Early user-generated internet content was amateurish and physically hard to access

Evidence

Yet the early cultural products of Web 2.0 were, by most standards, amateurish. Slow connections made watching and uploading videos difficult. In 2006, TMZ posted video footage of oil empire scion Brandon Davis ranting against actress Lindsay Lohan’s “firecrotch” as Paris Hilton laughed in the background; almost no one had a fast enough connection to watch it. The first YouTube hits were quite primitive. Two Chinese art students called themselves Back Dorm Boys and lip-synched the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” inside a cramped dorm room. “Star Wars Kid” was an unintentionally comedic video of a Canadian teenager wielding a golf ball retriever like a lightsaber. These low-quality productions could hardly compete with the prestige TV of the era, like The Sopranos and The Wire. The initial wave of Web 2.0 content often felt like a digital riff on America’s Funniest Home Videos: bloopers, fails, and moments of accidental hilarity. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 178

Categorization

• CANDY: The Brandon Davis ‘firecrotch’ detail and ‘Star Wars Kid’ are fun, tweetable cultural-history nuggets.