https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1ZfIuq9KGhUefY7VW5goNdxA7-0vB3FE

My first experience with a youtube video occurred when my Aunt and Uncle showed me the Charlie the Unicorn videos. I couldn’t believe that I had never heard of them before, because my family members could quote these videos from the beginning to end. I think that was the start of my experience with being completely behind on anything “youtube.”

I have never been the type of person to go onto youtube and waste hours getting lost in video content. My experiences with youtube have largely been defined by everybody else in a room being able to quote a video that I have, inevitably, never heard of. Throughout my life, if I have wanted to show someone a youtube video, there is basically an 85% chance they have already seen it. Even now, I genuinely don’t know how people hear about/find youtube videos. It’s an art that is lost on me.

There’s a small number of youtube videos of me singing in middle school and high school productions (I have no idea who put them up, but they’re pretty good blackmail) so I get to occasionally walk down memory lane and watch fourteen-year-old me belting out a tune from “Kamp Kaos,” our eighth grade musical. My mom used to go onto youtube and show her friends the videos and I would bolt from the room so I didn’t have to hear myself.

Mostly, I use youtube for music. If it’s a newer song, it’s probably in my itunes library, so I head over to youtube for the middle school stuff or songs that I grew up hearing my mom singing. Over the years, as I’ve become more engaged in fandom, I’ve also wasted a lot of time watching scenes of couples I like all condensed into one video, usually with a song in the background (like the mashup videos that the Russo article was discussing.) One night last semester, my roommate and I spent multiple hours watching videos about Seth and Summer from The O.C., despite the fact that neither of us have ever seen a single episode of that show. We are not proud of this fact.

Youtube is also a place where I have been able to watch Broadway shows. A lot of them are on youtube if you know where to look (many are unlisted, so you need a link to get to them). I watched Spring Awakening, Next to Normal, A Very Potter Musical, Legally Blonde, and Dogfight (my all time favorite musical!) on youtube. Although I have since seen three out of five of these shows done live, I got to expose myself and others to theatre through this site, which I’m really grateful for.

I also had the pleasure of experiencing The Lizzie Bennet Diaries almost from the beginning of the show, and getting all of my friends addicted to it. One of my favorite high school memories is being gathered around the computer with five or six of my friends on the day that we knew we were going to see Darcy’s face for the first time (dubbed ‘Darcy Day’ by the fandom because alliteration is awesome). We skipped lunch for it, but it was worth it. Towards the end of the series, I would sneak my ipad into school and excuse myself to go to the bathroom when the new videos came out on Monday and Thursdays at 12pm.