Youtube Prehistory

For about a year or so now I have been working on an ethnographic project which I have dubbed “Youtube Prehistory”. It is a playlist I have been compiling of notable and compelling youtube videos from the website's foundation up until 2012. The aim of this project is to capture the social and cultural geist of the period of digital culture. 

The project has no set goals and has been ballooning in scale for quite some time now. My eventual goal is to create something along the lines of Jane Shoenbrun’s film “A Self Induced Hallucination", a documentary film compiling noteworthy youtube videos relating to the slenderman mythos. 

Unfortunately having done the rough math, an unedited film comprising the videos hitherto collected would exceed 20 hours, making it generally unwatchable. Nonetheless I am currently planning on committing the playlist to a single film project after the playlist reaches one thousand videos. 

The playlist can be viewed here, (I had wanted to present it fancier but I cant figure out how to get the embed feature to work with playlists.)