The YouTube videos that changed the way we think about ourselves
In 2006, Time Magazine named its annual Person of the Year: you. "Yes you," the magazine read. "You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world." Its cover featured a mirror to reflect reader's image – emblazoned on a computer screen tuned to a site modelled after YouTube. It was just a year after YouTube's launch, but already, it had shifted our understanding of the role we would play in the coming era.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of YouTube. It's gone from a novel tool to an unshakable pillar of technological infrastructure. Some 2.5 billion people log on every month. The company says people who watch YouTube on their TVs consume a billion hours of video a day, to say nothing of time spent on the app and website. But as much as YouTube changed how we use the internet, it's had an equally significant impact on our offline lives.
"Not long ago virtually no one took YouTube that seriously," journalist Mark Bergen writes in his book Like, Comment, Subscribe. "But in so many ways, YouTube had set the stage for modern social media, making decisions throughout its history that shaped how attention, money, ideology, and everything else worked online."
YouTube videos have occupied a massive share of our collective consciousness, dictating what brings us together, what drives us apart, what makes us laugh, cry and cringe. "All the dynamics of social media – of attention, fame, disrupting old school media – have mostly grown because of the financial model YouTube built," Bergen tells the BBC. Human nature itself has shifted in the last 20 years, and as seen in these five videos, YouTube would become a nexus point for the way we see ourselves and each other.
Canon Rock: The dawn of online collaboration
Long before the video stitching on TikTok or remixing on Instagram reels, there was Canon Rock, uploaded just 10 months after YouTube's founding. South Korean musician Jeong-Hyun Lim, known online as funtwo, sits in his bedroom with an electric guitar, his face hidden beneath a baseball cap and pixelated footage. A backing track plays the chords to Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D, and Lim joins in, his guitar work subdued in line with the 300-year-old piece. But Lim's playing grows more intricate until, about 40 seconds in, he launches into a blazing solo, fingers gliding across the fretboard.
The reaction was explosive. As the video racked up hits, around 900 users sent direct video responses to Canon Rock – big numbers at a time when uploading videos meant plugging in a digital camera – and thousands more posted their own covers of the song. In 2007, YouTube user Impeto uploaded a compilation of dozens of Canon Rock videos edited into one continuous track, almost as though the whole internet was playing along together. Deft musicianship wasn't new to the web, but the user participation was.
Canon Rock created a "reciprocity between artists" that opened the door for people to see each other as creative partners, says Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor of communication at Cornell University in the US. By democratising the creative process, YouTube created a melting pot for different communities with different interests and skills to make the internet their own.
It helped inspire a new era of online collaboration, according to Jean Burgess, a digital media professor at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Videos like funtwo's weren't just a performance, Burgess says, they were an invitation, a "showcasing of skill and the setting of standards for other players in the 'game' to attain or beat".
Today's video platforms bombard us with marketing partnerships and endless threads of political discourse. But the musicians behind Canon Rock represented a simpler time, where collaboration was not an economic or ideological proposition, but instead a space where online bedroom dwellers were learning to see each other as members of a global community, a project they were all embarking on together.
lonelygirl15: What is Reality?
Early YouTube audiences will probably be familiar with the saga of Bree, better known by the username lonelygirl15. Her story began as a homeschooled girl posting simple videos about her daily life. But things took a bizarre turn when Bree discovered her family was involved with a strange religious cult. Over the weeks and months, the narrative grew more convoluted; Bree ultimately went on the run, investigating secret codes, eluding religious acolytes and fighting a sinister organisation.
It was all fiction, of course. But lonelygirl15's start was so mundane that many didn't question the story until the drama was too fantastic to ignore. "Bree" had an enigmatic realness – she was actively connecting with fans on MySpace and corresponding with journalists, and even the New York Times was still asking whether the series was truth or a hoax before the final episode. It sparked ferocious debate in online forums, with viewers picking apart everything from her narrative to the quality of her video production.
"[Lonelygirl15] seemed to captivate so many, drawing people who maybe didn't know what YouTube really was into the fold," says Duffy. "The authenticity, the relatability, the vulnerability, the expressive sharing."
Beyond satire, the series was a pointed effort to use the tropes and norms of social media to misguide the audience. It marked a major development on the internet, where some realised for the first time just how blurry the lines between fact and fiction had become, Duffy says.
Lonelygirl15 was a sea change for many users' relationships to each other, and it forced some people to examine the identities that they themselves were creating online, Bergen says. "In some ways, the lonelygirl15 series was ahead of its time," he says. "It was a clever commentary about the fact that authenticity doesn't really exist online – you're always a persona, even if you're not acting as one."
It raised questions about discerning truth on the web, and helped establish a new order where every post, no matter how innocuous, is subject to interrogation and distrust.
