Author Profile

  • Bob Nefkens
  • Url: http://newlymediated.tumblr.com
  • Posts: 8
  • About the user: Bob is a MA student in the field of New Media at the University of Amsterdam. During his first year of studying 'Communication and Information Studies' at the University of Utrecht he stumbled upon the subject of New Media, what would change his career as a student. Particularly because he was dealing with a lot of new media in his own life (like most of his generation), he was wondering what kind of impact they have on him and the people around him, and what the future will bring. Luckily for him the University of Utrecht offered a trajectory called New Media and Digital Culture in which he enrolled, and next to that he started the Minor Cognitive Psychology. After finishing his Bachelor in Utrecht he decided to go to the city of Amsterdam. The University of Amsterdam offered the Master program ‘New Media’, which he started in September 2010. His main interest lies in the notion of ‘Googlization’, and currently he’s writing his thesis about the personalization of search results by Google, and how it affects society.

Author Archive

On the Political Value of TED

Bob Nefkens | 24 March 2011, 8:57 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , ,

The Technology Entertainment and Design conference, better known as TED, has spread its worthy ideas annually since 1990. The last couple of years the TED-virus has spread the world as TED became globally known by letting their talks be viewed online for free. As a result the wide range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture of TED are also being addressed here in Amsterdam under the label of TEDx events. Its popularity seems undeniable, but what is the value of TED to us?

Blood in our mobiles

Bob Nefkens | 28 October 2010, 11:07 pm | tags: , , , ,

Corporate social responsibility has had a great impact on businesses the last decade. In light of this awareness, the Dutch television station VARA aired an episode last week of ‘Uitgesproken’ – an in-depth news program – that was about blood mobiles. Raw materials, like tin, gold and coltan, which are used in our mobile phones, are being produced in mines in eastern Congo, where pain and suffering surrounds these working places.

Electronic Paper to the Rescue!

Bob Nefkens | 17 October 2010, 10:08 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , , , , ,


Digital publishing is trying to replace centuries of ink printed publishing, however many people are still skeptical to this idea of digital publishing, and remain loyal to the ‘old’ book, mostly because they don’t like reading off a computer screen. Could electronic paper be the saviour?

Evolution of Twitter through Alternative Ways of Usage

Bob Nefkens | 14 October 2010, 5:04 pm | 4 comments | tags: , , , , , ,

Since Darwin’s On the Origins of Species the idea of evolution through natural selection has been used in a variety of disciplines, even in the field of media studies. Different types of media are born (being a technical invention) and can become obsolete or converge into new media forms. As the evolution of media goes on, will alternative ways of usage lead to new services, and maybe make Twitter obsolete?

The Collective Collaboration of SpaceCollective

Bob Nefkens | 02 October 2010, 5:17 pm | tags: , ,

The English version of Wikipedia has over 3,400,000 articles at this time, so when I was contemplating a subject that I wanted to contribute on the web-encyclopedia, you could imaging it was hard to come up with something that wasn’t already on there. For a moment I thought about writing something for the Dutch version of Wikipedia, but since I rarely use this version myself I had the feeling that I wouldn’t be contributing much to the body of knowledge if I published an entry on it. Eventually I decided to start a page about one of my favorite websites; SpaceCollective.

False Predictions of the Future of Social Media

Bob Nefkens | 26 September 2010, 8:41 pm | 3 comments | tags: , , ,

Perhaps it’s my dissatisfaction with social media hypes, and especially the ones that are ignited by marketing guru’s, but I can’t resist the feeling of pseudo science when I read about analyses and predictions about social media on blogs. It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading these posts about the subject that I love, but the neglection of making arguments with scientific foundation is what bothers me. Now I understand that on most popular blogs we are not dealing with new media researchers but I would think that if you are writing about these media a little more profundity would not harm you.

Book Review: “BOM” by Rik Van de Walle

Bob Nefkens | 21 September 2010, 5:37 pm | tags: , , ,

Endless rows of audio recordings, video tapes and all kinds of other audio-visual information can be found in archives all over the world. According to UNESCO there is over 200 million hours of audio-visual material on our planet, the only problem is that a great part of it is decaying; cultural and historical recordings are not going to last in their original storage formats. Digital technologies provide new possibilities for storing this cultural heritage, but the question is how do we best use these technologies to secure our collective memory?

Google-izing the television

Bob Nefkens | 11 September 2010, 11:38 pm | 6 comments | tags: , , , , , ,

For a couple of years now scientists and new media enthusiasts have been talking about the merging of television and personal computers. Nowadays there are a couple of examples through which this merging takes place and last week almighty Google announced it will also launch its Web-based television this fall. Google TV will let you combine the internet with your television. I could explain here exactly how it works but like always Google made a nice animated introduction.