“The living room has become a voting booth.” - Marshall McLuhan, in his book The Medium is the Massage, 1967
It might be cliché to say that everyone is an artist, but it's something I believe in. This isn't because everyone has the capacity for creativity but because ANYTHING can be considered art. The meal you ate quickly between 12:10 and 12:40 because you go to Lawrence University and you have classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The text you sent to your friend in which you said you couldn't make the hangout they were planning. Or the construction of your mind in such a way that all of the work you do is begun and finished within hours of the deadline because, how else are you supposed to be motivated to do it?
Though I find that anything can be seen as art, I do have a favorite formal medium: video. Specifically video: film not included. I was born in 2005, the same year the first ever video was posted to YouTube. Before I reached the age of 10 I had access to a Kindle Fire Tablet and began my time with YouTube, a platform that I have used every week of my life in the 520+ weeks since. Sometimes I just have to stop and think about that. For as far as my memory serves me, I can think of no time in which I went a week without it. And I would watch anything. Minecraft videos, essay-style videos, ones that made you think about philosophy or the world. Lots of slop, but many gems. I grew up not wanting to be astronaut but wanting to make YouTube videos about the games I liked, or my life, or things that happened at school. There were other things of course. I loved reading and playing outside, etc. But YouTube was both a creative outlet and something I WANTED to do.
In 2023, I got an opportunity to make a video for school. In Maine, where I grew up and have spent nearly all of my life, schools tend to start much later in the fall than some regions of the country. This means that there are significant periods of class time after AP testing finishes that are generally up to teachers to decide what to do. Following my AP Language test Junior Year, we got to spend this time working on OpDocs: opinion documentaries. My friend and I decided to drive up to another Maine town several hours away and film the place, interviewing people where possible. When it was done, I posted it to Google Classroom... and to YouTube. I got the opportunity to do a second one a year later, and though those are the only videos I have ever made, they were so much fun to work on that I decided to add film as a major going into college.
Thumbnail from one of my two school video projects on YouTube
Before I close out this "Me at the zoo" level blog post, I'll mention a multimedia project that is the reason for my interest in this particular medium and online forms of art past just video. 17776, a web story by sportswriter Jon Bois, details a future where all scarcity has been conquered and humans live forever. To combat boredom, people play games such as American football across entire states, often for thousands of years at a time. The story uses a combination of video, text, images, and GIFs. It stands as one of my favorite works of all time and one that introduced me to mediums such as blogging for delivering meaning.
This blog is awesome.
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