Writing about YouTube in 2008, Henry Jenkins notes that, despite much that is new about YouTube,“there is also much that is old.” 1 Jenkins explains how, for example, the “do-it-yourself (DIY) culture surrounding YouTube has clear precedents in other older types of DIY culture. Obviously, his contention also applies to the content that is found on YouTube—much of it is indeed old, seeing that it was produced long before the launch of YouTube in 2005. To name but one example, you can find some of the earliest ever recorded moving images on YouTube in the shape of early silent cinema (say, the work of the Lumiere brothers, Georges Mélies, Thomas Edison, and several others). Even for material on YouTube that is in fact “new,” you often get the eerie sense that there is also something “old” about such clips and the manner in which they are produced. They often share striking formal similarities with pre-established kinds of film and video. This similarity even extends to the works of early silent cinema just mentioned—several contemporary YouTube clips share a surprising affinity with early silent cinema (Appendix).