Today I was doing a bit of online tidying-up and I added my most recent YouTube video to my ‘key videos’ playlist and found that I have got up to 40 ‘key’ videos! Which is quite unhelpful, actually, because I probably created the ‘key videos’ playlist to highlight the six or seven videos that I thought were most useful or representative, at a time when I had maybe 40 videos total, which is clearly too many to deal with.
But now, 40 videos is the size of the selected playlist, out of a total of 103 videos. So at least it boils it down to some extent. Anyway, since 40 is a nice round anniversary number, we are here pausing to take note of my YouTube life.
I joined YouTube, it says here, as a creator, on 14 February 2008, St Valentines Day, 18 years ago. YouTube itself had been founded exactly three years earlier, as it happens, on St Valentines Day in 2005, and was already well on its way to being ubiquitous. It had been bought by Google in November 2006, for US$1.65 billion, which seemed like a lot of money at the time. (Today, the platform is valued at over US$500 billion, which is definitely a lot of money at any time).
In my very first video, about the changing place of media in everyday life, as it looked in 2008, I am talking – amongst other things – about YouTube itself, which is probably why I thought I should turn a one-hour guest lecture on somebody else’s course into a 7-minute YouTube video. The other-person’s course was called ‘Understanding Broadcasting’, and by that point I would definitely have been dismayed that we were still talking about ‘broadcasting’. I had been saying for a few years that television was a dead medium from the previous century, which made some of my colleagues upset.
My second video was merely an ‘improved version’ of the first one, which seems horribly amateurish of me, but I was learning lots of new skills in real time. The two versions were collectively viewed by 30,000 people, which is a very small number in YouTube-success terms, but seemed a good number to me, for a media studies lecture.
Since then, I’ve made another 101 videos, of many sorts, including a four-minute quick introduction to Making is C0nnecting (2011), reports or talks from Maker Faires in New York (2013) and Rome (also 2013), and a Danish forest (2016), as well as the keynote at MeCCSA, the UK’s big media and communications studies conference, on the last day of my employment in the UK, before moving to Canada, in January 2018.
In some ways the Covid pandemic – remember that? – was a peak time for YouTubing because all the classes were happening, every week, in a low-fi video production environment known as Zoom. After a three-hour class you could download the whole thing and chop it up for YouTube. In 2020 this meant I was cutting a three-hour ‘Your Creative Self’ Zoom down to just six minutes, which was fast and fun. By 2021 I was just chopping out the best sequences, like the surprisingly long twelve-minute video where we were ‘Unboxing Lorde’s discless box‘. These ones aren’t on the ‘key videos’ playlist, being artefacts of a particular time, but if you could ignore the global disease pandemic it was a golden time for educational video materials.
The two best ones weren’t made by me, but by students I hired to make and edit videos about the Creativity Everything #FreeSchool in 2019 and my ‘Creativity is a Thing That You Do’ book launch and music performance in 2022.
The 103 videos add up to almost 28 hours of content (!) so you can see why I at least tried to be selective.
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