ABOUT 15 YEARS AGO, a classmate of mine began uploading videos to a website called “YouTube”. In the videos, he played little songs and performed skits about gaming, school and “How to be English”. He was a well-liked chap, but it struck everyone as a strange thing to be doing. It was only The Internet. It wasn’t TV.
His video on being English went viral before “going viral” was a thing. Hundreds of thousands of young people across the world admired our classmate’s quirky sense of humour and boyish good looks. Soon, he became the first British person to hit a million subscribers and was able to turn making YouTube videos into a full-time job. No one still maintained that it was an odd thing to do.
Sure, we had been on the internet for years: flirting fruitlessly and awkwardly on MSN, creating Bebo profiles and downloading dodgy films. But we had not realised how global and
