I don’t know YouTube, but I know what I like

Dating from April 23, 2005, the first video ever uploaded to YouTube is a 19-second clip showing one of the site’s founders, Jawed Karim, talking about elephants. To Virginia Heffernan, writing this morning in the New York Times, the clip echos a technique used by Jean-Luc Godard.

When this technique of redundancy was used in the films of Godard, it was considered the height of sophistication, a comment 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 — can now quickly and at no cost be published, broadcast and shared. “Me at the Zoo” also sets a style standard for the classic YouTube video: visually surprising, narratively opaque, forthrightly poetic.

After the zoo, the deluge. Four and a half years later, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. YouTube, which was acquired by Google in 2006, takes pride in its metrics: “A good way to understand this is if all three major U.S. TV networks (NBC, CBS and ABC) had been broadcasting for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 60 years, they still wouldn’t equal the amount of content uploaded to YouTube in under 60 days,” Chris Dale, a company rep, told me in an e-mail message.