Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art by Virginia Heffernan

Author:Virginia Heffernan [Heffernan, Virginia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2016-06-06T22:00:00+00:00

LONG TRUNKS

Back to the first YouTube video and its fixation on elephant trunks. When this technique of redundancy was used in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, it was considered the height of New Wave sophistication, a commentary on the way movies pile on information. They show, they narrate, and they describe. The elephants are unmistakable to viewers, and yet Karim identifies them. Then he names the iconic shape right in front of us—“long trunks”—lest anyone miss that long trunks equal elephants equal long trunks.

This founding clip makes and repeats a larger point, too, with every pixel: video, trivial or important, could suddenly be published, broadcast, and shared, quickly and at no cost. Me at the Zoo also set a style standard for the classic YouTube video: visually surprising, narratively opaque, forthrightly poetic.

After the zoo, the deluge. A decade later, YouTube, now deeply integrated into Google, takes pride in its eye-popping metrics. Here’s one: If all three major American TV networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) had been broadcasting for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for sixty years, they wouldn’t have created the amount of content uploaded to YouTube in two weeks.

So the video floods in and YouTube is an exceptionally well-oiled machine. But the content continues to be enigmatic. While YouTubers in the early days often produced recognizable short-form genres that existed on TV—music videos (Numa Numa) and sketch comedy (MySpace: The Movie)—uploaders since have drifted from known forms, contributing entries now known only as “YouTube videos.” That’s because it’s not clear what these videos would have been called before the advent of the site.

Homemade oddities that attract attention in YouTube’s second decade include numberless pet videos, heartland vignettes, security-cam film of debatable authenticity, stunts, accidents, and DIY animation. There are also clips from actual television, with and without the permission of the channels, and copyrighted, professionally produced music videos uploaded by outfits like Sony and Universal. Somewhere between the weirdness of the homemade videos and the possible illicitness of the professional stuff (which might violate copyright), YouTube hit gold.

This is another component of Internet civilization: consuming art here feels like truancy, like something shady, something you shouldn’t be doing. And this is the best effect art can have.

It’s elementary semiotics. Measures taken to keep images from being seen—veiling, blurring, coding, scrambling—often become as exciting as the images themselves. Sometimes more. Photoshopped pinup girls lose allure when staring at them on billboards comes to seem mandatory. Sooner or later anyone seeking intellectual or physical arousal wants to see something she’s not supposed to see. YouTube videos derive huge appeal by seeming louche. A drunken celebrity, a failed stunt, a politician’s outburst on that crazy and cluttered site: Should I really be watching this? If you feel a little remiss while watching a short moving picture online, chances are good you’re watching a YouTube video—and it’s having the desired effect.

People contribute to YouTube because they want to tell stories, be heard, be seen, be known and maybe famous. But

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