On March 1, 1954, the United States detonated its most power ful thermo-nuclear weapon, code- named “ Castle Bravo,” at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Situated to the southeast of Bikini, the populations of Rongelap Atoll, including people residing on Ailingnae and Utrik Atolls, watched in confusion as the sun seemed to rise in the west. On Utrik, Rijen Michael, eigh teen years ol…
‘All right, so here we are in front of the elephants.’ This is the opening sentence of the first video ever uploaded to YouTube.1 What started in 2005 as an online platform for the upload of ‘homemade videos’ and the sharing of ‘ordinary people’s lives’ quickly became the nucleus of an intricate web of audiovisual interactions that reached through and beyond cyberspace. The year 2…
Although not di-rectly related to GAS, it is worth mentioning that the German music instrument re-tailer Thomann (2019) hosts an annual summer camp as part of its ‘Gearhead Uni-versity’. YouTubers get the opportunity to review each piece of equipment in Thomann’s warehouse in a small village in southern Germany, document their ex-periences on video and share them online with fe…