The real purpose of online content. Community.
Rethinking online video, from marketing to community, with Associate Professor David Craig.
At the bottom of every internet rabbit hole there should be an academic, shining the light and leading the way. After all, academics are in the business of knowledge generation. Especially knowledge of the weird and wonderful variety. But it’s not uncommon for academics, and especially the media and communication and marketing teams charged with supporting them, to think that their work is too niche, too abstract or too complex to connect with an audience outside of other academics in their discipline. That’s why academics spend so much time at conferences. Engaging with their community. But it isn’t true, that nobody outside of an academic’s discipline is interested in their obsession.
“There are almost an infinite number of communities of interest that share a curiosity about the world in ways that others don’t.” According to Associate Professor David Craig1, the internet is rich with “communities of interest around new ideas, new knowledge, new identity, new forms of engagement, new sets of relationships, new questions of the world.” There is incredible potential for academics to connect their work, in truly meaningful ways, with these communities of interest.
If only it were that easy.
Check out the amazing trailer for Craig’s book, Apocalypse Television.
Considering how academics might share their work and engage with online communities, in Craig’s view “I think academics are actually at a unique disadvantage.” He continues, referring to social media and online content platforms, “the sort of skills that we found work best at online community organising, using the affordances of these technologies are not the sort of skills that are particularly valued or embraced in the academe, not yet anyway.” Craig, who studies creator culture and social media entertainment, is a former media executive turned scholar. And he is interested in creators’ abilities to bring ideas to new audiences.
This is something academics would benefit from doing. Hugely.
“Absolutely, unequivocally, academic scholars, researchers, thought leaders, philosophers need to harness whatever mechanisms and tools we have to intervene out in the public sphere to position ourselves as platformed public intellectuals.”
But, unfortunately, “These aren't skills, necessarily, that are embraced or taught in the institution.” That is, sharing knowledge with non-academic audiences and engaging with broader communities. “There's no literacy being taught in the academic space.” He continues, “And it hasn't bode well for scholars who are hoping to best harness those tools and resources in a way that can help promote knowledge.” This is to the great detriment of the academe, and the ability to fulfil the full potential of universities in our contemporary society.
Sharing knowledge with non-academic audiences isn’t a priority, “that's not the nature of the game.”2 However, an unwillingness and “The inability to do so comes at a very obvious peril as we're witnessing now, which is a spectacular level of mistrust by the public and citizens and institutions by virtue of the fact they have no idea what it is that goes on in the academe.” Craig continues, “And it's left for them to only conspire and make assumptions and engage in all sorts of conspiracy theories that has led to this now vast turn against the virtues and values of higher education around the world.”
“We have, in many ways, been, as academics, responsible for our own plight in this situation. It doesn't help that we have operated in what I call, in the academic panopticon3. We've been sitting up in the ivory tower, not, fairly indifferent to who reads our content or how they might read our content, placing most of our knowledge behind extraordinarily expensive firewalls, but even then making, putting our content and our research only in dialogue with other academics but not with the public.”
Craig reflects on the disconnect between scholarship and the public, “Well, no one ever understands what we're saying half the time. It's all code speak to secure our reputations in the academe, to get tenure, to get credential, to get promoted.” He continues, “That's how, the way the academe has been designed.” According to Craig, “There's no going up the ladder unless you are putting your work in conversation with other academics. But it comes at the expense of broader public intellectualism… that means we’ve essentially cordoned off ourselves, ghettoised our knowledge.” With a public sentiment that academics are entitled elites with little to offer society (Ford & Jandric, 2019)4, and while institutions remain unwilling to address this disconnect, a door was opened for a new public intellectual to enter the media landscape.
“There is a much broader appetite out there in the world for knowledge. And that is evidence through the work of creator culture.”
It is content creators, on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch etc., who are meeting a thirsty publics’ want for knowledge. And not only meeting it, but constantly exceeding publics’ expectations.
It could be argued that universities are trying to compete in this space. Every institution produces video content to promote its researchers and their work. Some of this material does succeed in finding an audience, one example is Monash University’s A Different Lens. But, generally speaking, universities and their academics are failing to connect their knowledge with online audiences because they completely miss the point of social media entertainment as opposed to content marketing5.
“Creator labor is sometimes conflated with social media marketing but these are critically different. The former is about building, engaging, and monetizing an online community around your knowledge, interests, values, ideology, politics, and identity. The latter is about harnessing platforms to promote and sell a firm’s products or services.”6
According to Craig, “It’s not about the content necessarily… it's about identifying, aggregating, engaging, building, harnessing, growing, and developing relationships with a larger community out there that shares about, shares an interest in knowledge and understanding and making meaning of the world.” University content fails to connect with audiences due to a traditional media mindset. Video is a tool of promotion. That’s why broader public engagement on social media and online content platforms is not acknowledged or appreciated: a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose.
The typical approach to research video content, where academics are “taking their research and putting it online”, misses the point of online platforms. “The affordances of social media are the social, not just the media. It's not just about transmitting knowledge, it's about building and engaging an online community.” So, instead of a tool of promotion, video, and all forms of creative media, must be understood as modes of engagement. And content must be created accordingly to meet the needs, the wants and desires of online audiences.
