A new online project is inspiring a wave of nostalgia. IMG_0001, a website featuring older videos on the internet, is calling back to a period when social media content went unfiltered and unedited. 

University of Michigan School of Information professor Christian Sandvig says the draw for videos like this is not just sentimental. It’s speaking to a desire for more genuine content on social media. The project, he says, “lets you view videos people truly didn’t care about.” 

“It’s a stylistic choice,” Sandvig says. “People are going to great lengths to make themselves appear casual and unprofessional. Authenticity is the genre that they would like to break into.”

The desire for genuine content that is tailored to smaller audienced and is largely unedited is becoming increasingly popular, according to a study by UMSI PhD candidate Kevin Zheng. The study, “Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube” shows a different side of YouTube, one where content creators are less concerned with virality, and more interested in pleasing a specific group of people. 

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Read “YouTube is full of old, unseen home videos. Now you can watch them at random” at The Washington Post. 

Christian Sandvig is the H Marshall McLuhan collegiate professor of digital media, a UMSI professor, a faculty associate at the Center for Political Studies, a professor of communication and media at the Institute for Social Research, a professor in the Digital Studies Institute and a professor of art and design at the Penny W Stamps School of Art and Design. Learn more about Sandvig by visiting his UMSI faculty profile. 

Learn more about UMSI PhD student Kevin Zheng by visiting his UMSI profile.