How is YouTube a digital writing environment, and how does the medium (videos) influence the content of the digital writing and the "many different ways the site can be understood?" (94). 

YouTube is a digital media environment with a heavy focus on online video consumption and distribution. However, even though YouTube's primary purpose is a video consumption website, it also serves as a digital writing environment.  YouTubers (with a heavy emphasis on bloggers and vloggers) will often encourage  some type of dialogue with the viewers. This dialogue may ask the viewers something directly, stir up some sort of controversy for the viewers to debate over themselves, or encourage interaction between users via the comments section (93). So even though YouTube's purpose is to provide videos for consumption, it still counts as a digital writing environment. As stated before, the YouTubers themselves have the ability to incite dialogues between them and the users, or users to other users. In other words YouTubers have the ability to directly influence the content of the digital writing environments that YouTube offers. This interesting balance of video and writing environment as well as its sheer size allows YouTube to have a layer of complexity that was not offered on many sites prior to its existence. Thus, it can be understood in many different ways (94).

How can audience labor "generate alternative forms of value?" (116). Provide an example.

Television is interesting because it has two primary schools of thought, the appointment model and the engagement model (116). While both involve the distribution of media content, they do it in two very different ways. The appointment based model involves an "engagement based paradigm (116)" in where viewers need to arrange their lives around a certain timeslot in order to consume the media distributed. Monetenization occurs via target audiences by target viewer demographic, which allowed companies to advertise to a select audience and networks to collect ad revenue from the select audiences. Alternatively, the engagement model involves a piece of content spread over many different consumption mediums (116). It differs from the appointment based model in that the viewer may consume the media at their leisure, but through a premium service, and with a variety of different mediums to do it through. These mediums include services like Hulu, Netfilx, a DVR, home media (such as DVD's, video cassettes, Bluray, etc), and many others. This method will more-often-than-not encourage the discussion, analysis, and spread of the media being consumed. The inherent audience will also be more likely to partake in said actions, as they are going out of the way to pay for a non-standard service (as opposed to the more standard cable subscription). In other words, the content creators will target some of the 'hard core' fans of a series to help perpetuate the fandom through encouraged actions, essentially creating a type of 'audience labor (116)'. This 'audience labor' generates additional value, as the viewers will get to share additional experiences beyond the media that they consumed. For example, popular TV show  'Game of Thrones' is only accessible legally through premium services, but still has a very dedicated fan base to the point of mass merchandising.

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