in LinkedIn ten years back came up. I clicked on it, and discovered I’d written a piece that on the whole I still agree with, and perhaps is even more relevant now than it was back then. So I thought perhaps it might be of interest to my readership here. Below is the piece as published a decade ago:

Recently, I got invited to the YouTube Creator Community - essentially a set of interesting forum boards focused on all things YouTube, with a few (elsewhere available) creator tools mixed in - and one of the most interesting prompts was entitled "What YouTube Taught Me". Interesting for several different reasons...

The assumption that the platform itself somehow "taught" its content-producers is by itself rather interesting. It's true, as Marshal McLuhan observed generations ago, that at least in certain respects "the medium is the message", so that an astute observer of how content gets produced, posted, shared, commented upon, and so forth can draw some useful and far ranging inferences about this new media format. In this case, however (and this is the case for every online platform I can think of) the medium exists as it does because there is an organization, a company (in this case, YouTube, owned by Google) shaping, forming, and conditioning it. A lot more could be written about that. . . . Who's doing the "teaching" here? And what does "teaching" mean? Fodder for follow-up conversations here. . . .

I've reformulated the question in a more active way that restores the agency to us content producers, euphemistically termed "partners," who actually make possible YouTube's official raison-d'etre (housing and making accessible video content), and who further its other one (making money, and lots of it). What did we learn from YouTube? Quite a lot of interesting answers on that thread, many of which had to do with negotiating the strange new interpersonal world of comments. . . again a topic ripe for further reflection in later posts.

Here though, I'd like to write and reflect a bit more about what I myself learned, since I think the main point it turns upon may be of considerable general interest. And I'll frontload that point. It's this: there's a strong, deep, and widespread desire out there that is either not being met at all, or being met poorly, by many of our institutions and media. It's a desire at its essence for substantive intellectual engagement and content. And those who can speak to, let alone satisfy, that desire are primed to prosper.

There are a lot of forms such engagement can take. As a trained philosopher - someone who spent a bit over a decade intensively studying philosophical texts under the tutelage of others, and now another decade and a half doing so on my own - and as a teacher of, and researcher in, philosophy, my mode of engagement understandably consists in large part simply in taking difficult, complex, often inaccessible philosophical texts from our millennia-long canon and making some of the key ideas accessible to today's not-necessarily-academic, but educated and literate public.

To be quite honest, it took quite a bit of persuasion on the part of my then-fiancee (now wife), Andi - who is much more of an optimist and technological pioneer than I'll ever be! - for me to even consider recording and uploading my class lectures to YouTube, let alone shooting videos outside of class, for a world-wide audience. I had a lot of ready excuses: I wasn't a "big", i.e. recognizable (or teaching at a recognizable place), "name". My videos would be raw, minimally edited, low-tech. They were far too long, according to the then-current educational "experts" (who claimed, incorrectly, that anything over 5 minutes would lose audiences' attention). Who would possibly want to watch me teaching a class from some low-tier college?

As it turned out (and my story is not really an exceptional one in this respect) thousands of viewers scattered all over the world. That's who would watch it (actually, I've got several million views now). Students at other institutions, struggling with the material (and less interested or competent instructors), watched my videos to write their papers, pass their exams, or even just to understand what their class was supposed to be about. Some instructors (and later, institutions) began to reference, link to, even incorporate my videos into their own courses. These academically-located people, however, were just the tip of the iceberg.

I would estimate that the majority of my viewers at any given time (except perhaps around finals weeks) are not people who are currently enrolled at, or teaching at, academic institutions. Instead, they are that amorphous class of "lifelong learners". That includes everybody from recent or not-so-recent retirees looking for something interesting, something with some "bite", to occupy their minds to younger people, working and unable to afford traditional college, to people in rural areas far away from academic institutions but with an internet connection, to would-be-students in the third world who for one reason or another simply don't have access to a decent education.

That's where that desire - a genuine, palpable hunger - most resides, and when given the opportunity, appears. For a philosopher - at least one who pays attention to the classics - that's no surprise. Aristotle observed that all human beings by nature - human nature - desire to know, not just to be passively accept information in the format institutions and media deem best to grant them, but to actively dialogue, to hear lectures and ask questions, to mull over matters, to be treated as full members of the old Republic of Letters rather than just as charity cases. It is is this universal desire to know that Aristotle located the origins of philosophy.

Epictetus, for his part, highlighted a different and equally valid motive - being confronted with the conflicts of accounts, opinions, perspectives, and even (when you can get them) arguments, human beings tend to want to sift through who is on track to the truth, and who is figuratively full of crap.

I don't want to be seen as simply detracting from the vast web of our currently existing academic institutions, public libraries, media companies and platforms - occasionally, they do offer some excellent intellectually engaging fare to the general public. Most often though, there's a gigantic divide between those privileged enough to enjoy the rather rarified atmosphere of academia (even though in many cases, this is more of an artificial, rather than organic environment), and those who get the "intellectual" products that trickle down to them.

Again, not a blanket condemnation, since there's some decent aspects to this - but "Three Minute Philosophy", as slick and cheeky as it can be, just does not satisfy anyone who really wants to know anything about the subjects or thinkers it briefly ranges over. And the occasional public presentation, condescending to hoi polloi by the typical university lecturer, tends more to stress how out of touch academics are than anything else.

On the part of the commercial media, we get stuff that's all too dumbed down, and quite frankly, schlocky (I'm looking at you History Channel, but not just singling you out!) On the part of the universities and colleges, we get (sometimes) great stuff, but usually just for a select few (not, e.g. streamed, or video-recorded) lucky enough to be there.

You know where the real awareness lies about just how many people really do want substantive intellectual engagement, though? Talk to public librarians. Talk specifically to those doing adult programming for their libraries. You'll find out that most of them really get it. And if you've got anything interesting to offer, they'll gladly bring you in do conduct a workshop, lead a class, give a talk. . .

YouTube is, in a certain way, the flip side of that gigantic, uncoordinated complex network of public libraries. It's a digital repository of knowledge, and everything else (well not everything - fortunately, for porn, you've got to go to other, seedier, areas of the internet), placed in audio-visual format. It's also - at this point in time - an unfinished project, an open frontier. If you build it - or rather if you film and upload it, and it's worth watching - they will come.

I get requests enough for what videos people would like me to shoot next that, if even if I happened to be bankrolled by some foundation, and didn't have to earn a living, I still would be hard pressed to meet the demand - and that's just those who take the time to actually articulate their desires!

So long story short, what did I learn from my now-five-years spent creating, uploading, and curating videos on YouTube? I'll put it in an even shorter, still-more-to-the-point way:

People want the real deal, intellectually speaking. They're not getting it. If you can give it to them, they're going to watch you, and they're going to tell everyone else to watch you. So, if you've got anything of genuine intellectual content to offer, now is the time to put it out there. . .