YouTube Put the ‘You’ in ‘Ubiquitous’
It seems inevitable and permanent now, as much a fixture in the American mind as McDonald’s or instance magazine.
But YouTube, it is easy to forget, did not exist when the current decade opened. It didn’t exist in 2001 or 2002. There was no YouTube in 2003 or 2004, either.
Not until “Me at the zoo,” a video of co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo, was posted in April 2005, was there, really, a YouTube.
Yet despite being around for fewer than half of the last 10 years, the video-sharing service is the decade’s most influential popular-culture force on the Web.
From Karim talking about the length of the elephants’ trunks in the still-available 19-second clip, it has spearheaded the widespread availability of video on the Web, everything from golf’s Masters tournament, live, to brand-new episodes of popular sitcoms such as “30 Rock” in the same week they aired on TV.
YouTube became the clearinghouse for the short, shared, “viral” videos that were key to making World Wide Web culture into mainstream culture, and started to play a role in politics, particularly in the 2008 presidential campaign.
It developed as a kind of chaotic library, a go-to reference resource for citizens seeking video of musical artists, old cigarette commercials or the latest news sensation.
And it has championed the decade’s DIY aesthetic: Skip the professionals, was YouTube’s implicit data. Shoot your own video. Upload it here, fast and easy. And in the end, it doesn’t matter so much whether your backyard trampoline-stunt footage (ouch!) isn’t great art; what matters is the validation it seems to get by being hosted on an external site.
With YouTube, whether you wanted your friends to watch what you made, you didn’t have to drag them into your…
Original post by dhiram
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