Coming out videos: Our authentic selves
It's 2011. A young man sits in front of a map of the world. His hands and voice are shaky as he calls his father on the phone. The man is Randy Phillips, an airman in the US Air Force, and he is filming himself telling his dad that he is gay.
Phillips ran a channel called "AreYouSurprised" detailing his life under the US's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. In his previous videos, Phillips positioned the camera to keep his face just out of view, but hours after the 16-year policy was repealed, he was on full display. Phillips wasn't the only one. His post was an early example of the "coming out" video, a YouTube genre that became more and more influential as time went on.
"Watching real LGBTQ+ people share their own coming out journeys across platforms like YouTube definitely provided an opportunity for queer and transgender people all over the world to realise they were not alone," says Zach Eisenstein, director of communications at The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group. "When YouTube was just starting up, I was a teenager figuring out my own identity," he says. "It helped me exponentially as I navigated my own coming out journey."
The offline world was in the throes of change. It would be four years until the US Supreme Court legalised gay marriage, but following a global economic recession that highlighted growing inequality and shifting political climates, social attitudes were becoming more inclusive.
Tyler Oakley, one of the first major openly gay personalities on the platform, launched the "Coming Out" challenge in 2011, encouraging his audience and fellow creators to proudly share their sexual orientations and experiences. YouTubers like Hannah Hart, Ingrid Nilsen and singer Troye Sivan garnered a collective 2.8 million views on their coming out videos. Olympic diver Tom Daley came out in a 2013 video, receiving support from his fans and fellow athletes.
"People find creators that speak to them, and very often watch them and get to know them and trust them and are influenced by them in a way that no other platform touches," says Ben Relles, former head of comedy at YouTube and cofounder of the YouTube channel Barely Political. The way we present ourselves differs between coworkers, family, friends and strangers, but YouTube circumvented those social links. LGBTQ+ creators leveraged the relationships with their audiences to make it plain that people with different sexual identities did not just exist, they were no different than every other person.
"Through the good, the bad, and the ugly of the internet, social media has given people a unique ability to find safe and welcoming online communities – especially when they don't feel accepted in their in-person ones," Eisenstein says.
'WHY I REALLY AM QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA': When enough is enough
"This is for my 12-year-old self," begins Australian YouTuber Essena O'Neill in what she called her last ever YouTube video in 2015. Over the next 17 minutes, O'Neill broke down her decision to quit all social media and made a passionate plea to her followers to do the same. O'Neill's story took aim at the "contrived" reality of video and social media production, and its harmful effects on mental health. It was a sign of things to come.
"Running a channel is very much like running a treadmill," says Matt Koval, a filmmaker and YouTube's former head creator liaison. "If you stop, if you get off the treadmill for a long period of time, your viewers are going to move on and start watching other people just by nature, and it can be difficult to come back." And many creators, even as far back as YouTube's early days, never did.
Quitting videos have become a social media subgenre unto themselves in the past decade – people in the public eye realising that they've taken on too much, or that they need a break. But O'Neill's departure helped spark a broader conversation.
"People are so dismissive of influencers and creators," says Duffy. "What creative workers experience really presages wider trends in the economy."
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It wasn't just creators facing burnout online. In the early days, social media was sold as utopian opportunity, a place where people would come together to share ideas beyond the constraints of traditional gatekeepers. But as time went by, a new discussion emerged about social media's potentially addictive qualities and negative effects on our time, attention and mental health.
Thanks in part to a push from creators like O'Neill, who offered their own experience as a model, conversations about our own relationships to the internet began to shift. Ten years later, we've reached the point the point that officials describe social media as a full on public health crisis – but that shift in thinking hasn't been enough to keep people off the internet. Social media usage on YouTube and elsewhere is higher than ever, and these days, O'Neill herself is back online.
A spokesperson for Google, YouTube's parent company, says the platform works hard to ensure it's providing a healthy and fulfilling network, both for creators and users who just come to watch. "Each YouTube creator has a different definition of success, and we have support mechanisms in place and continue to build a community that allows creators to thrive based on their individual needs and business aspirations," the spokesperson says. "We want creators to make their videos in a healthy, sustainable way, and creating engaging content should always take priority over producing a certain quantity of videos." YouTube has invested in a number of efforts to promote mental health among its users and across the globe.
YouTube Rewind 2018: Why do we love to hate?
More people than ever were watching YouTube videos in the 2010s, with the site averaging one billion users a month by 2013, according to the company. But as YouTubers became more comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions, some of those feelings turned towards the platform itself.
For years, YouTube released an annual recap video looking back at the service's biggest cultural trends. What began as a one-and-a-half-minute round-up turned into big budget productions, bringing together a growing roster of notable creators and celebrities recreating viral moments set to remixed tracks of hit songs. It was a fairly well-received – until 2018.