But, beyond issues of literacy, for Craig, “I see a spectacular level of contempt on the part of academics for people who know how to harness media and know how to produce and generate content.” Many academics wilfully reinforce ivory tower stereotypes, with the attitude that they are smarter than content creators7. While that might be true, a sophisticated content creator producing high value content and connecting with large audiences is having a far greater impact on knowledge and understanding than an academic publishing papers for their colleagues.
Considering the success of knowledge content on platforms like YouTube compared to the traditional dissemination of academic research, “they're presented in a way that is more accessible, that is in the vernacular, that we all understand, that uses all of the tools of videography and vlogging and all the modalities of live and recorded and imagery… to continuously improve the way in which that knowledge is transmitted in a way that makes communities even more curious and engaged.” Unlike academics, content creators are driven to innovate how knowledge is shared.8
How content creators actually create, their “modes of expression”, their use of narrative, visuals and sound, “in a way that, again, is designed first and foremost, not to impress, but to engage, to get people to pay attention, to get people to be curious, to get them to then want to stay and listen to more, to like and subscribe and comment and share.” So long as universities fail to understand the purpose of online video, so long as they remain stuck in a traditional media mindset unwilling to embrace creative innovation, academics’ content simply won’t meet the expectations of online audiences9.
“There are so many brilliant people out there who are creators, who are attempting to bring to their community a whole raft of complex ideas of the world.”
Making special reference to the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT, Craig reflects on the academics he knows, “who I happen to think are some of the most spectacularly brilliant people I will have ever met in my lifetime. And it's just frustrating to me to know that so many other people aren't even aware of their work because it's been cordoned off.”
From your colleagues at the DMRC, thanks David.
Check this out if you’re interested in making better research videos.
“Emmy-nominated David Craig is an expert in Hollywood, Chinese, and social media industries; a television historian; and a pioneer in the field of creator studies at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism”.
More from Craig, “Academics are increasingly being quantified, whether through Web of Science or Google Scholar, for how many places and ways they are being cited, their work is being cited. And that sort of quantification ends up having a knock-on effect across the entire academe, which is people gaming the system and finding ways to get as many citations as they can or publishing certain sorts of work that they know is more likely to generate a lot of interest. Even if it's dislikes. Even if they're being cited because they came up with some really bad ideas.”
Read a little more about the history and social function of the panopticon: “Michel Foucault, a French intellectual and critic, expanded the idea of the panopticon into a symbol of social control that extends into everyday life for all citizens, not just those in the prison system (Foucault 1970). He argues that social citizens always internalize authority, which is one source of power for prevailing norms and institutions.” Academics’ collective and deeply internalised need to publish, and their publications as reflections of worth.
From the article, “Academic workers in various fields—including beyond the hu- manities—want to make their work accessible and relatable to the public in different ways. This is likely egged on by recent attacks on higher education, which are often justified by presenting the university as bastions of elitist and detached liberals with little to nothing to offer society.”
One academic who has a clear understand of online content is Unlearning Economics. An academic economist, I believe formerly of London School of Economics and Political Science, with over 210,000 subscribers and 6,500,000 views on his YouTube channel. It is clear, from his videos’ engagement, that Unlearning Economics has found a community of interest that come to his videos to make meaning of the world. The other important distinction to make here is that a marketing video’s purpose should be to sell a product. Such as a course. The issue is generic reputation type researcher videos that have no clear purpose. Unless an institution has a product or service to sell, a marketing campaign to support, there is a lot to learn from creator culture to understand how to connect ideas with audiences. But, there’s another thought from Craig, how institutions might leverage leanings from creator culture for to achieve marketings’ aim, “But I think we will see a rapid change in the very near future as increasingly more and more students are making decisions about where to study, not based on the school, but on the people. And so the more that people can position themselves as thought leaders of online communities, the more likely you might get, I think we'll start to see more students enrolling in institutions for that reason.”
An additional point Craig makes about labour, “Creator labor would be difficult for academics to do on the side, like gig labor. For most successful creators, it’s a full-time occupation, if arguably more of an avocation, that demands a tremendous amount of time and dedication, plus skill and strategy.” At the same time, from many conversations with academics, universities’ marketing and communication departments are not meeting the needs of academics to engage with non-academic audiences.
As recently discussed with Associate Professor Dallas Rogers. According to Rogers, “Academics think they’re better than the Jack Tooheys of the world. I’m smarter than Jack Toohey. I’ve been researching housing for twenty years. I know more about the problem than he does. Maybe. But he’s got a bigger audience and he’s having more impact than you are.”
From Craig, “My suspicion is they’re well aware that what the key to their success isn’t just simply that they know a lot and they figured out how to communicate that online. I think their key to their success, probably, also has to do with their ability to use many platforms to reach a much broader community, to get them to engage in many different ways.” And that’s why typical university videos, even very good ones, fail to connect with audiences. It isn’t about being a good piece of content or not, but giving audiences what they actually want. Education, meaning making with entertainment, and also a sense of community.
And online audiences don’t care about prestige metrics like citations and grant funding.