Monthly Archives: September 2010

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 numbers we can no longer ignore the social impact of social network sites. I shall focus in this blog on Facebook since it is the most controversial social network site and has provoked several debates concerning privacy, reality and commercialization.


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 these sites serve the purpose of staying in touch or getting in touch with people you met off-line and want to…


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 to create better (financial) solutions for the creative industry. Roy Cremers and Valentine van der Lande were two…


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 he likes to call them, had been playing around with the song for months already and had produced many remixes, videos and album covers based on the original clip. Frank’s plan was to present the mysterious singer known only as Ray with their finished works. But how do you find someone if all you know is a first name and the sound of their voice? Apparently, it’s not that hard. Frank’s community managed to find and identify Ray within two days, which, Frank admits, is kind of creepy. In this case, Frank’s mobilization of his community was based on good intentions and fun was had by all, including Ray. But what happens if things turn a little more serious?


MIN(D)ING Your Data

Last week, ‘surveillance and control’ was the theme the Masters of Media-students were debating about. Theorists as Michel Foucault, Deleuze, Galloway and Thacker and Chun passed the revue. With the articles of the last three theorist there was some pessimism going on during the discussions.

In their article ‘Protocol, Control and Networks’, Galloway and Thacker write about the network discourse…


The Changing Power of Parents

Being present on a social network once was a way to escape parents’ attention. For many teens, home is a highly regulated space with rules and norms that are strictly controlled by adults. The internet is less regulated by social norms. Teenagers face a challenging dilemma on social networking sites. How can they be simultaneously cool to their friends and acceptable to their parents at the same time? Danah Boyd states:

“The power that adults hold over youth explains more than just complications in identity performance; it is the root of why teenagers are on MySpace in the first place.”


Web 2.0+ User=♥? An ANT approach to User-Web relationships.

In reviewing the Digital Folklore Reader last week, I came across Olia Lialina’s essay Vernacular Web 2, in which she argues that the void caused by the demise of the playful, cheeky and, most importantly, personal homepage has been filled by dull designer-developed profile pages or templates. “The online life of a today’s user [...]is disciplined and fomalized.…


Why you shouldn’t adjust your privacy settings in Facebook

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Chun states that we, the users, perceive the new media, in particular the Internet, to be free, democratic and save. We think we are in control of our content, but just like with other technologies, we can never have total control. It is only then, when technology fails, that we are reminded of our vulnerability and this is…


Facebook Confessions: Pastoral Power in New Media Practices

Facebook, as a tool to connect, communicate, share, link, network and socialize, has become omnipresent in the Internet landscape. Its history starts in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg launched the network at Harvard University. It has since reached over 500 million members. The fascination with facebook is equally pervasive. A quick search at google scholar results in a staggering…


How Social Tagging can improve Digitized Cultural Heritage

The Internet has in recent years paved the way for the social web. This is a development to the so called Web 2.0. In this manifestation the web finally distanced itself from traditional websites in the old media tradition. One of the characteristics of the social web is social tagging, also called folksonomy. To investigate this phenomenon from a humanistic…