Within a week, YouTube Rewind 2018 racked up over 10 million dislikes, making it the most-disliked YouTube post of all time. Critics panned the video, including the CEO of YouTube's own daughter, arguing the company was promoting a self-serving view of the platform geared towards its own corporate interests, one that glossed how people were actually using and responding to the service. "The community, which was once celebrated by YouTube, no longer feels included in the culture YouTube wants to promote," reporter Julia Alexander wrote at the time. The speed and scope of the reaction was unlike anything the company had seen before.
"For a long time, YouTube has been pretty tolerant of its creators' and audiences' criticisms. I think that's the sort of atmosphere where it's totally permissible for the audience to get really mad at the company," says Bergen. But "the company has never been great at reading the room".
Despite the criticism, YouTube maintains that it's an inclusive space built to allow its community to thrive and feel empowered. "YouTube has not only democratized content, but democratized opportunity," a Google spokesperson says. "At YouTube, we developed a comprehensive approach aimed to ensure we're a video streaming platform for high-quality content." That includes a set of robust community guidelines, the spokesperson says, one the company works to apply equally to all users in order to combat the spread of harmful content and build a healthy environment that lets users flourish.
Rewind 2018 revealed a festering hostility that grew in the online space. "There was a marked shift," Duffy says. In the earliest days, discussions about YouTube centered around the idea that it promoted a culture of positivity. YouTube's original slogan was "Broadcast Yourself" – creators and users saw the website as a project they were all working on together. But as time wore on, an adversarial tone erupted on the platform, Duffy says, and many started to feel the YouTube they helped build had become too powerful.
The biggest change, perhaps, was how people understood the role they played on the platform; once they were creating YouTube, but now, they were just using it.
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Biddy Baxter obituary: the brains behind Blue Peter
For the best part of 26 years Biddy Baxter was the guiding force behind the children's television programme, Blue Peter, stamping her formidable authority on a series that drew audiences of 12 million with its pet animals, charity appeals and ability to come up with ingenious new uses for discarded toilet rolls. Baxter's Blue Peter was high-minded. She was a firm admirer of the BBC's first director-general, John Reith, and thought broadcasting should have a strong element of education and moral purpose. The show taught children about the Great Fire of London, Florence Nightingale and Scott of the Antarctic, while encouraging them to think of others less fortunate. The Blue Peter appeals became legendary. In one of the early ones, children were asked to send in silver paper to buy a guide dog for the blind. Seven and a half tons arrived. Another featured milk bottle tops. Baxter insisted that the children donated rubbish, not money. A bring and buy sale for refugee children in Cambodia raised £7.7 million and inspired the BBC to start the annual Children in Need appeal. Baxter was a disciplinarian and could be frightening. One of the presenters said she 'came to dread the click of high heels on the metal staircase' as Baxter descended from the gallery to the studio floor. Baxter's retort was that running a live programme twice a week, with items changing almost up to transmission, meant that she had to be tough. This extended to her superiors, against whom she fiercely defended her patch, using what she called a form of Chinese water torture to get her way. However, her reputation for sacking presenters for unacceptable behaviour owed more to tabloid embroidery than fact. Michael Sundin was reported to have lost his job because he was gay. Baxter said it was because he was unpopular. When the unmarried Janet Ellis was revealed to be having a baby she was condemned by the Mothers' Union and the press whipped up a storm. But Baxter supported Ellis and the decision to leave the programme was Ellis's own. The programme had some notable scoops. Baxter was particularly proud of an interview with Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank, in which for the first time in public he showed some of the original pages from his daughter's diary. Simon Groom was one of the first British reporters to get into Cambodia after the fall of Pol Pot and Princess Anne took part in a safari in Kenya with the Blue Peter stalwart, Valerie Singleton. There was fun as well, some of it unscripted. The best remembered episode in the show's entire history, and frequently repeated, concerned a young elephant called Lulu. She had a minder called Smithy, 'a tiny, rotund gentleman. He came with this absolutely horrendous stick with a sharp metal spike like a spear. I said I'm, sorry Mr Smithy but you just can't have that'. Without Smithy to keep her in check, however, Lulu stepped on presenter John Noakes' foot, urinated, and emptied her bowels over the studio. Unusually, for what was usually a live show, the item was recorded. Baxter decided to keep the cameras rolling: 'The defecation', she said, 'was too compelling.' In time Blue Peter was criticised for being too middle-class and comfortable but Baxter would have none of it. She retorted that nobody was compelled to watch and middle-class children alone would never have accounted for the large viewing figures. Moreover, young children, at which the programme was aimed, needed something secure in their lives. Ironically for someone who made a successful career in children's broadcasting, and seemed instinctively to understand what children wanted, Baxter had no children of her own. She insisted it was not a handicap, recalling that some of her best teachers at school had been spinsters. An only child, she was born Joan Maureen Baxter in Leicester in 1933. Her father ran