An Explainer Explainer

Here’s what you need to know about explainers.

During the 2010s, the online world evolved at what felt like a snail’s pace to me. There had been an enormous explosion during the 1990s, when I was first exposed to AOL and then the likes of Netscape Composer, Geocities, and Webcrawler. Social media and the smartphone cropped up during the late 2000s, and then everything just sort of incrementally evolved for a while.

It was during this apparently slow leg of our racing, exponentially accelerating journey toward ever-faster, ever-better technology, that explainers first became popular. I say “apparently slow” because this is when the groundwork for the AI revolution we’re currently experiencing was being laid.

Meanwhile, the world was getting ever-more complex. The 2010s saw a massive rise in business investment, as the world crept slowly back out of the deepest recession in 80 years. All this complexity made people like me very curious—we began to realize that we could find answers to questions we never would have thought answerable.

One important way I found loads of answers during the 2010s was with explainers. In between books, audio books, and full documentaries, I discovered that they gave me a great deal of information about a particular subject in a very short time.

These articles or videos basically followed a similar format. They assume you’re more of a general knowledge person with little to no knowledge of the subject at hand, and they fill you in like you’re a CEO or something. In other words, explainers give you a high-level overview of a topic in the shortest time possible.

Unlike a deep dive for experts, the explainer gives you context. This includes a little bit about why you should even care about this in the first place, something I’ve found to be very important for me personally. If I don’t really know why I should care about a thing, I’m going to focus somewhere else.

If you’re writing about something only a few people know about, there are serious limitations insofar as how much feedback you can get. The conversation necessarily stays small so you don’t have ill-informed people weighing in and asserting silly things, but what if there was some way to inform more people efficiently, so more folks could be in on the conversation?

That’s exactly what an explainer tries to do. You kind of level up from zero to one, knowing just enough to want to learn more… or maybe just a little knowledge is enough for you on this particular subject. I’m not judging!

Of course, everything we come up with that’s any good (like explainers) comes with the other edge of the sword. Any time you’re trying to take a very complex subject and distill it down to a few words and phrases, you run the risk of oversimplification. You lose nuance and important context really easily.

An explainer on a particular subject can vary depending on what the creator wants you to see. In other words, you might see a very biased presentation of the material, just as you might with longer-form stuff.

You might also get what’s often referred to as listicles. I positively love this word—it immediately draws your attention to how silly these lists actually are when you get down to it. Listicles are really just glorified lists with a little text to fluff them up, so it’s generous to call them articles.

You know the type of article I mean. Titles might be something like 3 Things You Didn’t Know About Explainers, 10 Things Being in a Punk Band Taught Me, or 5 Surprising “Laws” that Behave Like Laws of Nature (But Aren’t!).

Explainers suffer from this same phenomenon: they need to get clicks and eyeballs at the end of the day, and they are willing to go pretty far just to get them.

With all their flaws, I still find explainers to be very helpful, particularly if I’m learning about a subject for the first time. From there, I can dive deep into my own research, or find an interesting book or book summary for a follow-up. Then, next steps might be me writing about it (and forcing myself to be sure I have all the details right before publishing), or maybe just talking it over with some friends or partners.

How about you? Meet me in the comments and let’s swap recommendations!