Liberal Arts Majors, You Should Know Tyler Oakley
I heard the groans of other literature students as I walked into the fishbowl, a computer lab classroom thoughtfully named because of its wide window walls. Unlike their writing studies counterparts, literature students will likely have to take just one class in the fishbowl: Senior Capstone. The fishbowl isn’t what students were groaning over last semester. Students were dreading a professor we’ll call Dr. G, a professor so notorious at our school that students know to delay graduation in order to avoid her classes. Dr. G’s classes are heavily focused on rhetorical studies and new media, but many literature students are comfortable as grinding cogs in a machine of the old college tradition: read a book, take a quiz, draft midterm and final research papers on Word Processor.
As much as some professors try to beat the revision process of writing into us, the problem with the college machine is that it doesn’t often grade students to reflect on their own purpose or audience, and sometimes the grade is the only thing that matters when one is cocooned by the ivory tower of academia. If writing is a cognitive task, the machine doesn’t require students to think about thinking. The goal of writing in some classes is just a finished product, the midterm or final paper for which fifty percent of the grade may rely. For a research paper on something like Ovid’s anti-Aeneas, there is a comfortable audience of one — the medieval literature professor and keeper of the grade book. However much this may benefit the aspiring Shakespeare scholar, the rest of us are wondering how to gain readership in a world where books and media flood the market. The voices of our generation are so saturated, that I sometimes feel like screaming at the top of my lungs. If my audience could hear me now, I’d tell them this: if you’re an aspiring writer, academic or otherwise, you should know a man named Tyler Oakley.
Oakley is a famous YouTuber whose biographical book, Binge, was released at the end of last year. This communications major-turned-internet sensation found an audience in young adults across the globe. Oakley offers personal insight and advice to young people, and he does so in a candid and hilarious voice. The internet offers a resounding democratic consensus. People like Oakley. I like Oakley.
I didn’t discover Oakley on YouTube. Instead, I was working on black Friday morning last year at Barnes and Noble during my initial discovery. Each year, we take down our bestsellers display at the front of our store to feature signed books by some of the year’s most influential writers. This year, we had signed editions of books by presidential candidates Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, best selling authors Michael Connelly and James Patterson, Pulitzer Prize winners Anthony Doerr and Donna Tartt. Finally, we had books by internet celebrities Connor Franta and Tyler Oakley.
When the doors opened on black Friday morning, a rush of screaming girls mobbed the front of store displays. In minutes, our stock of Tyler Oakley’s book sold. The entire morning, young adults and teens asked me if there were any more of Oakley’s signed book anywhere in the store. The answer was no. Pulitzer prize winning books remained on shelves through the weekend.
Although he uses YouTube as a medium to reach his audience, Oakley is a writer. He’s essentially the new modernist writer who doesn’t put high culture and art on a pedestal. His message is for anyone who will listen, and he makes his message accessible to the society where attention is the greatest deficit by communicating through brief and colorful videos on his YouTube channel. The truth is that writing is a game of twenty questions, but the most important questions are: Who’s my audience? What do they care about? How can I reach them?
Maybe it comes more naturally to him, but Oakley’s exceptional at the game of twenty questions.
As liberal arts students and aspiring writers, perhaps we’ve been too loyal to the pen and paper, too loyal to Word Processor, too loyal to the machine that built us up. We need more professors like Dr. G, who teaches us to teach ourselves from the bottom-to-top knowledge web that the internet spins. Oakley can be part of this educational outlet. We can reach out to individuals like him and other YouTubers to find out how to inform the audience we wish to reach. We need to reflect on our writing process, and we need to reflect on the medium which will best allow readers to hear our messages. Oakley uses YouTube to reach his audience, but this is just one outlet for writers on the internet. If we consider our purpose and audience more, perhaps our voices can be heard across the muddle.
