YouTube’s invisible standards
Great essay by Paul Ford on the hidden infrastructure that makes most of your favorite user-created viral videos possible: 4’ by 8’ by 1/2” slabs of drywall, screwed into studs and painted beige.
The people dancing and talking and singing in beige rooms with 8’ ceilings are surrounded by standards, physically and online. Technological standards like HTML5 also allow us to view web pages and look at video over the Internet. All of their frolic is bounded by a set of conventions that are essentially invisible yet define our national physical and technological architecture. Their dancing, talking bodies are the only non-standardized things in the videos.
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