Platform Pedagogy

The limitations and possibilities of Youtube

Youtube is going through a change. You’ll likely have your own views on social media platforms right now, so I’ll avoid boring you with mine; but it’s something like abundance of creators plus AI plus algorithmic populism plus bad economy equals tough times.

But the changing atmosphere has at least goaded me into one of my biannual crises about what I’m doing on Youtube. My hypothesis is that it’s only going to get harder, but that those difficulties present an opportunity to think about how to improve and, I hope, innovate, at least in some minor way.

The working conclusion from my hypothesis is the old adage - during the gold rush, don’t seek the gold, sell the tools. In other words, forget short-term views, popular topics, and trends; give people the tools that will be genuinely useful in their own lives.

That means, I think, creating content that can exist but has genuine democratic use – putting philosophy to practice, helping people think in clearer ways, creating the tools that are useful to the widest set of people, helping people form their own views – rather than just spooning ‘content’ into their mouths while making aeroplane noises.

This is a topic ex-Wisecrack philosopher-in-chief Michael Burns tackled in his latest video about philosophy on Youtube. I recommend (insist!) you go and watch it (with a notepad and a red pen – it must be RED and you must do lots of crossing out and criticism) as it’s the most thoughtful analysis of the limitation and possibilities of pedagogy on Youtube I’ve seen.

Michael explores the tension in doing philosophy on a platform designed to maximise attention, clicks, and ultimately, entertainment. Can meaningful philosophy realistically exist on a platform like Youtube? If it can, how can it escape being entertainment? How can it avoid being designed not just for pedagogy, but for clicks and influence too? That often, watching your favourite educational creator is nothing more than an act of moral superiority – of simply ‘knowing’ the correct ‘take’. Rarely is it about destabilising something in the viewer, of encouraging not passivity but transformation, of creating something new.

I'm constantly torn between these different modes of thinking about a video too; is it my job to transmit? To entertain? To provoke? To give my opinion? When I think about how I personally learn – how I really learn something - it's from actively highlighting, making notes, repetition, re-reading, sitting and thinking about a sentence, drafting, re-drafting, and writing about it. It’s rarely when I’m consuming the text for the first time, let alone when I’m consuming a video.

Of course, the video, interview, or podcast might be a larger part of that process – an introduction, or media consume when I’m too tired to be ‘actively’ thinking. But that’s the point – the tension is always there between passive and active learning.

What I’m trying to think through is how to combine the two.

Borges said that art is fire plus algebra. The great works of art and literature contain something of both the hot and cold. My own fondness for the Romantics comes from this idea of striving for wholeness – to rally against reductive cold rationality and include all aspects of life – the passion, the emotion, the place, the imagination, the visual and audible, the story – to aim for some unreachable approximation of wholeness.

Maybe that’s the best we can do with a video – to try and entertain, be thorough, to educate, to add some art and flair, to destabilise and provoke all at the same time. The problem is, the Borges of the world who can pull that off are rare. Not all of us can create a symphony in every video.

But if you’re doing philosophy specifically, I think Michael is right: If you’re only consuming ‘philosophies’ as topics or philosophers to learn, especially through a video, are you ever doing philosophy? (Of course, this is a problem for the university lecture hall as much as the Youtube channel.)

The latter – doing - is an act, not something to be consumed. But the doing is much harder, much rarer.

A cursory look at how philosophers have tried and failed to define philosophy is informative here.

The consensus as I read it is that philosophy is not a destination, a thing to be learned, a universal to be defined. It is not something you get to and then you’re finished, like a cake to be eaten. It is something done.

Kant said ‘We cannot learn philosophy; for where is it, who is in possession of it, and how shall we recognize it? We can only learn to philosophize.’

And the Canadian philosopher Barry Stroud writes ‘"What is philosophy?" I say, "Don't ask; don't tell." It is a question to be treated, not answered. Trying to answer it in that general form gets you nowhere. You have to look at some particular bit of philosophy, or better still do some philosophy—think about something, and try to get to the bottom of it—and then ask yourself what is going on.’

Of course, most people are contented to learn about philosophy rather than do it. But I think it you destabilise them further they’d acknowledge that it’s in pursuit of some kind of change, at least of mind. Most people want transformation.

Which means the task of philosophy shouldn’t just involve some duplication of knowledge from one mind to another. Instead, it should aim at ‘process’.

Conceptualising this is I think both challenging and necessary – an ideal to move towards. The best I’ve come across in my own reading so far is the French philosopher Pierre Hadot’s conception of philosophy as a ‘way of life’.

Hadot looks at the history of ‘spiritual exercises’ in philosophy. These are very broad, but in their incredible survey of Philosophy as a Way of Life, Michael Ure and Matthew Sharpe write that:

‘In each case, what is at issue is a cognitive, mnemonic, imaginative, rhetorical or physical exercise consciously chosen and undertaken by an agent with a view to the transformative effects the undertaking of this exercise will have upon the practitioner’s way of experiencing, desiring, emoting, or thinking.’

Meaning in Hadot’s formulation it’s a way of acting or thinking – done consciously, with some kind of transformation in mind.

The optimism to take from Hadot (and Borges’ formula) is that there’s an equation where philosophy can be pedagogic, active, entertaining, and popular all at the same time. I think this is why Stoicism is so popular. It’s easy to turn your nose up at the proliferation of Stoic Bros, but the reason is unignorable: Stoicism is an exercise of universal applicability. It’s something not just to be consumed but that you can do (plus unlike class struggle for example, it’s much easier for teenagers to do/practise/destabilise in their bedrooms, along with other things).

