Youtube: an Analysis

 
Hello Readers! 

 For this week's blog post, I am going to be talking about something more school-related, and by school-related, I mean "my- personal-homework-assignment -related". As a part of my Digital Writing class, we must write a Digital Artifact analysis paper. A Digital Artifact can be anything ranging from a website to a gaming console, to a specific wiki page. This paper will require analyzing the parts of the Digital Artifact that makes users want to contribute to it, that offers learning, and overall make it practical and appealing for its users. I will use concepts I've learned from the class such as Rhetoric, Virtual Communities, Cooperating versus Collaborating online, and etctera. With all that being said, this blog post will also serve as a sort of introduction to my paper topic and will also give some background information as well. The Digital Artifact I will be analyzing is *drum roll please...* YouTube.




The "YouTube" Logo


   Anytime someone needs a tutorial on how to complete a task, an idea for a project, or even homework help, where do they go? YouTube. YouTube is a social media platform that was created back in 2005 on Valentine's Day. Social Networking, according to Howard Rheingold's Netsmart, is the act of socializing or interacting with people or content within any online community (Rheingold, H. (2014). Net smart: how to thrive online.) .YouTube offers just that.  On this platform, users are able to create videos and upload them for the world to see. YouTube is appealing for a variety of different reasons.
     The reason I am so intrigued by it and want to focus on it for my paper  is because of the sheer vastness of the platform. I feel that there is nothing that HASN'T been put on YouTube yet. Participatory culture is a huge factor in YouTube and something that I think has caused it to become such a big platform. Youtube encourages people to like and comment on videos, but to do so, you must make an account. This encourages even MORE participation and I think that  the website has been growing ever since because of this. Participatory culture, also defined by Howard Rheingold in NetSmart is the act of millions of individual acts of participation. According to Tubics (Tubics.com), As of 2019, there were 31 million or so YouTube accounts. On top of that, YouTube is very powerful. Just a couple days ago, I streamed an hour long video. This video had lots of advertisments, and the uploader of the video was donating all of the monetary funds from the ad revenue towards the Black Lives Matter movement and other relevant causes; Here is the link if you are interested: (BLM Youtube Fundraiser). I was also able to find a video from the creators of YouTube themselves, only a year after its launch, announcing that the platform had been acquired by Google (
Creators of YouTube ) which can be insight into the whole story of Youtube. 

    With all of this being said, I still have a lot more researching to do, but I think that my topic has great potential and a lot to talk about. Feel free to comment your thoughts about YouTube, What do you think YouTube has that other social media doesn't that has allowed it to flourish for as long as it has? Thanks for reading!

                                                                From my Desktop,
                                                                            Kanya
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References:
tubics, Author: MatthiasFunkCo-Founder of, and Co-Founder of tubics. “How Many YouTube Channels Are There?” Tubics, 20 Mar. 2020, www.tubics.com/blog/number-of-youtube-channels/#:~:text=As%20of%202019%2C%20there%20are,hours%20of%20video%20every%20minute.

Rheingold, Howard. Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. MIT Press, 2014.

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