There will be many of you who are unfamiliar with the word “unboxing” and to tell you the truth I was too until recently.

You must admit, it’s a slightly unusual word.

You might conceivably be forgiven for thinking that it refers to one of the many burgeoning alternative sports. You know, the sort of thing that gets relegated to late at night on the Xtreme Sports Channel. This time involving a man wearing shorts and gloves who gets up from the canvas following a countdown from 10 to 1 and then hits another guy in the fist with his chin. A bit like untennis and the untriplejump. But then with blood.

And that's a straight belly to the fist from McManus!

You would be wrong.

It could also refer to the practice of going shopping and refusing to get things wrapped. “No I’ll take it unboxed please. And while you’re about it, I’ll have some unboxed pastrami and a couple of unboxed bagels.”

Wrong again.

Unboxing is the increasingly popular practice of taking things out of boxes. Notably on YouTube. Naturally, the objects that are unboxed do not include pastrami or bagels but are usually some piece of soon-to-be-obsolescent hardware that the unboxer can’t wait to get his hands on. Although he can certainly wait long enough to set up a high-definition video camera and film the whole business.

To leave you in no doubt about what I mean, here’s an example:

I’m sure you didn’t watch that until the bitter end, and that’s unfortunate as it gets really exciting in the last 5 minutes. But don’t think that this video is in any way unique. The only thing that’s unusual about this one is its length – a full 25 minutes of monotone commentary on something very few people could care less about.

Which brings us to the point of why anyone in his or her right mind would want to make a video about taking something out of a box and then post said video on YouTube. After all, although I’ve seen much worse footage on YouTube, in terms of sheer boredom value the unboxing video positively streaks ahead of the opposition. But why do it? I’ve thought long and hard about it and the only conclusion that I can come to is that this is the last resort of people who desperately want to post something on YouTube but have no idea what.

Nothing ever happens in their lives. There are no hilarious and possibly fatal accidents involving children or pets. No UFOs hovering over the back yard. No idiot riding a shopping trolley into a canal. Not even a gang of international terrorists kidnapping their grandmothers. At least none when the video camera is handy.

Nothing not happening nohow.

It’s not even that many of the unboxers seem particularly enthusiastic about unboxing. Some of them even claim to not know what is in the box in the first place, which is fairly difficult to believe when you consider that they bought it, and paid the transport costs. No, they stumble along in their boring monotones, sometimes exclaiming “well, will you look at that” with all the excitement of an archbishop commentating on a chess marathon.

I’ve also noticed that many of the presenters of unboxing videos tend to be a bit disrespectful to the contents of the box. Accessories are tossed casually aside one by one with words like “And we have a hard drive and a standard USB cable” as if they don’t really matter at all. And in fact they don’t. The product is nothing; the unboxing experience is everything.

Mind you, in terms of production costs, unboxing videos tend to be very cheap entertainment indeed. Props usually consist of a table and a knife, although scissors have been used on occasions. Script writing too tends to take a low priority. There’s a lot of ad-libbing in the style of “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much foam padding” or, more prosaically, “So let’s see what we have in the box” or, more bizarrely, “Let’s do the smell test”.

Unboxing smell-testing equipment (here seen on dog).

More worrying to people with an ounce of sanity is that some unboxing videos have pretty high production standards. There’s a snappy intro with upbeat music. A presenter – typically a voice only – who achieves a certain degree of rapid-fire articulacy. There’s quite clearly a flourishing market out there for people who want to see objects removed from boxes.

And even more worrying is the fact that in today’s consumer society, the box is gaining in importance over its contents. Manufacturers wised up to this a long time ago - Apple, in particular, has become well-known for its elegant, stylish packaging. In fact, if you buy high-tech goods online, you’ll often see a photograph of the box along with one of the product. Does the box tell you any more about the product than what you’ve already read about it? No. But the box is still important. After all, when you’re actually using your tiny mobile phone, can anyone really see what brand it is? Of course not. The defining moment of ownership of a high-end device begins and ends with the box.

Fortunately I foresee a rosy future for the unboxing video. Splice them all together and play them back-to-back on the TV in your bedroom. A guaranteed cure for insomnia.