Given the domination that YouTube has achieved on large expanses of world culture, we all expect to remember the first video we watched there. However, many or most of us do not do so: rather, we simply realized, one day, from the middle to the end of the two thousand, that we had developed a daily habit of YouTube. Like no, your own introduction to the platform went through an overly trivial video to make a big impression, assuming that you can make it load. (We forget, in the era of instant streaming, how slow you could be slow.) But perhaps triviality was the point, a previous one defined by the first YouTube video ever downloaded, “Me at the zoo.”
“Very well, so we are here in front of the elephants, uh,” explains the co-founder of Youtube, Karim, standing in front of these animals at the San Diego zoo. “What's cool about these guys is that they really have, really, really long, uh, trunks, and that's cool. And that's about everything there is to say.”
The execution time is 19 seconds. The download date is April 24, 2005, two years before “Charlie bit my finger” And “Rain chocolate” “ Four years before The Joe Rogan experienceand seven years before “Gangnam style”. The pop-cultural force which is MrBeast, then a child known only as Jimmy Donaldson, would have planned his seventh anniversary.
“After the zoo, the flood,” wrote Virginia Heffernan A 2009 New York Times piece On the first four and a half years of YouTube, when the site barely contained none of the content with which we associate it today. If you have a favorite YouTube channel, it probably didn't exist. Heffenan tackled the videos “failure”, “transport” and “unpacking” becoming viral at the time as new cultural forms, as they were, but the conventions of the YouTube video as we know now had not yet crystallized. All those who saw tastes of “me at the zoo” would not have understood the promise of YouTube. Perhaps it does not feel particularly proving to be informed that elephants have trunks-but then, it is even more informative than many countless explanatory videos for download when we speak.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.
At Learnopoly, Finn has championed a mission to deliver unbiased, in-depth reviews of online courses that empower learners to make well-informed decisions. With over a decade of experience in financial services, he has honed his expertise in strategic partnerships and business development, cultivating both a sharp analytical perspective and a collaborative spirit. A lifelong learner, Finn’s commitment to creating a trusted guide for online education was ignited by a frustrating encounter with biased course reviews.