Runny nose, fever, itchy throat… Just type in your symptoms into Google and get a diagnosis. Some people are criticizing Google for trying to play doctor, however Google only means well.

We live in a day and age where everything is literally at our fingertips. We can search Google or any other search engine and get an answer to our questions within seconds. People have been searching their symptoms online on site such as Web MD and other online resources and they will continue to do so in the future. In my opinion, as long as Google is simply providing information and not pushing products like a specific pill made by the pharmaceutical industry, there is no harm done.

Google provides patients with an additional resource and in some cases, an online community. In my opinion, these platforms give users and patients more agency over their care. What if your doctor is not versed in the newest technology or treatment plans available for your diagnosis? What if you are not able to afford to get a second opinion? Google is simply giving you the tools and the questions to ask your physician moving forward.

This is especially true for people suffering from uncommon or uncurable diseases and disorders. I know someone who suffers from a mild form of hidradenitis suppurativa – a recurring skin condition with no cure and a treatment plan that only treats the symptoms after they have already occurred. After numerous unsuccessful doctor and dermatologist visits, this person has found solace in the online medical community. They have provided a way for them to find different alternatives to treat the condition through trial and error of what has worked for other people. It has also provided them with certain medications or treatment options to ask their doctors about – many of these are things that would not have been previously recommended.

The Dr. Google article reminded me of a story that I heard about one of my favorite HGTV hosts. The host, Tarek was diagnosed with Thyroid cancer after receiving and tip from a viewer asking him to get a biopsy done on his neck. (http://news.health.com/2015/11/23/tarek-el-moussa-thyroid-cancer-battle-remission/) This viewer’s actions may have very well saved his life.

While there are some negatives to Google and heath/medical treatments, I think that as long as Google commits to not promote certain products or miracle treatments and simply offers information and always recommends that users confer with a medical professional, there is no harm done.

I honestly had no clue what Twitch was before this class and just my luck we ended up being the group that got to present on it. So now I feel as if I took a complete 180 and went from not knowing anything about Twitch to becoming very knowledgeable about it. I think that Twitch is a great platform for people to use and to watch. I started watching some streams to try to understand it better. Although I do not see myself continuing to watch Twitch streams after this semester I do get it now and can understand why this became so popular. I really never understood why people would want to watch others play video games and quickly realized how hypocritical that was because I always used to watch my friend play video games and it was a pretty good time. So I get why people would watch streams online. It also seems like the same thing with watching sports. Why would you want to watch someone play a sport when you could actually just go out and play it yourself? This holds true to video games as well. You are not really watching Twitch just for the games. You are watching it for several other reasons. You may be watching someone play an extremely difficult game like League of Legends who is very good at the game. Or one may just be watching someone who has a good personality. They may just like a certain streamers commentary regardless of how good they actually are at the game.
But even though I now understand Twitch and the popularity in has received there are some real problems with some aspects of it and the gaming industry in general. The gaming industry does not represent people of color or people other genders then male. This holds true to Twitch too. Most of the top streamers are white males. For women to get noticed in Twitch it almost seems like the have to treat it as a webcam website. Some women use their looks to get more viewers on their channel, which causes some debate on whether or not this is a good thing. Should women have to use their looks to gain views? It is a really difficult question to consider and there seems to be no real answer to it. It really depends on who you ask. Like everything Twitch will develop over time and hopefully some time soon we will see more people of color and other genders represented on Twitch and have their channels reach the higher popularity levels

I’m not a big gamer, mostly dabbling in the NHL, FIFA, MLB, and Madden realms of the gaming world and even to that extent I am not very good or into it at all. I had no idea that people actually live streamed their screens while gaming and could make up to $300,000 a year. If I ever reach that type of income I’ll probably be living on a private yacht somewhere in the Caribbean.

Twitch on the other hand might be a good career path if this whole accounting thing doesn’t work out. The game streaming business is a crazy concept to me that people will pay to watch someone else play a video-game. The article by Tanya Depass in Paste Magazine brought numbers up that seemed out of this world: $300,000 annual salary, 16 billion minutes watched per month and 11 million videos broadcast per month. The gaming community is obviously much bigger than I had ever known. However, with this many players broadcasting, and this many viewers, why is there such a lack of diversity in the gaming community? That blew my mind a little bit because let’s face it, who doesn’t love video-games?

