Meet Tiffany Ferguson, YouTube’s Resident Internet Scholar

On privilege, wielding a platform responsibly, creative burnout, and so much more.

Courtesy of Tiffany Ferguson on YouTube.

To understand the internet, one must first understand its culture. For a long while, that effort was exclusively undertaken by academia and news media–that was until a new legion of content creators imparted upon some fresh wisdom based on their familiarity with the space, adding much depth to what was erstwhile tackled with crude simplicity.

Tiffany Ferguson is one such creator. Once a repository for musings about the challenges of young adulthood, her channel has now become known for the ‘Internet Analysis’ series where the internet’s often-convoluted cultural happenings are rendered less opaque. “I’ve been on YouTube since [around] 2007–2008. ‘Internet Analysis’ as a series, and everything I’ve been doing in the last almost two years, is obviously a lot more recent,” she says. “I’m a media studies major with an emphasis on media analysis and criticism, and I actually started internet analysis a few months before I transferred to my current university and started this major. So it’s all been very relevant to each other.”

At first, Ferguson was skeptical about the idea of turning internet culture analysis into a permanent staple on her channel. “It was kind…