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Which Memes Deserve Digital Preservation? See the Online Videos the British Film Institute Selected for a New Archive
Key takeaways
- Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent
- From grainy clips that took early forums and chatrooms by storm to the TikToks and Twitch streams popular today, the expanded archive represents a new type of archaeological research, its keepers say.
- “The videos have this almost scary ability to document so much of modern life,” Will Swinburne, a curator at the British Film Institute, tells the New York Times’ Leo Sands.
Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent
Add as preferred source. A still from the famous You Tube video known as Charlie Bit My Finger, which is included in the British Film Institute s new archive of significant online videos British Film Institute More than 400 online videos spanning 30 years of internet memedom and virality have been enshrined by the United Kingdom’s highest authority on cinema as culturally significant pieces of digital life in a new archival collection.
Curated by the British Film Institute—whose library of thousands of films and documentaries are otherwise geared largely toward cinephiles and historians—the new collection is meant to preserve memorable pieces of ubiquitously shared media for future generations. From grainy clips that took early forums and chatrooms by storm to the TikToks and Twitch streams popular today, the expanded archive represents a new type of archaeological research, its keepers say.