Author Profile

  • Kimberley Spreeuwenberg
  • Url: http://kspreeuwenberg.wordpress.com/
  • Posts: 8
  • About the user: Currently I am a Master student of New Media at the UvA. In 2007 I graduated in Graphic Design at ArtEZ, Arnhem. During the study at ArtEZ I was introduced to some ‘grande’ theorists, like McLuhan and Manovich. After working as a graphic designer for one year I decided to expand my knowledge of the media I use as a professional designer and the way these media influence society. My interests in media are very broad, but I am especially focused on Internet and Internet culture. At this time I still work as a graphic designer. In my assignments I combine low and high technology tools (analogue and digital techniques). Visit my site!

Author Archive

TOP: Egypt, Twitter, and Activism.

Kimberley Spreeuwenberg | 19 February 2011, 11:13 am | tags: , , , , ,

Activism and social network platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are mentioned together more often than ever. The 2009 Iranian election protest was nicknamed the ‘Twitter Revolution,’ and the more recent protests in Egypt are depicted similarly. The platforms are said to enable and generate activism, but at the same time this assumed importance for activism is disputed. The use of social network platforms for (online) activism clearly asks how we should understand and characterise recent forms of protest.

Blog-art

Kimberley Spreeuwenberg | 01 November 2009, 12:18 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , , , , ,

A Few weeks ago I attended the Blog-art Festival in The Hague. I was eager to see how they interpreted the concept of ‘blog-art’, but as it turned out they did not interpreted it at all.

A Wiki Noob

Kimberley Spreeuwenberg | 30 October 2009, 7:36 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , ,

Posting a new entry on Wikipedia is not very difficult, but keeping it online is an impossible mission. These were the first lines of this post when I started writing it a couple of weeks ago. By now I changed my mind… I did it! I have a post on Wikipedia!

Discourse network 2000 Does technology influence what we write?

Kimberley Spreeuwenberg | 15 October 2009, 1:18 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , , , , , ,

How do the tools that you use for writing influence what you write? Alan Liu researches this relation between technology and writing. He argues that our reading and writing is part of “discourse network 2000”. We structure our knowledge more and more in XML (extended markup language) and databases and this, according to him, influences not only how we write, but also what we write.

The significance of Twitter

Kimberley Spreeuwenberg | 08 October 2009, 10:38 am | tags: , , , , , ,

Since its start in 2006 people have speculated about the significance of Twitter. Twitter has often been criticized for it’s lack of content, but is also praised for the empowering possibilities it offers us. I question both these perspectives and propose to understand Twitter, not just as another tool that can be critiqued on the basis of it’s usefulness, but as a communication-tool that can be understood as a reflection of our current society.

Social Network Sites – friend/Friend/defriend

Kimberley Spreeuwenberg | 27 September 2009, 11:18 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , , ,

Social Network Sites (SNSs), like Facebook and Hyves, are focused on ‘Friendship’. As SNSs get more mainstream and infiltrate in our everyday lives the use of the term ‘Friendship’ becomes more problematic within the SNSs discourse. Using the labels of friend, Friend or defriend is not as obvious as it seems.

De-botting wikipedia

Kimberley Spreeuwenberg | 20 September 2009, 3:46 pm | 3 comments | tags: , ,

Wikipedia is praised for its open “everybody can contribute” system and it’s collaborative knowledge production. An environment that is seemingly built by human editors, but where in fact bots do much of the work. Since 2002, Wikipedia entries have been maintained not only by humans, but also by bots, and humans assisted by administrative and monitoring tools. [1]

BOOK REVIEW ’say everything’ by Scott Rosenberg

Kimberley Spreeuwenberg | 17 September 2009, 10:58 am | 1 comment | tags: , ,

Rosenberg, a former newspaper journalist and co-founder of Salon.com, gave himself the difficult task of recounting the history of blogging and – as the subtitle indicates – providing an idea of what’s to come and ‘why it matters.’