An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube

Michael Wesch start his presentation off by telling about how ABC was the third television network to start broadcasting in 1948. He then says that if all three networks had broadcast everyday for the sixty years they had been operating then there would have been 1.5 million hours of programming. Then Michael lets us know that YouTube produced for than that in the last six months. YouTube is more than just a site on the internet to watch videos. YouTube lets people from all over the world connect with one another and be able to show the world anything. Michael tells the tale about the moldovan pop song Numa Numa and how the song spread across the world because a person in New Jersey made a web cam video of him dancing to it in his room. How that persons act spread to millions of people to remake his video of them dancing to Numa Numa and even getting so big that there were news stories all over the country talking about the guy from New Jersey. He starts to give all kind of statistics about YouTube were very interesting.

Grandberry Museum

On the first day of the Digital Literacies II the class went to the new Grandberry Museum to see the brand new Smartphone Museum. The museum consist of old forms of digital media, each display includes a QR code that can be scanned with your smartphone. Once scanned with your smartphone, the user will be shown a video explaining how the device works and how it was used. We were told to pick one of the displays that interested us. The display I found most interesting was a record player from the 1920's that had the capability to transmit the sound of the record to a radio nearby. It is the same technology as bluetooth or AM/FM radio transmitter.