Get This On Video
We live in a golden age of YouTube video essays. You are highly likely to find at least one essay on YouTube about any cultural icon, piece of media, recent or ancient historical event, or theoretical concept that you take an interest in.
Credit to Trish Rooney at Inside Hook
These videos are essentially well-researched papers that stand out from the ones you might have been assigned in college due to one key factor: video essayists can make these videos about absolutely any subject they please and present them in whatever way they please. The rise of well-produced video essays has ushered in a new approach to education and entertainment by masterfully merging the two fields into one piece of content.
The main aspect of video essays that makes them so popular is that they’re easily accessible and consumable. Academia is built on the privatization of knowledge; the mental image we tend to picture when we think of "education" is sitting in a classroom and listening to a teacher explain a concept to us. Classrooms are inherently exclusive and are designed to contain only a certain number of people at certain hours on certain days of the week. In a college setting, this exclusivity is also tied to finances. A formal education is only accessible to those who can afford to buy it.
YouTube essays overturn this model of learning in so many ways. Firstly, they transfer the role of educator from a certified teacher or professor in a direct position of power to social media influencers, people outside the realm of academia. The internet phenomenon of parasocial relationships fosters a feeling of personal connection between content creators and their audiences, allowing viewers to feel a sense of camaraderie with the YouTubers who make the essays they watch. Learning about a subject through a video essay feels more like learning through osmosis via social interaction rather than staring up at a lecture podium. This departs from both the sense of elitism that accompanies standardized education and the imbalanced dynamic between degree-holding professors and degree-seeking students.
Secondly, video essays make education more readily attainable for more people. YouTube is completely free for anyone with internet access and a computer or phone. This still leaves room for unfair discrepancies—what about people who don’t have access to those tools?—but it significantly widens the scope of who can obtain the information they’re interested in. You don’t have to attend an institution of higher learning to be a part of a social conversation regarding these subjects; the information you seek is always mere moments away and at your fingertips.
Credit to @elleliteracy's YouTube page
Thirdly, video essays can demystify confusing concepts and make them more readily comprehensible. In an interview with YouTuber Shanespeare, video essayist @elleliteracy on YouTube refers to the rise of video essays as “a way of democratizing academia.” She praises essays for the way they simplify lofty and intimidating concepts and “explain [them] in very easy language.” You don’t need to already possess a background of knowledge on a particular subject in order to learn about the global history of neoliberalism, or the Library of Alexandria, or the pointillist art of George Seurat, on your own. You don’t need to watch a drab documentary to learn about these things, either.
Granted, because video essays can be about anything, they often are not about traditional academic subjects. The majority of the most-viewed video essays focus on popular culture, social issues, or an intersection of the two. At the same time, it can be argued that there is immense value in essayists' ability to synthesize their knowledge of cultural and social trends into approachable works of scholarship. By focusing on that which academia often does not, video essayists can generate consciousness, conversation, and interest within their viewership regarding subversive and progressive topics that may not propagate social norms, prompting their audience to open their minds to different possible ways of looking at the world.
As video essayists subvert widespread norms surrounding education, they rewrite unspoken social rules regarding what learning can and can’t look like, making information more free and easy to immerse oneself in than ever before.
