In Videoblogging Before YouTube, Trine Bj¿rkmann Berry offers a cultural history of online video, focusing on the critical moment when the internet moved from being a mostly textual medium to a truly multimedia one. Through a close analysis of the early videoblogging community and their creative practices, she argues that early in the new millennium a new cultural-technical media hybrid emerged. This coalesced around the short-form digital film whose aesthetic, technical form and content is a predecessor to, and anticipator of our current media ecology.
Trine Bj¿rkmann Berry is a visiting researcher at the University of Sussex. She publishes on online video, digital culture and aesthetics. Her new research examines the history and practices of the video essay.