With Xmas behind us, and the new year fresh on the horizon, celebrations have been fresh in our minds. But during this time, it is also important to look back and take stock on the year we’ve left behind. A couple of weeks ago, YouTube the streaming giant, released their annual celebration video inviting some of the biggest names from their platform to reminisce. This global celebration has the rather charming name of rewind, and in 2018, we’re in control.

YouTube Rewind is a challenging concept to explain, it’s like a let-your-hair-loose celebration of years with some of the well-known stars of YouTube celebrating the year’s zeitgeist, by doing a bunch of micro-skits. It’s a charming, goofy 8-minute extravaganza of these stars having fun out of their elements. A lot of these are references to what these stars door other trends of 2018, but there are also special guest stars from other mediums as well.

Of course, with only 8 minutes of run time, not everyone is going to be included, and a lot of the stars that I didn’t recognise, I was curious to look up to see what content they produced. But I assume if I was some years younger not only would I be familiar with them and their talents butbe jumping for joy. With the selection including some of the biggest stars on the platform, there’s something for everyone, or at the very least the vast majority of everyone.

It also became apparent watching this rewind that there was a lot of challenges, memes and other pop culture trends that simply flewunderneath my radar, for instance, I didn’t realise how many songs and dance crazes happened this year. I distinctly picked out some K-pop songs in the Korean section and I understood the whole Fortnite parody framework. But even those were blips that I was only subtlety aware of from the previous years. Bearing in mind the whole conceit around this year’s Rewind is the creators are in control, it’s a nice way to celebrate these trends and interests.

YouTube Rewind strikes at the heart of its objective as a care-free look-back on a triumphant year of events for the channel that has further cemented its omnipresence into our lives. It serves as a strong reminder that there is a whole ecosystem of culture that is buried underneaththe petabytes of video content that is updated, there’s a tonne of good content to be unearthed, all that is required is a rewind.

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