a sportswear company and played rugby for Leicester, while her mother was a talented amateur pianist whose life was blighted by premature deafness. Joan found war exciting, rather than frightening, and showed early sings of tenacity when she organised a raffle for a doll she owned. She attended Wyggeston Girls' Grammar School in the town, where she was hopeless in maths but shone in English, and she also joined the Little Theatre, a venue for amateur dramatic productions. Such was her height that in one production she was cast as Britannia, complete with trident, helmet, breastplate and union flag shirt. She was not however allowed to wear her spectacles, and narrowly avoided falling off stage. Baxter went on to the all-women St Mary's College at Durham University, where she studied social sciences. Graduating in 1955 she decided to reject both of the main careers then open to educated women, secretary or teacher. She spotted an advertisement for a BBC radio studio manager but was told by the university appointments officer that nobody from Durham had ever gone to the BBC. In what she called 'a fit of pique' she applied for the job and got it, joining the corporation as a 22-year-old in October 1955. Being a studio manager turned out to be less glamorous than it sounded, consisting of chores such as balancing microphones and creating sound effects. She was determined to be a producer and got her chance three years later, working on programmes such as Listen With Mother and Junior Schools English. In 1961 she moved into television for the first time, after successfully applying for an attachment to the children's department, where she worked with the naturalist Johnny Morris and the ventriloquist Ray Allan. When the attachment ended she was about to go back to radio when she was offered the job of producing Blue Peter. Contrary to a wide popular perception, Baxter did not create Blue Peter, which had been running for four years when she took it over. It originally went out for 15 minutes once a week, with an emphasis on model trains for boys and dolls for girls. By 1962 John Hunter Blair, who had run the programme from the start, was too ill to continue and Baxter, still in her twenties, got her chance over more senior candidates. She soon made Blue Peter her own. She decided it must have a logo and commissioned the galleon design from a young artist, Tony Hart. In 1963 the Blue Peter badge was born, awarded to children who sent in letters, poems and stories. Baxter was determined to involve the viewers and make it their programme. The first special Christmas stamps, issued in 1966, were based on designs by two six-year-old winners of a Blue Peter competition. Another way of encouraging children to do things for themselves was showing how discarded toilet rolls, squeezy bottles and yoghurt pots could, with a bit of imagination and liberal use of sticky-backed plastic, be turned into something useful, such as a pen holder or desk tidy. The phrase, 'here's one I made earlier', entered the language. Realising that many children, particularly those living in tower blocks, were unable to have pets Baxter decided that Blue Peter should feature animals. One of the early ones was a puppy called Petra. The dog died a few days after one brief appearance and was replaced by a lookalike. Nobody seemed to notice and the substitution was only revealed years later. As Blue Peter expanded to 25 minutes and was broadcast twice a week, the original two presenters became three, with John Noakes joining Singleton and Christopher Trace. 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Scotsman
2 minutes ago
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"She was a true enthusiast and a supporter of young people." Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Biddy Baxter, the pioneering television producer who transformed Blue Peter into a national institution, has died aged 92, the BBC said. As editor of the popular children's programme between 1965 and 1988, she introduced viewer engagement segments including the national appeals and the famous Blue Peter badge. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Former presenter on the show Peter Duncan remembered her as "a true force of nature". PA He told BBC Breakfast: "For me, she was a wonderful, inspiring person, and not just for her presenters, but for what she got onto BBC television, and the kind of things she projected about young people. "She was a true enthusiast and a supporter of young people." He added: "She was truly a one-off within the BBC. I think that if something upset her, she would trail off to see the DG (director-general) and tell him what she thought, really. So we need people like that now more than ever." Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here. Born Joan Maureen Baxter in Leicester to Bryan Reginald Baxter and Dorothy Vera (nee Briers), she studied at St Mary's College , Durham University , where she first encountered recruitment flyers for the BBC. She joined the public broadcaster as a radio studio manager in 1955, and was promoted to producing Schools Junior English programmes and Listen With Mother, before making the transition to television. Baxter took over as editor of Blue Peter in 1965, several years after the programme's launch. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad PA Baxter served as editor for more than two decades, winning two Bafta awards and receiving 12 nominations. Upon her departure from the show in 1988, she was awarded the programme's highest honour, a gold Blue Peter Badge. "I didn't want to do anything other than Blue Peter," she told The Guardian in 2013. "I certainly never wanted to be an administrator or in charge of anything. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad "It was an absolute dream and I never wanted to do anything else. "It was a terrific time to be in television." She continued to act as a consultant to BBC directors-general John Birt and Sir Michael Checkland after her departure, and received the special award at the Bafta Children's Awards in 2013.
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