(De)socialised on YouTube?

Recording of a debate at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

Young people are increasingly growing up online. To some, this conjures up images of anti-social boys spending hours on YouTube in their bedrooms or Mum’s basement. It has sinister connotations of incels and rabbit-hole radicalisation. But for some GenZers, YouTube offers a renaissance of online public intellectuals prepared to challenge woke orthodoxies.

For example, increasing numbers of students feel let down by traditional education, dominated by DEI priorities and activist professors, so have embraced the online world as a source of alternative education. They are reacting by identifying with high-profile, often right-wing dissidents who provide an alternative worldview and crucially a wider range of facts and information than the fashionable, but prescriptive cultural theories they are exposed to on campus.

Since the explosion of what the then New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss dubbed the Intellectual Dark Web and the viral embrace of the New Atheists online, long-form podcasts and personality-led interview shows, along with YouTube history and science videos, are increasingly filling a void. And while both young and old are turning to the internet, it plays an increasing role in young people’s view of how to get educated. From personal development and wellbeing to politics, history, philosophy, science and more, there’s something on the internet for everyone’s interest.

Some welcome this as a new era of autodidacts, arguing that it democratises knowledge, makes education more readily available, and provides a way of escaping the ideological capture of institutions. And with crippling tuition fees and an alleged collapse of academic standards at universities, online alternatives can provide the excitement about learning that traditional institutions lack and may put some much-needed pressure on the old guard.

However, others worry about a new ‘Wild West’ online. Yes, YouTube may have popularised Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. But it has also spawned the likes of Andrew Tate, Candace Owens, Bronze Age Pervert and a proliferation of ill-informed conspiracy theorists and false prophets.

What’s more, educational commentators note that a life full of YouTube gurus may be implicitly anti-intellectual. Why even read books when you can listen to a podcast or watch a video that is much more engaging? And while viewers may feel in control of curating what content they are exposed to, algorithmic choices may create echo chambers just as narrow as those bastions of Diversity and Inclusion dogma that users are trying to escape.

But while ‘concerned adults’ may find this world anti-social and worryingly alienating, its adherents praise a sense of a solidarity that comes from this novel shared virtual public sphere just when the offline community seems to be fracturing.

Is the problem with grown-ups who just don’t get it? Can the online world provide a robust virtual intellectual community and genuine knowledge-building, or is it an illusion? Is the online intellectual world the future, or are we throwing the baby out with the bath water by disregarding traditional education?

SPEAKERS
Ada Akpala
writer and commentator; head of content, The Equiano Project

Elliot Bewick
host, The Next Generation; former producer, TRIGGERnometry

Andrew Gold
YouTuber; host, Heretics

Fraser Myers
deputy editor, spiked; host, the spiked podcast

CHAIR
Max Sanderson
assistant managing editor, Guardian