YouTube is a relatively new concept, having only started in 2005. It was created soon after the disaster from the tsunami that shocked the world on Boxing Day 2004. According to Jawed Karim, one of the platforms’ co-founders, the concept of YouTube was inspired by videos of Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl and the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

The idea behind the creators of YouTube was that it was originally designed to introduce the idea that everyone can have a platform to express themselves. It was registered on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal. They had the idea that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their “home videos”.

Nowadays, YouTube, as one could justify, is used to publish almost every form of televisual content – from music videos to short films, podcast specials to original shows etc. The question is, however, how exactly has YouTube’s repetitions and accelerated aesthetics had an effect on the post-cinematic forms? We all know that music plays a huge part in films. As Carol Vernallis put it: “In video our attention to the song shapes the way we percieve the image, but to an equal extent what we attend to in the image helps to determine how we hear the music” (Vernallis, 2013).

Before YouTube was launched we had platforms like MTV for music videos and IMDb for films. On YouTube absolutely anyone can upload music videos, films and just about anything. YouTube offers new spaces for both user-generated content and monetisation of creative material. Youtube offers a great platform for new creativity in music and films however possibly the biggest negative is for children and untrustworthy people. People can be exposed to so much on YouTube and are we able to learn more and more from this platform particularly when it comes to media and communication.

By George Lambert

Bibliography:

Vernallis, C. (2013) ‘Music Video’s Second Aesthetic’, in Unruly Media YouTube, music video and the New Digital Cinema. New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press, pp. 207–233.