Last year marked 20 years since YouTube was revealed to the world, as well as the anniversary of the first-ever YouTube video. To celebrate this milestone, it’s heading to one of the most famous art museums in the world, the V&A museum in London, and it’s wild to think that it’s now considered museum-worthy.
As part of the museum’s latest collection ‘Design 1900 – Now,’ which opens today (February 18), its curators have acquired a reconstruction of the original YouTube watch page from 2006, as well as a projection of the original video file for the first uploaded video titled ‘Me at the zoo’ — taken by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.
While this part of the exhibit is designed to spotlight early web design aesthetics, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Its purpose is to showcase how YouTube’s early contributions to internet culture have shaped the evolution of content platforms and the formation of online communities.
“By reconstructing the original 2005 watchpage, we aren’t just showing a video; we are inviting the public to step back in time to the beginning of a global, cultural phenomenon”, YouTube’s chief executive, Neal Mohan, summarizes for the BBC.
YouTube goes into further detail in its blog post, saying “The 19-second clip of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, filmed on a low-res camera in 2005 is widely considered a foundational moment in the rise of user-generated content, enabling new modes of public self-expression, changing how media is created and consumed”. In this lies the birth of the popular social media functions we use daily.
It was unknown back then, but much of YouTube’s early design elements feature infant examples of key social media tools such as badges, rating buttons, as well as sharing and recommendation features — all of which I, frankly, couldn’t live without. That said, I still can’t get over the fact that early YouTube is now considered old enough to be exhibited in this way.
My favorite corner of the internet is almost old enough to buy a beer, and I’m still using it
I remember stumbling upon YouTube around the 2007-2008 mark, and it felt like I had discovered something otherworldly. The first batch of videos that defined my early YouTube days ranged from clips of The Sims to viral hits such as Potter Puppet Pals — but then music videos happened.
Being a frequent scourer of pre-YouTube music websites such as Slack-Time (that’s where I first watched the video for Poker Face), and a keen watcher of music TV channels, you can imagine how thrilled 9-year-old me was when Vevo started providing YouTube with music videos galore in 2009. But even then, I look back on that time and nothing feels too dissimilar to how I’m consuming content in my 20s even though the game has exponentially changed.
I still can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that we’re now approaching a time where we’re beginning to view platforms like YouTube in this light — even though its layout today has a lot of the same features it did back then, it is much more refined. Before you know it, it’ll only be a matter of time before an early TikTok feed gets suspended in the Louvre.
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