The past is a foreign country

My first Cyber Thursday website is YouTube Time Machine. This is a site that will give you random YouTube videos from any year you choose, all the way back to 1860 (even though there aren't many videos to pick from until about 1916, which makes sense, really). 

I spend most of my time hovering around the years with more videos, especially the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I love how the wider selection gives me a cross-section of random stuff I'd probably never look at otherwise- commercials, TV shows, movie snippets, concerts, parts of live news broadcasts, whatever. That gives me an idea of the general look of that year. I know TV isn't an accurate representation of the world, but it's definitely a reflection on the trends and moods of its time. And I feel like it's a better idea than I would get from just watching things that were notable because it includes everything- the shitty sitcoms and forgettable movies, the annoying commercials, the news broadcasts and sporting events no one ever really expects to see more than once. I don't think anyone lives in a bubble of art films and nothing but the smartest TV- we're all surrounded by these stupid bits of ephemera that get dated unbelievably fast. Don't believe me? Go look up a commercial from 2000. I'll wait.

The closest I can come to explaining why I love that is with the quote I used for this post's title, from L.P. Hartley: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." It's looking into a place that was completely different, somewhere I can never go or go back to myself.

Also, all seriousness aside, it can just be entertainingly tacky sometimes. That's why I stay to the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Stuff from then is too modern to be considered vintage and quirky- it's just savagely hideous in a way I adore. But all that is an angle that I'll probably cover much better whenever I decide to post about Everything is Terrible, one of my favorite websites.

UPDATE 5/29 (as if anyone cares):
I found a fantastic blog post ("Survivorship Bias" by David McRaney) that said what I was trying to get across about how notability messes with people's picture of the past in a way that's actually clear. Here is a quote:

"Your sense of a past era tends to be informed by paintings and literature and drama that are not crap, even though at any given moment pop culture is filled with more crap than masterpieces. Why? It isn’t because people were better artists back in the day. It is because the good stuff survives, and the bad stuff is forgotten. So over time, you end up with skewed ideas of past eras. You think the artists of antiquity were amazing in the same way you associate the music of past decades with the songs that survived long enough to get into your ears."

The whole article is here. You should check it out, it's definitely worth reading.