The YouTube videos that changed the way we think about ourselves

YouTube started out as an off-beat video sharing site. But at its 20th anniversary, the platform's content has fundamentally altered the way we think, feel and interact with each other.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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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Source: BBC