New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam | 2010

Virtueel Platform at PICNIC 2010: HOT and NOT

I can call myself HOT officially since last Thursday the 23th. Attending PICNIC 2010 with 99 fellow HOT-students is a hot experience indeed. Packed in a decorated marquee, listening to Sebastian Chan who is currently the Head of Digital,...

By Xander Stolwijk on 09/30/10 Comments Off

The panopticon is just a prison, guys: On a new approach to understanding new media

Numerous academic books and articles that have claimed to address the workings of new media tend to merely present an online phenomenon’s lineage or draw an analogy between older (media) theory and newer media (theory). Let us, for instance,...

By Lennard Torbijn on 09/30/10 3

Wikipedia for Experts

I am in the process of creating an English Wikipedia page for the school I work at, Het Amsterdams Lyceum. The state I initially found this Wikipedia page in is illustrative of the reasons many teachers believe forms of...

By Bram van der Kruk on 09/30/10 Comments Off

Africa Unsigned: the Professionalizing of User Input

In the past years the Internet has been flooded with user generated content. The theory on new media has subsequently been flooded with research into this phenomenon, that is commonly centered around the web 2.0 concept. This theorizing of...

By Erik van Bemmelen on 09/30/10 Comments Off

Social Media Is Not Social

Last week I saw this TEDx presentation by David Armano. In this inspring 16 minutes he talks about how social media itself, is not social. Armano says that it is the people itself that are social. It is time...

By Joris Pekel on 09/30/10 Comments Off

Introducing: A Wiki Debut

In order to gain some more insight in the inner workings of Wikipedia, I've created a new entry about the book Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women by Ricky Jay. A highly recommended history book about some of the...

By Laurent Hubeek on 09/30/10 Comments Off

Excerpts of audiovisual astronomy

In the first systematic study about movie stardom and its heavy influence on early mass culture, Edgar Morin (1957) argues that during the golden studio-age Hollywood was able to dramatically change the ritual function of the mythical universe: by...

By Alberto Angelini on 09/29/10 Comments Off

Open Data

There is an open data movement afoot, now, around the world. (Berners-Lee, 2010) Tim Berners-Lee is optimistic in his 2010 Ted talk The year open data went worldwide. Berners-Lee is one of the advocates for open data, he is...

By Marije Rooze on 09/29/10 1

Adopted Teen Traced on Social Network

A great example of how the privacy issues we face on social networks are not just limited to our data being sold to marketers. This BBC interview tells how a British girl was traced by her natural sister on...

By Natalie Dixon on 09/29/10 Comments Off

Reflection and critique on the development of location-based mobile applications.

Location-based applications are the new hype. Their presence is prominent in festivals, conferences and symposia that address to new media technologies, or to use the most recent terminology, that address to cross media developments. Thinkers and researchers either praise...

By olga paraskevopoulou on 09/29/10 Comments Off

Not to get too emotional… but what happened to emotion?

She' ll smile to you if you move to the left. No, try a different angle. I don't know... Is she smiling at all? For over 500 years, viewers and researchers have been trying to interpret Mona Lisa's...

By Ilektra Pavlaki on 09/28/10 Comments Off

Online Activism, Offline Passivism?

Social media and Web 2.0 have radically changed the way we communicate with each other. Blogs and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter let us...

By Fei An Tjan on 09/28/10 Comments Off

Researching online music networking in the Web 2.0 era: Soundcloud and the demise of MySpace

With the current steady rise of social networking sites, it is by all means an important question to ask how to research these in the field of new media studies. Furthermore, a lot of these sites offer services destined...

By Hans Terpstra on 09/28/10 Comments Off

The Internet – a ‘seductive data set’ accessed at the touch of a button

The rapid expansion of internet uptake throughout the world created a potential for new social experiences, and thus offers researchers new environments for their social enquiry (Beddows, 2008). Kaye and Johnson predicted already in 1999 that the World Wide...

By Anne Lukas on 09/28/10 1

Involve me, and I’ll understand: Classroom 2.0

Returning to the topic I wrote about two weeks ago, I’d like to have another look at the use of technology in education. It was easy to express my annoyances about the way platforms such as Blackboard are oftentimes...

By Anouka Slemmer on 09/27/10 1

Can the web become more social?

We have always thought that ‘less is more’ but according to Wired’ editor in chief Chris Anderson ‘more is better’. We have to move away from the idea of scarcity and exploit the power of waste on the web....

By Levien Rocha on 09/27/10 Comments Off

Amazonian Geeks and Social Activism: An Ethnographic Study

A couple of months ago I went to Brazil to conduct my MA reseach in the North of Brazil. This ethnographic study offers insight in the usage and appropriation of ICTs and the several projects and initiatives aiming at...

By ellen sluis on 09/27/10 Comments Off

Relationships matter! Even for our royal!

Since last Saturday our Royal is on twitter as well! And today on the news there was a new article about it. U can read the full article here. Although i am not very interested in our Royal, it...

By Layla Van Daalen on 09/27/10 1

Will Wikipedia end the disregarding of Swedish artist?

Swedish singers are often disregarded. They won’t make it out side the Swedish borders. What happened there? Did publicity fall short? Didn’t MTV pick it up? Or is there some other reason why Swedish musicians mostly don’t appear on...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 09/27/10 2

Shift in power

If you google “social media” or “social networksites” you will receive tons of links. Everybody seems to use social networksites and you need to be involved soon. Most of the links use a kind of paranoia, to make you...

By Hanneke Mertens on 09/27/10 1

Yeey I’m on Facebook! :s

With 500 million active users spending over 700 billion minutes per month, Facebook is gaining more and more traffic each single day. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. With these...

By Laila Koubia on 09/27/10 Comments Off

Surfing the Web of Trust: Couchsurfing

Social networks come in a wide variety on the World Wide Web. There’s the generic social network focusing on sharing info and multimedia with your friends (like facebook), professional sites (LinkedIn), forums, collaborative blogs and so on. Most of...

By Frank Molenaar on 09/27/10 Comments Off

Is Crowd Funding Viable? Best and Worst Practices

During PICNIC 2010 last week I attended the session Crowdfunding: The Financial Solution for the Creative Industry, it was an interesting presentation/discussion with crowdfunding experts who shared their best practices and visions of the future. Discussions emerged on how...

By Jidi Guo on 09/27/10 Comments Off

Don’t Feed the Trolls

Back in 2006 when Ze Frank was still running The Show, he asked his viewers to help him find the creator of a funny audio clip that had been floating around on the Web. Frank’s community, his Sportsracers as...

By Laurent Hubeek on 09/27/10 Comments Off