The BFI preserves “Charlie Bit My Finger” and other videos in the Viral Moments Archive

ByTech Word News

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 about 430 clips offers a glimpse into three decades of shared online culture that might otherwise one day be lost, archivists said. All clips are from Britain, although many have traveled far and wide around the world.

“Videos have an almost eerie ability to document so much of modern life. If you imagine losing that, you’d lose access to what life was like at this time and how people expressed themselves,” said Will Swinburne, a curator at the British Film Institute who helped acquire some of the videos. That’s why they’re worth preserving, he said.

The length of the clips ranges from an 11 second viral meme on weekly live broadcastand are accessible at the BFI display space in London as well as online for internet users in Britain.

Here’s a selection, in no particular order.

When Howard Davies-Carr uploaded a video of his toddler putting his finger in his little brother’s mouth, the story of innocence, curiosity and consequences hit a viral nerve.

“The video was funny so I wanted to share it with the boys’ godfather,” Mr Davies-Carr told a British TV talk show 10 years later, adding that he only posted it to save his elderly parents the trouble of setting up an account. The original video upload became one of the most watched home videos on the internet, reaching almost 900 million views on YouTube.

“No one would have expected this video at the time to become the cultural phenomenon it has become,” Mr Swinburne said.

He also proved to be materially valuable to the Davies-Carr family. In addition to ad revenue from their huge audience, in 2021 they sold the video as an unfungible token for $760,999.

When Tim Berners-Lee released the world’s first web browser in the pre-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.

The students pointed a camera at the pot and created what they describe as the world’s first live broadcast, initially transmitted under the floor and then over an Internet connection since 1993.

“If you want to be really precise, it was the world’s first live camera image transmitted over web protocols,” recalls one of the students, Quentin Stafford-Fraser. “This was all part of allowing my co-researchers to get fresh coffee, which was very important for our computer science research.”

The Trojan Room Coffee Pot, named after the Trojan Room in their lab, became an early artifact of Internet history.

The endlessly repeating “Badgers” animation was a staple of early Internet humor. The video has no story, showing a proliferating sequence of dancing badgers, a slithering snake and a toadstool backed by a repetitive bass line track. For many millennials, it was one of the funniest things they’d seen on the internet.

According to the film institute, the way it is shared is another relic of the early Internet. Before the proliferation of video sharing platforms like YouTube or TikTok, users forwarded this Flash animation in long email chains, posted it in web forums, and shared it on personal websites.

Flash, the technology on which the clip was based, was phased out by Adobe over the 1910s, until it disappeared entirely in the late 2020s. Its obsolescence underscored the importance of conscious preservation of digital artefacts for archivist Mr Swinburne.

“None of these websites and platforms serve archival purposes. They don’t promise to preserve and save the work,” he said, pointing to other platforms like Vine that shut down and took much of their content with them.

Before the advent of streaming TV binges, there was interactive internet drama.

Launched at the turn of the millennium, “Online Caroline” offered readers a glimpse into the life of the show’s title character through fictionalized webcam streams and texts. By registering an email address, users can also receive sporadic updates directly to their inbox.

The project was part of a narrow wave of “online novels” in the early days, experimenting with the narrative formats made possible by the Internet.

The internet has always been a place where serious topics collide with deep irreverence.

Beleaguered British Prime Minister Liz Truss was reminded of this in October 2022, when the Daily Star newspaper began broadcasting a head of lettuce live to test whether it would survive her stay in Downing Street.

The gag was inspired by a throwaway line in The Economist which estimated Ms Truss’ political life expectancy at seven days, or “roughly the shelf life of a lettuce”. In the end, its premiere lasted another 14.