I agree with some of the article in that perhaps many players of color do not identify themselves as so in their Twitch or Twitter handle, but there has to be more to it than that. How can it be that in a virtual community there is still such disparity and assumptions made about people that can’t even be seen through the game. Tanya Depass states, “there is a false assumption that white male stars attract the best audiences…non-white people are still not considered beautiful or appealing by societal standard.” This is horrible. Even in a world that is seen on screen, with no view of the gamer themselves, there is a “societal standard” that exists in attempt to attract a broader audience.

We have covered a lot of topics this year from new media to gender and race roles, but I don’t know if any have been as shocking as this topic for me. We covered it in our group project about podcasting and the differences amongst podcasts and I am curious if there is a Twitch handle that is owned by the TWiB team. I felt as though they covered the most relevant topics, and had a way of bringing people of all gender roles and races together. Tanya mentions that more people of color need to share and promote other streamers of color to try and level the playing field and that “diversity can’t be put as an afterthought but should be part of the core mission and values of the organization.”

I agree with her in this aspect, and I also hope that someone, similar to Elon James White and his development of the TWiB platform, can create a system that will strengthen the Twitch community by eliminating this societal standards and bring gamers together with the one thing they love most: gaming.

The future of television is a topic that could be taken in a million different directions. I never thought that growing up with my grandparents still owning a television with a knob to change the channel would develop into a conversation about whether televisions will live on or become a thing of the past. I was born in 1994 and grew up on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel, the classic Disney Channel movies and shows such as Rocket Power, Hey Arnold and Spongebob of course. To think that I would wait every night until 7:30 to watch an episode of Rocket Power before bed is crazy considering that I could pull up any show in the world while simultaneously writing this blog post. The advances in technology in just my 22 years of life are mind blowing. I can log into Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Prime or Hulu and essentially have every television show at my fingertips. I can google a movie title and have it streaming from my laptop or even my phone in a matter of minutes. I can even stream these things on YouTube, which was always used for sports highlights or music videos; never did I imagine it being an outlet for movies and television shows.

So, where does it go next? Will the television become obsolete? Will family gatherings on Sunday afternoons to watch the Patriots turn into everyone tuning in on their own virtual reality headset and standing on the sidelines for the game? I sure hope not. This is of course an exaggeration, but with recent advancements in technology and articles I have read about the future of the NFL and holographic images brought to the living room, I’m not so sure it’s out of the question. There is already a crazy announcement in the NFL with Twitter recently winning the bid for the right to stream Thursday Night Football games in the fall of 2016. Anyone with a Twitter account can log in and watch the games on your smartphone, laptop or even television if it is a smart TV or has an HDMI connection. Twitter won the rights over CBS, ESPN and the NFL Network. How? Because the future of television is evolving, even in the world of sports which I always thought would keep the television set a permanent fixture in sport fanatics households. That being said, if I can watch sports via my Twitter account, why am I paying Comcast $100 or more a month for everything that I can receive on the internet? Well, a large part of that is because Comcast is also my source for internet access and it is the package that becomes worth it with the high cost of internet. But, if there is an alternative source in the future for internet access, cable companies will become obsolete, the internet will become crucial and the television may evolve into a giant computer with Twitter applications to stream your favorite television shows, movies, news and sporting events.

The persistent problem of free speech and platforms is the question of censorship. Is there a point at which, in order to preserve someone’s potential happiness, speech should be censored? Or is speech protected in all forms?

There are two primary issues with censorship. 1) censoring the speech of one party opens the door to censorship of others and begs the question of consistency: when is it ok to censor and when is it not? a question which is based on relativity and 2) censoring the speech of one party can lead the radicalization and appeal of that party, so that even if censorship is ok, exercising it can work against the reason censorship was delivered at all.

In order to avoid these issues, a different approach can be taken. If hate speech/harassment are viewed not individually as problems, but rather the symptoms of other problems, then addressing the root of the issue avoids the problem of censorship.

It would then become prudent to trace the root of hate speech to its various structural supports, namely the oppressive structures that serve to divide and dichotomize individuals and fester hate between them. A dissolution of these systems, among them capitalism, the patriarchy, and racist states, would then discourage hate speech to such an extent that censorship should never be necessary.