Thinking about Hadot’s formulation of spiritual exercise is useful for content producer and consumer alike – like all exercises, they need to be repeated, refined, and perfected. The problem with any form of inactive consumption – on Youtube or elsewhere – is that you’re rarely encouraged to do anything yourself.

Michael invokes Paulo Freire’s banking model of education as depositing ideas, compared to a model that encourages new and critical thought itself. Socrates’ description of himself not as a teacher but a midwife comes to mind, too.

There are no easy answers here. My point is only that destabilising means provoking action of some kind. I could simply say ‘get a notepad and critique everything I say’ but that’s not exactly a subtle innovation on a new medium.

Of course, subtler ways do exist. Take the decision as to whether I should simply transmit a philosopher’s ideas to you as thoroughly and unbiasedly as I can, compared to whether I should add my own spin, criticisms, views, points of contention, and so on. On reading everything up to this point, you might assume that it’s better for me to destable through deconstruction – to give you, the viewer, the confidence to disagree with me and the philosopher I’m covering.

However, there’s also a case to be made that if you get the reputation for not ‘giving the information straight’, as it were, for being biased, overly critical, subjective – then viewers lose confidence in what you’re telling them.

If instead you have a reputation as an impartial transmitter of well-researched, ‘objective’ knowledge, the viewer will have the confidence that they know the subject well and can then form their own opinions, which is arguably more ‘destabilising’ and active than telling them when to ‘critique’.

I have this experience a lot when listening to partisan punditry. Even if I agree with the person, I’m always suspicious of the unconscious choices they’ve made, their biases in reading the data, in what they’re not saying as much as what they are.

In other words, ironically, I find it much more destabilising for my own view of the world to go and get ‘objective’ data from the source or somewhere I can absolutely trust. Then form my own view.

There’s a balance here of course. It’s a tightrope walk I always try to walk in my own videos. I make sure I’ve read the most authoritative secondary sources, add citations as much as possible, add my own view where it seems relevant, but make sure that it’s explicit that it’s my view. Rhetorically, there are points where I can provoke a viewer to think two different readings too. I add story when I want to entice and warn viewers how long the tricky bits will be. Etc, etc.

Ultimately, though, it’s a one-way street, and that’s difficult to overcome.

Michael points out that earlier philosophical texts were dialogues which are much more effective at demonstrating how philosophy can be a dialectical process between people – between Socrates and his interlocutor, for example.

Plato’s point was always that Socrates claimed not to know anything himself, but drew self-knowledge out of Athenians with dialogue – again, the philosopher as midwife. Socrates had the benefit of wandering around being annoying (my favourite anecdote is in the Symposium when Alcibiades goes to sleep and wakes up in the morning to Socrates still droning on). Youtubers do not have the luxury of being able to follow you around your town begging you to do some philosophy with them (I have to say I admire Michael and Jared Henderson’s facilitating of reading groups online as a benefit of supporting their work – it’s an inspiration to those of us who have the fight the urge to sink into solitary hermit-ism).

I do think there is room for innovation here though, and I hope I have the confidence in the future to try. Online video is young and still relatively derivative. But I have no doubt that there are true artists out there that might be able to combine dialogue, fiction, music, pedagogy and entertainment in a way that makes the most out of this new medium – fire plus algebra.

Where I disagree with many commentators is that this is just Youtube problem, a capitalism problem, an attention economy problem. Sure, it’s the form it takes for us right now, but the tension between inaction and action, between active participation and inactive consumption, between being and doing, seems to me to be a universal problem.

In fact, despite all of its flaws and difficulties, Youtube is still a platform that has brought philosophy to more people than any other library in history has. It’s always going to be difficult to make difficult things popular, but at least Youtube affords that possibility.

But I think to gamify the process of pedagogy (Hank Green’s new app), to persuade viewers to get out a notebook, to pause, to think against what I say, to leave questions purposeful unanswered, to add silence (algorithmic-god forbid!), to make a surrealist video half-pedagogy and half purposefully wrong! To create a video that has two ending in two separate videos (I used to love those kid’s adventure books that tells you which page to turn to based on your decision) -

My point is, the internet is in its infancy, and we have still not seen anyone close to an innovate Michelangelo of it – someone who can take the art form somewhere completely new.

Maybe that’ll take a hundred years. But we can at least try and take some tentative steps. The differences between an online video, traditional television, and a text are the key to this. The innovations come from the differences. Online video is a more sophisticated, thicker medium; you can pause, rewind, comment, there is sound, music, colour, personality, use tonality and show multiple meanings at once – this all sounds quite trite but, as Michael pointed to, there is lots of opportunity here. My optimism is that these can be used to enrich a process, rather than turn it into inactive consumption.

The irony in all of this is why I’ve actively responded to Michael’s video. I was mentioned in it by name, and I have to wrestle with whether it was only that highly irregular feature of a video that snowballed into some quasi-philosophical action.

But it was at least in part because I’ve been actively thinking about a similar problem too, and that either way, Michael’s point about some loose community combined with those reflections has compelled me to sit and watch a Youtube video with a notepad in a way I don’t normally do. Maybe I need to start practicing what I preach.

Ultimately, I suppose the takeaway from all of this is reasonably simple. As producers of information, we can often forget that the vast majority are consumers of it. It might be enough to remind people that at least for some of that consumption, pick up a pen, make some notes, and write down your own thoughts, too.