A functionality of YouTube is to automatically select as a given video’s thumbnail the frame of the video in the exact middle of its temporal runtime – no matter what the frame’s content or how much relevance it affords the theme of the video.
So there could be a video in which two old men are having a picnic in the park and the thumbnail could be some randomly blurred image of a bunch of grass which happened to be the exact middle of the video.
This convention’s absurdity, which might be described as a Web 2.0 perversion of the movie poster, is regularly exploited by YouTube users who will insert a single frame of a girl in a bikini in the exact middle of a video in order to get more views.
At times, though, the default YouTube thumbnail has a certain unintended power in its own right.
When one uploads a webcam vlog to YouTube, for instance, the thumbnail is often an image of one’s self which one would never think to choose as their personal online representation.
Perhaps one’s eyes are closed or one is in the middle of an expression that distorts one’s facial features in an un-becoming manner. This un-intended, un-becoming-ness might create an anxiety – it shows me what I look like – out of control; not becoming.
It is a portal to see how things look. A post Internet photography.
The light catches a bowl of rice in a living room filled with cigarette smoke; a family unloads a red bike from a station wagon as a blue bike whizzes by; a Scottish teenager’s eyes catch the lens of the camera directly, allowing one to see her.
One of the unspoken dynamics of surfing through YouTube is that, by and large, most all interaction with video online is conducted through these secret messages, these unintended crystallizations, which afford one, not the theme of the video, but a random moment – a glimpse into a world which never agreed to be glimpsed in such a naked way.