I had a moment not too long ago when I realized with no small amount of surprise that I remember an internet before YouTube.
It’s one of those things that, when I stop to actually think it through, only makes sense: I remember all kinds of “old things”: dial-up, GeoCities being the seeming building blocks of the entire world wide web (as it was called at the time, Netscape Navigator, newsgroups, and so on. I remember a world before the internet, and the fear and thrill and disbelief of the internet becoming a thing in the first place. (None of us really knew, if we’re being honest; I can remember talking to a researcher working on their PhD who was an internet evangelist in the mid-1990s and thinking in all seriousness, nah, this will never change our lives the way he thinks it will.)
But these days, looking things up on YouTube seems almost second nature when looking for video (or even audio). It’s a shorthand, an easy shared reference that everyone understands. The closest thing to a public utility, in some ways, even though it’s part of the Google Machine and very much not a public option in very meaningful ways.
I remember when YouTube was a new thing, and it felt strange to find actual video like that all collected together in one place; I have a sense memory of sitting at the computer in the first San Francisco apartment and looking things up on the site just because of the novelty of it all.
There was a point, back then — which feels almost parallel to when Blogger was relatively new, and there were other new ideas and formats being created to share things online — when the web felt like a new and exciting thing, and perhaps more importantly, a thing that had a real opportunity to be a Force For Good, whatever that might end up meaning in the grand scheme of things. Where every step was a step forward, even if it was just a small one.
We were all younger then, with no idea what a mess lay ahead of us all.