YouTube is a video hosting headquartered in California, United States.  The service was created by three former Paypal employees in February 2005.  In November 2006, it was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion.  YouTube’s 2005 launch and the subsequent proliferation of similar sites represent a maturation of the broadband infrastructure and the embedded software required for social media” (Julie Levin Russo).  YouTube has over a billion users that’s almost one-third of the Internet.  YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.  The number of users coming to YouTube who start at the YouTube homepage, similar to the way they might turn on their TV, is up more than 3x.  Most videos have less than a 100 views and most are home videos.  80% of YouTube’s views are from outside of the U.S.  YouTube has launched local versions in more than 70 countries.  You can navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages (covering 95% of the Internet population).  According to Google’s analytic tool Google Trends, the top 4 searches on Youtube are (2014-2016): trailers, music, Minecraft, and movies.

YouTube Red is a paid subscription service that  YouTube has offered to its users in the US; it provides advertising-free streaming of videos hosted by the service, offline and background playback of videos on mobile devices, access to new original content, and access to advertising-free music streaming in November 2014.  Offline downloads are only available for 30 days, but, using the apps, users can download videos for offline use and play them in the background.  It costs $9.99 a month.  However, apple users will be charged $12.99 for in app purchase tax).  It’s not its own app, just a tier for Google and YouTube accounts and apps.

It is supported by Smart TVs.  However, you still need to see ads on other paid networks such as paid channels or TV and movie purchases and rentals.  You also get free Google Play Music subscription with Red.  If you’re subscribed to Google music you also get YouTube red.  ”Google will continue to keep YouTube just the way it is. Without a subscription to Red, you can still watch all of the videos and channels you like on the site, free of charge, but with ads.  You will miss out on the extra features Red offers, but nothing will change about how you use YouTube right now. Additionally, most of the original content available through Red will eventually become free with ads after an unspecified amount of time.”  YouTube music filters out any non musical videos and red allows you to listen while in other apps or while the screen is off. YouTube music is still available but not with those features

-”Because YouTube Red includes free access to Google Play Music, it’s arguably a better deal than Spotify, Rdio and other streaming music subscriptions because you get both services.”

In Limor Shifman’s “Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker” the meme is  re-examined in the context of digital culture.  Richard Dawkins coined the term memetics in 1976 to describe gene-like infectious units of culture that spread from person to person.  Like genes, memes are defined as replicators that undergo variation, competition, selection, and retention. However, only memes suited to their sociocultural environment spread successfully, while others become extinct (Chielens & Heylighen, 2005).

Arguments about memes:

The definition is highly contested and a little vague.  The analogy between nature and culture feeding the field has been criticized as reductive, materialistic, and ineffective in describing complex human behaviors.  The conscious selection and mutation of memes has generated heated debates over human agency and memetic control.  Finally, some critics claim that memetics has no added value: It does not offer tools or insights beyond those employed in traditional disciplines such as cultural anthropology or linguistics (Benitez-Bribiesca, 2001; Chesterman, 2005; Rose, 1998).  In the vernacular discourse of netizens, the phrase ‘‘Internet meme’’ is commonly applied to describe the propagation of content items such as jokes, rumors, videos, or websites from one person to others via the Internet. According to this popular notion, an Internet meme may spread in its original form, but it often also spawns user-created derivatives.  An era of blurring boundaries between interpersonal and mass, professional and amateur, bottom-up and top-down communications. In a time marked by a convergence of media platforms (Jenkins, 2006), when content flows swiftly from one medium to another, memes have become more relevant than ever to communication scholarship.
Google and Education:

Google is a new format for research and obtaining general information.

Google is amazing in that it lets us access the global library.  Google’s ease of access is shortening people’s capacity for recollection, though our ability to store and recall information in our minds is also changing with new technologies.  However, Google and ‘googling’ are new formats for interacting with information that we are not necessarily trained to use. Instead, as part of its transition into traditional education, googling is crammed into a format that still prioritizes memorization and traditional techniques/sources for research.  The Introduction of The Gospel of Google describes the permeation of the enterprise into our culture.  “We need to examine what Google has told us about itself, its means, and its motives as it makes the world anew in these ways, and to interrogate and evaluate both the consequences of Googlization and the ways we respond to it”.

The first time I ever heard about pod casting was probably somewhere between elementary and middle school.  By that time I had become a full-on music junkie.  I was scouring the internet for new music and at first kept up with iTunes charts to see what was coming out and becoming popular.  Through my strolls on the iTunes store I stumbled upon a whole trove of podcasts.  There was a podcast for everything, and anyone could make one.  This easy to use medium of expressing one’s self had become this huge online community.  I first got introduced to various news, comedian, and blogger podcasts.  Never really becoming captivated by the whole thing I kind of let it fall to the side as music stayed my main focus throughout time.  I would still obviously see podcasts pop up on the internet, strolling through NPR or seeing some podcast for some obscure blog or person I had no idea about.  Addressing podcasts in this class made me remember how relevant this medium is to some people.  It has stayed relevant ever since its inception into media.  Clearly there is a market for podcasts.  To me it almost seems like a modern version of talk radio.  Just easier to digest and divided out into episodes for listeners to scroll through and go back to when they please.  The structure of it is quite interesting.  It can be any range of time length, it can include as many people as you can record, it can be weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc.  There are no strict guidelines to a podcast.  It is pretty freeform when it comes to making one.  Creating one for our reflection on Youtube and vlog series was an interesting process.  I have spent a decent amount of time recording raps in the sound booths at school, but I had never used them for an educational purpose.  Going there and setting up the equipment for people to record conversations seemed strange at first.  Eventually once we got into the flow of things, it got easier.  It was something I could see myself doing in the future as a sound engineer for a radio station, but those are just small dreams.  The real bulk of the work came when it got down to editing it.  I can see how editors in media industries can be stressful.  It takes a lot of time and fine tuning to edit a piece of audio until it sounds good.  Adding music, editing out mistakes, playing with the equalizer to make the audio edits flow smoother, adding effects here and there all take a lot of time.  I don’t really see myself doing a podcast any time soon, nor do I see myself listening to podcasts in the future.  But I am glad I revisited this medium for a bit and got to dive back into podcast culture and see what it is all about now.  Maybe in the far future I will get back into podcasting as a way of spending my time, but until then music is all I need to sustain myself.