Author Profile

  • Ilektra Pavlaki
  • Url: http://shampoohelps.wordpress.com
  • Posts: 17
  • About the user: Here I am in Amsterdam. Studying in the New Media Master Program and hoping that by the end of this year I will have gained new experiences, new friends, brand new goals. My bachelor was in Communication, Media and Culture in Athens. Then I found myself a 90% dreamy job as a copywriter in a global advertising agency (BBDO). Great boss, big clients, small income :) Fun Theory and Free Hug Campaign magnified my interest in new media. "So, there must be a way to combine passion -advertising- and curiosity-new media-. Let's find out" I said. So... here I am in Amsterdam.

Author Archive

MADONNA R.I.P ?

Ilektra Pavlaki | 31 October 2010, 6:41 pm | 6 comments | tags: ,

Some thoughts on mock-up obituaries in view of the New Media Research Seminar’s start.

A fatal car accident. Thousands of cameras capturing the scene. Millions of mourning fans. Breaking news: Madonna has passed away.

Alice in iPad, the New Wonderland.

Ilektra Pavlaki | 20 October 2010, 11:45 pm | tags: , , , , ,

Will fairy tales live happily ever after in the digital publishing era?

Once upon a time, electronic signatures didn’t designate us as individuals, passwords didn’t determine if we would be denied or not the access in data and emoticons didn’t constitute “the artificial warrant and guarantee of our human presence” (David Gunkel, Debra Hawhee – Virtual…

Twitter: The next “great good place”?

Ilektra Pavlaki | 11 October 2010, 2:28 pm | tags: , ,

… or isn’t it a bit too hasty to talk about Twitter effects?

My activated Twitter account could not be more passive. Two tweets in about two years’ time is my contribution to the broadening of horizons of eleven people that decided to follow me, as an extra confirmation of our Facebook friendship. Both of the tweets were sent “out there” in my effort to understand how this medium works. Or to be more accurate, to examine what I was missing: the value of following and being followed.

Greek Wikipedia calls for Βοήθεια (Help)!

Ilektra Pavlaki | 04 October 2010, 11:10 am | 2 comments | tags:

Geert: “Yes, you can write your Wikipedia post in your own language”

Me (not saying that aloud of course): “Finally! This is going to be a piece of cake”

Well… it wasn’t. Instead I could describe it like a nerve-breaking, patience-challenging and surprisingly disappointing experience. And think that I haven’t even published my Wikipedia entry yet. But as Konstantinos Kavafis describes in his poem “Ithaca”, it’s the journey that counts not the destination.

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

Ilektra Pavlaki | 28 September 2010, 8:35 pm | tags: , , , , , , ,

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 enigmatic smile. If a half-smile is worth that much attention, that says a lot about the importance of emotions. And maybe even more about the difficulty of their detection.

Internet users, having to deal with the lack of face-to-face interaction and the frequency of misinterpretation, started to convey their feelings with emoticons.

Book review: John Freeman, “The tyranny of e-mail” – The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to your Inbox

Ilektra Pavlaki | 20 September 2010, 12:15 pm | tags: , , , ,

I ‘ve read once a story about a Japanese man who got married to the virtual girlfriend he dated in a Nintendo DS video game called Love Plus- a wedding blessed by a priest and not a virtual one. This is no doubt an eccentric way to declare one’s devotion to a machine. But as…

Harvest your crops, feed your dog, serve the dishes… socialize!

Ilektra Pavlaki | 13 September 2010, 4:07 am | 3 comments | tags: , , , , ,

Let me get this straight. I don’t have a pet. I never felt like growing pumkins. My cooking skills are below average. Does that make me socially “incompatible” with the millions of people playing Pet Society, Farmville, Cafe World and other social games?