The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer

Who today would argue that YouTube will one day be evaluated in the same category as the printing press or the telegraph? It is quite possible it will be.

All of these factors come together in YouTube, where people upload their digital videos to the internet on a viewing platform that allows for easy search and content aggregation — all on a massive scale.

Imagine a society that has digital cameras and mass broadband internet access available, but no way to search through the videos. Somewhere in there might be exactly what you need, but if all you did was replace the cost of finding someone in your social circles with the cost of finding a needle in a digital haystack, the economics of transmitting ... See more

Massively available video recordings of practitioners in action change this entirely. Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches that were previously cordoned off by personal access. These new points of access range from the specialized trades, where el... See more

Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a ... See more

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeepi... See more