New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam | 2011

PICNIC: Life in Readable Cities

Using public transport, we leave digital traces when checking in and out with our OV chip cards. Once our Bonus Card at Albert Heijn got scanned over the counter, we provide Albert with valuable information about what we like...

By Caroline Goralczyk on 09/18/11 3

“Letters, Postcards, Email” Three ways of communicating by Esther Milne

One of my favorite moments of all is when I open my mailbox and find there a letter waiting for me. I don’t mean my emai box, but the traditional letterbox. It’s always full of advertisements and bills which...

By Urszula Jurgiel on 09/18/11 1

Book Review : Vu a la web-cam (essai sur la web-intimité) by Nicolas Thély

Nicolas Thély published in 2002 his PhD thesis on web intimacy. As he started doing research on webcams, Nicolas Thély was surprised to find so few (if any) specialized literature on the subject of webcams. The book presents and...

By Clément Adam on 09/18/11 1

Book Review: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

As a follow up of his first book, Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky now present to us the concept of Cognitive Surplus. In previous years of this so called “new world”, criticizing the Television became a common thing. The...

By Juliana Paiva on 09/17/11 1

‘Mapping E-Culture’ book review

The book is recommended for people who start their new media education and/or want to get introduced to some pioneering digital artists in the Netherlands, Brazil, China, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine.

By Andrian Georgiev on 09/17/11 Comments Off

Eagerness to share our lives with the others — where are the online boundaries?

More and more often I find on Facebook things which I would rather never want to find. Sonograms of unborn children of people who I know from high school and didn’t talk to them since then, tomographies of their...

By Urszula Jurgiel on 09/17/11 Comments Off

Book review: Peter Olsthoorn – De macht van Google

What does Google know from us? Since search engines are able to track the user’s search queries, personal information can be gathered in order to improve the engine’s accuracy and provide better results. In De macht van Google (The...

By Erik van Mastrigt on 09/17/11 Comments Off

Book Review: The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser

The Filter Bubbler refers to the personalization processes taking place on the Web, which shape what content you see and more important what content you don't get to see. Big players like Google and Facebook feed you what they...

By Jorrit Schaap on 09/17/11 1

Korean gladiators from a distant galaxy

Most people just aren’t interested in watching videogames. They’d rather be playing them. That may be the case in Europe or in the United States but not in South Korea. In South Korea watching videogames is a national pastime,...

By Wouter Timmermans on 09/16/11 Comments Off

Review of Nancy Baym’s Personal Connections in the Digital Age

It is often the narcissistic tendencies of academics which alienates a much wider potential readership of their work. A use of language and content that predicates a certain level of cultural capital renders many articles inaccessible to a number...

By Jamie Franklin on 09/16/11 Comments Off

Book review: Virtually You by Elias Aboujaoude, MD

The humankind is moving online. Our work, relationships, communications, banking and even shopping can be done online today, and where possible we’ll happily take the easy ‘one click away’ shortcut, because it’s faster, more efficient and more convenient. For...

By Ave Tampere on 09/16/11 1

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Media So Different, So Appealing?

As any illustrator should be, I am obsessed by visual culture, art, design and media. The way contemporary creative conception and expression takes on new shapes and forms, catapulted through the fibre-optic network and available for all to consume,...

By Martijn Dorresteijn on 09/15/11 Comments Off

‘It’s the Village, Stupid!’: How Hyperlocal Media Can Save Journalism

Do you remember the good old days? Back then, journalism used to be a respected profession. Crowned by the rhetoric of popular culture as a sort of ‘champions of truth’ (Superman, His Girl Friday, All the President’s Men), reporters...

By Jacobo Corujeira on 09/15/11 Comments Off

The virtuality debate

Media mention the term frequently: virtual. Think of virtual worlds (Second Life), gaming environments (World of Warcraft) or simply social network sites (Facebook). Those are places that don’t exist in a physical, touchable form, except from the hosting servers....

By Erik van Mastrigt on 09/15/11 1

Master New Media; a logical choice.

The first week at the Master New Media was interesting and it gave a good view of what we will do in the upcoming year. It is nice to see that the classes consist of so many students from...

By Daan Fliervoet on 09/15/11 Comments Off

Media art to teach the unaware people

My first blogpost on the Masters of Media blog should be about a topic I’m interested in., but that’s not as easy as it looks, because my interests are very wide spread. The reason why I’m following the master...

By Maarten Jansen on 09/15/11 Comments Off

The Naked Eye: Toward an Object-Oriented Ontology in the Literature of Tao Lin

On being seen naked in the bathroom by his pet cat, Derrida likens the feline’s stare to “… the gaze of a seer, visionary, or extra-lucid blind person,” (372). I am compelled to thwart such clairvoyance by putting my...

By Kendall Grady on 09/15/11 8

Notes from the underground torrent scene – or on the distributed emergence of taxonomical conventions.

There is an uncertainty aura around the act of downloading illegally distributed content: no matter how versed one is in the matter, one can’t always be completely sure of its precedence, which directly impacts its expected quality, relevancy, and...

By Daniel Luiz dos Santos on 09/14/11 Comments Off

A(n Ever)note from the train

There’s something remarkable about the interaction between man and machine (and vice versa). Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams both had their own view in this classic debate about the social shaping of technology versus the technological shaping of society....

By Bree Tahapary on 09/14/11 1