For a brief moment, I was a regular content creator on Youtube. I had christened my channel as Knowledgeably Yours and after a two minute video introducing myself, the first real video I posted on Youtube was a 45 minute video titled "How to become an Astronomer?" And one of the earliest feedbacks that I got from the people who saw the video was "You might lose an audience if you keep making videos these long!". Both because of this feedback and the general limitations of my videography and video editing equipment, most of my subsequent videos were restricted to 10 - 15 minutes of duration. Eventually, the videos stopped, for reasons I shall not go into here, but the theme of "keep them short" appeared in many places for me.
It appeared after this and it also appeared in a retrospective analysis of the various interactions that I had had with many people in the past. One particular interaction that I remembered was with a student who wished to learn a programming concept and had approached me for advice. There was very little advice that I could give him because of the manner in which the question was posed by him - "I wish to learn this but I don't want to learn from a book. I would appreciate if you could point me to some Youtube video, a short and a simple one." My reply to the student was brutal - "Well, it seems you are more interested in declaring to the world that you know something about something rather than truly learning. I am the wrong person to guide you there."
If you care about something, you cannot insist on learning about it in a lazy manner. Maybe you wish to understand how your privacy is at stake because of the changes in the terms and conditions of your favorite social media or messaging platform. Maybe you wish to learn whether a particular change in the tax law affects your investment philosophy in a bitter manner. Maybe you wish to understand a new subject which is likely to become the center stage of your career. Maybe you wish to understand the disease you were unfortunately diagnosed with, recently. It doesn't matter! If the goal is to learn something, you can rule out everything but the most diligent of approaches towards it.
This is different from awareness by the way. You want to be aware of something - you can read a Twitter feed, a casual post on the social media, a short video on Youtube etc. But awareness is not learning. To be aware of data privacy issue is to only not get alarmed when in the next cocktail party, somebody discusses the issue. To learn about data privacy means to have enough information in your hands to form an opinion and take the necessary action or devise the correct strategy in response to it. But it seems like people confuse awareness with learning. You cannot learn anything properly with a single "five minutes read" blog post, a social media post or a Youtube clip.
Whenever I want to seriously learn about something and not merely develop an awareness of it, this is how I personally prefer searching for sources.
Books: Books have the biggest advantage of being detailed, having enough space to build a strong foundation that allows the harder stuff to become more easy to absorb and also plenty of space to guide on how to develop further knowledge.
Courses: A series of lectures covering the topic. They are quite detailed and are especially important when nobody has bothered writing a book that is of sufficient pedagagical quality. If books are hard to read or unavailable, lecture series become a great starting point. Tip: If you do a Youtube search, use the Filters option to search for Playlists as opposed to Videos. And once you find playlists, open them and ensure that they are named sequentially since sometimes playlists are a random collection of related (or unrelated) videos.
Long Videos: For me, personally, a person who is explaining a complex topic in a short video, is merely spreading awareness and this I consider different from teaching. So, I generally use the filters to give me the longest possible videos about a subject. In general these tend to be more detailed and the person making the video cares about explaning something to the audience.
"Long" and "short" as words used to describe durations associated with lectures or videos deserve a bit of elaboration here. For example, an hour video explaining the whole of a programming language is actually quite short. But a 10 minute video explaining only one single concept of a programming language is long. In other words, there is no absolute meaning to the words 'long' and 'short' as used by me here. The meaning is relative to the coverage of the concept in that video.
And I think it is also worth clarifying here that I am not ruling out blog posts, social media and other modalities of acquiring knowledge. I am instead arguing that knowledge comes in different depths. There is the mere awareness which simply enables you to apparently look less stupid when involved in a social gathering where the topic is being discussed. And then there is learning, which is truly empowering. My criticism of the use of shortcut modalities is purely from the endeavour of learning.
Coming back to where we started - my Youtube channel - I take some heart from the fact that my longest video is also my most watched video. There is hope after all!