‘Webfilm Theory’ is the title of my PhD research into early Internet video.
The research, completed in 2007, explored online video, its production and distribution from 1998-2005 – the area of ‘web 1.0′, just before the breakthrough of YouTube (2006) and the start of social media.
Using the framework of actor-network theory, it argued that consumption and production of content in the digital age had started to merge, and that humans were no longer separate to their technologies but interwoven with them in a network of consumption and production.
The conclusion that content exists in a network of humans and their technologies seems no more true than in today’s social, consumer-driven digital world.
Webfilm Theory anticipated modern digital consumers and their ubiquitous, multi-device video consumption and production on social media.
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