Working in groups we are looking at different examples of digital media an figuring out why we think it is a form of digital media,how people use/work with this media and mechanics of the medium.
I have been given these topics to look at which are ‘Video Games’, ‘Facebook/SocialNetworking’ and ‘Youtube’.
We are using the term Digital Media to refer to any content-based electronic media that is created, distributed and displayed using communication technology for the purposes of entertainment.
Youtube:
Why is it a form of digital media? Well a digital media is any media that has been encoded in a machine-readable format which is exactly what Youtube is. Behind the easy faced website there is many codes creating videos and links etc. Youtube can be created, viewed, distributed, modified and is preserved on computers. Youtube is much more than just a digital media now people use it to interact with each other.
How do people use/work with this media? Youtube is an interactive digital media where people watch and share videos. It can be used as a form of promotion, advertisement and people can interact with one another. You can look at peoples pages find out about different users and also look into different categories on the webpage for example news etc.
The Mechanics of Youtube –
I have found the mechanical side of Youtube very interesting in the way that they use many different codes and formats they use to upload videos and help people watch them all over the world. I have also found it very interesting the ‘loading’ sign, knowing that it just a gif file going round and round is bizarre knowing myself that it gives comfort to people informing them that the video is loading when whats behind it is a very technical process.
Facebook:
Why is it a form of digital media? Again just like Youtube, Facebook is a media that has been encoded in a machine-readable format. Facebook again can also be created, viewed, distributed, modified and is preserved on computers. Facebook is the all known most famous Social Networking site, where people share imagery interact with each other and is theoretically a book of faces.
How do people use/work with this media? Facebook is an interactive, social media where people post about themselves and whats going on in the world. Almost like a personal blog and newspaper. Lots of people on a day to day basis look at Facebook not just on the computer screen but on their mobiles and iPads etc. You can look at different peoples pages and interact worldwide.
The Mechanics of Facebook:
Programmes used –
– ‘Facebook uses PHP because it is a good web programming language with extensive support and an active developer community and it is good for rapid iteration. PHP is a dynamically typed/interpreted scripting language.’
– ‘For the database, Facebook utilises MySQL because of its speed and reliability. MySQL is used primarily as a key-value store as data is randomly distributed amongst a large set of logical instances. These logical instances are spread out across physical nodes and load balancing is done at the physical node level.
As far as customizations are concerned, Facebook has developed a custom partitioning scheme in which a global ID is assigned to all data. They also have a custom archiving scheme that is based on how frequent and recent data is on a per-user basis. Most data is distributed randomly.’
Facebook uses many different programmes for many different things looking into this video i found it very interesting to find out how it works from the inside and how they store their data. This was the most interesting part for me.
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