Archivists at the British Film Institute have preserved hundreds of online videos for their cultural significance, hoping to preserve a slice of digital life for future generations.
The catalog of around 430 clips offers a glimpse into three decades of shared online culture that may otherwise one day be lost, the archivists said. All the clips come from Britain, though many traveled far around the world.
“The videos have this almost scary ability to document so much of modern life. If you imagine losing that, you would lose access to what life was like at this time and how people were expressing themselves,” said Will Swinburne, a curator at the British Film Institute who helped acquire some of the videos. That makes them worth preserving, he said.
The clips range in duration from an 11-second viral meme to a weeklong livestream, and are accessible at the B.F.I.’s viewing space in London as well as online for internet users in Britain.
Here’s a selection, in no particular order.
Charlie Bites His Brother (2007)
When Howard Davies-Carr uploaded a video of his toddler putting a finger in his infant brother’s mouth, the tale of innocence, curiosity and consequences struck a viral nerve.
“The video was funny, so I wanted to share it with the boys’ godfather,” Mr. Davies-Carr told a British television talk show 10 years later, adding that he only made it public to save his elderly parents from the difficulty of setting up an account. The original upload became one of the most-viewed home videos on the internet, clocking in close to 900 million views on YouTube.
“No one would have expected this video at the time to have become the cultural phenomenon that it became,” said Mr. Swinburne.
It also turned out to be materially valuable to the Davies-Carr family. Alongside ad revenue from its vast audience, in 2021 they sold the video as a nonfungible token for $760,999.
As Tim Berners-Lee was releasing the world’s first web browser in the prehistoric internet year of 1991, sleep-deprived researchers at the University of Cambridge came up with a new way to remotely check whether their communal coffee pot was full.
Pointing a camera at the pot, the students created what they describe as the world’s first livestream, initially relayed through under floor wires and then over an internet connection from 1993.
“If you want to be really precise, it was the world’s first live camera images transmitted over the web protocols,” recalled one of the students, Quentin Stafford-Fraser. “This was all part of enabling my co-researchers to get fresh coffee, which was very important for our computer science research.”
The Trojan Room Coffee Pot, named for the Trojan Room in their lab, became an early artifact of internet history.
The endlessly looping animation “Badgers” was a stalwart of early internet humor. The video has no narrative, showing a multiplying sequence of dancing badgers, a sliding snake and a Fly Agaric mushroom backed by a repetitive bass line track. For many millennials, it was one of the funniest things they had seen online.
According to the film institute, the way it was shared is another relic of the early internet. Before the proliferation of video-sharing platforms like YouTube or TikTok, users forwarded this Flash animation on long email chains, pasted it in web forums and shared it on personal websites.
Flash, the technology that underpinned the clip, was gradually discontinued by Adobe through the 2010s until becoming fully defunct at the end of 2020. Its obsolescence underscored for Mr. Swinburne, the archivist, the importance of consciously preserving digital artifacts.
“None of these websites and platforms serve an archival purpose. They make no promise to preserve and save the work,” he said, pointing to other platforms, such as Vine, which have shut down and taken much of their content with them.
Before the advent of the streamed television binge, there was the interactive web-based drama.
Launched at the turn of the millennium, “Online Caroline” offered readers a peek into the life of the show’s titular character through fictionalized webcam streams and texts. By registering an email address, users could also receive sporadic updates direct to their inboxes.
The project formed part of a niche wave of “online novels” in the early aughts, experimenting with storytelling formats made possible by the internet.
Liz Truss Versus a Lettuce (2022)
The internet has always been a place where serious subjects collide with deep irreverence.
Britain’s beleaguered prime minister, Liz Truss, was reminded of that in October 2022 when the Daily Star newspaper began livestreaming a head of lettuce to test whether it would outlast her time in Downing Street.
The gag was inspired by a throwaway line in The Economist, which had judged Ms. Truss’s political life expectancy at seven days, or “roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce.” In the end her premiership lasted another 14.
