The Medium is the Video Essay

Video essayists’ blend of creativity and critique highlights how technology shape the stories we tell—and how we tell them.

Editor’s Note: It’s been a minute since I’ve hit “send” on this newsletter. I’ve been off focusing on spinning up my freelance biz and launching my new column at Every, Working Overtime. (If you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s where I’m exploring all the big, thorny questions about work, technology, and meaning that keep me up at night. Highly recommend.)

That said, this newsletter isn’t going anywhere. I still want The Curiosity Gap to be a space where I can share the thoughts and ideas rattling around in my brain about media, marketing, technology, and culture—plus, whatever obsessions are currently lighting up my corner of the Internet.

Thanks for sticking around, and as always, I’d love to hear from you—what’s been occupying your curiosity lately? Hit reply, and let’s chat.

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I’ve been going down YouTube rabbit holes, as one does when one is bored, single, semi-employed, and preparing for a snowstorm. It’s taken a bit of an Ozian twist, what with my ongoing obsession with Wicked, and after a friend mentioned the 1985 Disney movie Return to Oz in our chat, what should pop up in a bit of creepy, tech-enabled serendipity but a video essay with the distinctly YouTube-ian title, “Return to Oz is an Absolute Nightmare.”

I start to watch, and pretty quickly a familiar feeling settles in. It’s the feeling you get when you know you’re about to watch a piece of good media: something that will make you smarter, or more informed, or maybe just something that will scratch a particular itch in your brain. In this case, the particular itch is video essays.

I’m interested in media and technology and the intersection of the two in general, but I’ve latched onto video essays in particular in the last ten-odd years. They’re the kind of thing I would get a PhD to study—if I were so delusional as to go to grad school at this stage of my life. Not only do I find them entertaining and interesting in their own right—if I step back and look at them through the lens of media and cultural criticism, they’re a great example of how technology, media, and markets shape each other.

First YouTube enables this direct-to-viewer model, which spins up a whole ecosystem of new genres, from family vlogs to unboxing videos to beauty tutorials. Then in 2007, YouTube unleashes revenue share, and a business model that was previously reserved for large media operations (advertising) becomes accessible to these small creators. Meanwhile, an ecosystem of new tools, also internet-native (see: Patreon and Kickstarter) emerges specifically to support this new market. There are wrinkles in this model, some of which I’ve written about in the past. But suddenly, “YouTube creator” becomes viable as a livelihood. Some–not many, but some–creators are able to spin up entire businesses (or, in the case of Vlogbrothers’ Hank and John Green, a series of businesses) around their YouTube presence. Ethical and legal complications emerge, as they are wont to do in situations involving the Internet, media, celebrity, and human frailty, let alone the four combined. But for better and for worse, YouTube evolves into a media, culture, and business force on a level with TV.

Among the genres that emerge is the video essay. Creators combine history, philosophy, cultural criticism, or whatever they happen to be interested in with the capabilities of video—also made accessible by software—to create these blends of critical analysis, commentary, and Internet culture. It’s an entire subset of people who might, in another timeline, be university professors, deconstructing Twilight through the lens of gendered norms of desire or running down the case against crypto, on the Internet, because they have the ideas and they have the tools.

And the even wilder part is, it finds an audience. Dan Olson’s takedown of crypto, Line Goes Up, has been viewed over 16 million times as of this writing. Hbomberguy’s video about plagiarism on YouTube has been viewed 33 million times. Are these Super Bowl numbers? No, but they’re respectable—especially when you consider they’re run as solo or small-team operations.

Then, you combine video essayists, who are building audiences, with another distinctly digital phenomenon: Internet fandom. Entire cultures spring up surrounding certain creators and groups of creators. John and Hank Green, whose Vlogbrothers channel also back to 2007, have Nerdfighteria, a fan community that, from what I understand sprung up organically and has been tapped by Hank and John to do everything from launch products to take down corrupt pricing models in the pharmaceutical industry. There’s “BreadTube,” a loose configuration of video essayists, some of whom know each other, but that (again, from what I can tell) was essentially crowd-coined by fans on the Internet. There are video essayist subreddits, there’s video essayist gossip and drama. And it’s all mediated and enabled by these distinctly 21st-century tools.

Of course, there are perils and pitfalls inherent in this model. There are no fact-checkers on this content, there are no peer reviews. The video essayists I admire are rigorous about consulting credible sources and citing them on the screen; but as hbomberguy points out in “Plagiarism and YouTube,” not all video essayists are as diligent. Not to be cynical about the state of media literacy in our day and age, but how many viewers of YouTube think or care about that? There’s no real accountability to truth apart from individual conscience and, potentially, canceling. Then again, I guess that’s more or less true of conventional media as well.

When I was in undergrad, one of my professors, in the midst of talking me out of going to grad school, said something that has stuck with me ever since: “You don’t have to be a professor to live a life of the mind.” Video essays prove that that’s absolutely true–for the people who create them and the people who watch them. In another era, the sharp critiques and deep dives of video essayists might have been confined to classrooms, lecture halls, or academic journals—spaces inaccessible to many. YouTube’s direct-to-viewer model has torn down those walls, allowing anyone with a good idea, some editing software, and a bit of determination to create something meaningful and get that something seen.

At their best, video essays democratize intellectual discourse. They invite us to think critically about the media we consume, the stories we tell ourselves, and the cultural forces shaping our world. They show that rigorous analysis doesn’t have to be dry or inaccessible—it can be creative, engaging, even funny. They remind us that media isn’t just something we passively consume; it’s something we actively shape–more so now than ever before.

Video essays may seem like a niche corner of YouTube, but they’re also a microcosm of something bigger: the ongoing evolution of media, driven by technology and fueled by human curiosity.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to watch Dan Olson eviscerate crypto for the twentieth time.