YouTube's first video upload is in the V&A Museum
Both the video and a recreation of a watch page from the mid-2000s are on display.
Believe it or not, this is one of the most significant videos every recorded:
Why? Well, that's one of the co-founders of YouTube, in the first video ever uploaded to the platform, nearly 20 years ago.
The cultural significant of this has been recognised, two decades on, by the V&A museum in London:
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is helping preserve and document the history and culture of the internet with its latest landmark acquisition: a reconstruction of an early YouTube watch page, featuring the first-ever upload, "Me at the zoo.”
The exhibit's been live a little over a month, and is part of the V&A's ongoing efforts to record digital culture:
The V&A is no stranger to the challenges of collecting and displaying digital objects, having previously acquired examples such as the reproductive health app Euki in 2019 and the social media platform WeChat in 2017. The acquisition of the earliest available YouTube watch page featuring ‘Me at the zoo’, dated 8 December 2006, captures a significant moment in the history of the internet and web design – the shift from a read-only internet to one centred on user-generated multimedia content, social interaction and collaboration, otherwise known as Web 2.0.
It's slightly alarming to me, as someone only in his mid-50s, that I'm becoming an elder of the internet. This blog, for example, is about three years older than YouTube. But knowledge of – and understanding from – the early days of the internet is being lost. Digital history, like all history, has a tendency towards cycles. We need to understand this past to take lessons from it.
In journalism, we're looping back to managing communities around our journalism – the exact same work I and my colleagues were doing as YouTube launched. Everything old is new again.
