TECHNOLOGY Each One Team One Presentations
Today in class my classmates and I presented on a different technology and gave the background of it, how it has helped society and how it has hurt society (if it has). I presented on the history of Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) also known as drones which I completed in a blog post about. Below are three technologies that I learned more about from my peers' presentations.
CASSETTE TAPES
Cassette tapes were created in 1963 by Lou Ottens while he worked at Philips, a European company where he was the director of audio vision. Vinyls were around long before cassette tapes and were popular. People used them when entertaining guests or just for their own pleasure. However, with the invention of cassette tapes the music industry was changed because people could create custom playlists and travel with them. Vinyls are played on record players which are big devices that usually have to be plugged in to work. Whereas a cassette tape is compact and transportable, and only vinyl is practically transportable, not really the whole record player. Cars became adaptable for cassette tapes so people could listen on the go. It was surprising to find out how cassette tapes dominated compared to vinyls. The American Enterprise Institute website states, “starting in the late 1970s as cassette tapes entered the market and overtook LP sales by the mid-1980s and remained the dominant format until 1993.”
YOUTUBE
YouTube was founded by Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, and Chad Hurley which launched on February 14, 2005. They all worked for PayPal (an online money system) prior to creating the video streaming service and even had investments from people linked to PayPal. Jawed Karim was the first ever person to upload a YouTube video. In 2021, there was a record number of 2.6 billion YouTube users with 23.6 million being premium users. YouTube premium costs $11.99 a month and gives members ad-free videos, the ability to exit the YouTube app but still have the video play, can download music and videos, and they can watch YouTube original movies and TV shows. However, just a year later Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion (today that would be around 2 billion dollars). One reason for this purchase was because of its popularity compared to Google Videos. Google Videos described by Google “was a free video hosting service launched by… Google on January 25, 2005… this platform allowed video clips to be hosted on Google servers and embedded on to other websites.” Even though Google Videos launched before YouTube people still flocked to YouTube and did not really entertain Google’s video sharing.
While the initial usage of YouTube was so families could easily store and share homemade videos it has in a way strayed away from that. Now, there are all types of videos on YouTube and to a certain extent anything can be posted onto the site which concerns people, especially parents. This concern led to the creation of YouTube Kids to be released in 2015 which is a kid friendly version of YouTube housing only appropriate videos of children, but there are still some holes in the system. Also, cyberbullying is a HUGE problem on the platform. With YouTubers getting comments about their appearance, life choices, and drama. Cyberbullying can consume someone’s life causing them to suffer from anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Which is sad considering many people who upload on YouTube are expressing themselves and would rather have acceptance than hate.
Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and Noah Glass are all entrepreneurs who helped make Twitter into what it is today. With its launch in 2006, Jack Dorsey sent out the first ever tweet which said, “just set up my twttr.” A tweet that recently sold for $2.9 million, but the buyer is now trying to resell his purchase and the highest bid is only $800.
Just two years later Twitter would play a monumental role in the 2008 United States Presidential Election. Then, Senator Obama who represented Illinois ran against Senior Senator of Arizona John McCain. The late McCain was 71-72 years old when he was campaigning compared to a middle aged Obama who was 45-46 years old. So, when Twitter launched it was not shocking that someone who is younger would utilize Twitter to their advantage which is what the Obama administration did. At that time “more than half the adult population were online political users,” and 60% of online users were going online to get information about the politics or the campaign. President Obama was able to utilize Twitter to reach more people which helped him win. He had 365 electoral college votes (115 over the required 270) while McCain had 173. Twitter and other social media platforms helped President Obama reach more people in the 2012 Presidential election as well when he ran against Utah’s Senator Mitt Romney. With President Obama having 23 million Twitter followers and Romney with only 1 million, at the time.
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