making the internet thoughtful: a new movement
Lately I’ve been delighted online. Here and there I have been stumbling across people with quite a prominent following, but the videos they are making are different.
Sort of.
In some ways they remind me of the very beginnings of YouTube, before millennials learnt clickbait and fast editing.
But these are a totally new breed of creative. They are intellectuals, academics and thinkers. They are not harnessing the internet to turn it into an online education brand like the Green Brothers. These are thought makers. I would consider them true essayists.
Tell me why I sat and watched this young man lecture me for an hour and a half on Old English Literature and Anglo Saxon Heroes? Because it was excellent! I always wanted to study English Literature at Oxford or Cambridge and here Frederick is showing me how to think about the literature I’ve always been fascinated by and understand how history affects my understanding of it.
Josh Czuba’s videos recently found me. He popped up in my YouTube for you feed. As someone who has made videos on writing morning pages and writing by hand I was offered his video entitled “How I write for 4+ hours a day with no distractions.” I want that. I want to spend all my spare time in tactile creativity. Not scrolling or being frustrated with a client. Not only does Josh talk about his own writing practise and method, but he performs his short stories. No, he doesn’t read them off the page. He performs them. Recites them. The way stories are meant to be told. A modern day Charles Dickens.
It’s not just the content of their videos that I take such joy in, but the way the videos are presented: Often they speak straight to camera, unedited, low lighting or simply window lighting. The emphasis is on the speaker. And these are really great orators. They are engaging, thoughtful and provocative.
I recently became utterly obsessed with Isabel, Agent 28 also known as invinciblevenus on TikTok. She came screaming across my feed with her arresting ‘Things you can do to get CONFIDENT!” - a video lasting SEVEN whole minutes (a long video for TikTok although clearly that is starting to change)
As you can see from the thumbnail, she looks like she was about to go out, coat zipped up to her chin, leaning forward to have a quick chat with you before she leaves the house. It feels very personal. Tagged as ‘your older sister’ she really comes across that way. Over 12 years her senior I eagerly listen to all her advice as if she was my older sister.
She’s an academic, a student, a teacher and a mother with a lot of opinions and topics to cover. Everything from how to study for exams, to choosing good friendships, to discussions on whether choosing an excellent school is classist.
Ironically, millennials, one of the first adopters of the online video vlogging world were often the ones who fell into a hybrid way of editing and presenting on video that falls short these days. Traces of the traditional television voice and persona can be seen in the likes of PewDiePie and Zoella, where they carry something they watched growing up but equally were trying to be more casual, more real, more authentic. I’m the same. I can see it when I watch myself on videos I make for YouTube. I am performing. For us that style was casual. One step away from a BBC Breakfast TV presenter.
These new creatives are not performing. They are not being told how to be on camera and they wouldn’t care if they were. Their confidence is reassuring. They are secure in their thoughts but not just their thoughts, the knowledge that they are not stuck in their ideas but are developing all the time. They remind me of a wise and weathered lecturer taking a tutorial with 4 or 5 students gathered round discussing subjects that won’t necessarily make anyone rich but will probably change the world.