The rise, and frankly odd popularity of making informational videos from home

There is something fundamentally weird about a person who sits down before their phone to make a teaching video for complete strangers.

Traditionally, the acts of teaching and learning usually occur within groups. The Ancient Greek philosophers were known to stroll around with their students, engaged in dialogue as a means of sharing ideas and facilitating thinking. At least one member of the group probably had more experience and took on the responsibility of guiding the conversation where they thought it needed to go. As the years rolled by we formalized classrooms, decided who could be in them, and this became a primary method for education. In parallel, it was decided that not all learning should be a discussion, and so some classrooms took on the standard lecture format where rote facts and boredom became the norm. The interesting thing about the lecture format is that it does not care or care to be troubled by what the students think.

The environments where this learning took place, if the learning was considered effective, gained notoriety, and thus society saw the arrival of schools, colleges, and universities, and along with it, traditions, ranking systems, and site-based legends.

The digital age has somewhat eroded the need for set physical environments and telecommunications equipment is now used in abundance to send information to the recipients in completely different locations. There are online meetings for discussion and the lecture format can either be delivered through a meeting platform or simply recorded and accessed later. The jury is still out on whether a shared physical learning environment is necessary for learning. Does it matter if the smell of chalk or dry erasers is not infused with the deodorant and skin care products of tormented students attempting to understand why the Grapes of Wrath is important?

The digital age also allowed for the mass proliferation of marketed teachings. Esteemed experts could be filmed casually walking around on a stage with a slideshow visible on a screen at the back, and the image of a contemporary and cutting edge lecture was complete. This borrows from what the market knows about learning environments – traditional images of school and university classrooms, thus lending it some legitimacy. There is a kind of assumed truth by environment, helping to keep an audience engaged, but also permitting the expert, personality dependent, to pass off a healthy dose of opinion as fact. The completion of these talks is also marketed as some kind of trophy or career milestone, allowing the expert or their affiliated institution to promote themselves, gaining more perceived legitimacy and credibility.

The mass sharing of informational and instructional videos has gone a step further and done away with imagery traditionally associated with school. Given the success and the circulation of these videos, the imagery clearly isn’t needed, neither is the acknowledgement of any credentials. This means that the market for information has evolved and for a younger audience where the imagery of traditional classrooms does not mean anything, different tactics are needed to keep their attention and gain their trust.

Much to the surprise of my Gen X-come-Millennial sensibilities, this means pontificating to strangers from the once private location of your car or home is the preferred environment. Perhaps allowing viewers to see around the periphery of your visage to take in your living quarters invites a level of trust, which bleeds over into the perceived quality of the message? If you can see where a person eats and sleeps and no doubt does other things, maybe their perceived humanity translates to a level of honesty? Yet, even given the intense informality of the setting and the tonal sincerity of the voice, the direction of communication is still one way, but the audience perhaps feels that they could talk to this person if they wanted to under other circumstances, and that’s all that matters? Relatability has become the desired method to take our information and thus gain our truths.

I am sure it is a product of my generation, but I have always felt that one’s private life is special. You interact with the public sphere of life, but then you have your private refuge to recharge in a pressure-free environment. To sacrifice the private in order to gain trust, followers, disciples, etc. just seems sad. However, maybe it does follow a logical progression that social media and telecommunications dissolves what privacy we do have, in addition to it becoming harder and harder for the younger generations to own their own private property in the first place. This makes it easy to sacrifice any they do have.

So here we are. Listening to people mixing their pain with their understanding of life, and sharing it with us from rooms that were initially designed to provide them with privacy while fulfilling basic human needs.

How relatable.