YouTube is awesome. But you know that. Its the repository for the flotsam and Jetsons of popular culture, an outlet for teen ennui, some of the longest Rick-rolling practical jokes, and every so often, a showcase for genuine talent. It also contains hours of amazing found footage, a veritable smorgasbord of geeky trivia.
Once relegated to 8mm and Betamax collections of devotees, these artifacts of ancient newscasts, commercials and home movies are now available to anyone with a broadband connection, and provide an always-amusing, often startling picture of how we used to be.
In this way, YouTube, a relative fetus on the Internets 40-year plus timeline (depending on who you ask) offers a multi-tiered story of the medium that made it famous. The recent popularity of a 1981 TV news report about the Internet is just the tip of the iceberg. Here it is in all its feathered-hair glory, along with four other videos that manage to be spooky, entertaining and educational.
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