Author Profile

  • Lennard Torbijn
  • Url: http://torbijn.tumblr.com
  • Posts: 7
  • About the user: Welcome to my author profile page. As you may have deduced by now my name is Lennard Torbijn. I am 21 years of age. Currently I hold a Bachelor's degree in New Media and follow a Master's in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. My main academic interest for some years now has been online information networks like Wikipedia. I have always been fascinated by how computers and the Internet have enabled people to create, participate, collaborate, and form communities. So, probably I will dig deeper into that during this Master's course.

Author Archive

Commons-based peer produsage? Rethinking online production.

Lennard Torbijn | 31 October 2010, 6:04 pm | tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Internet, and the emergence of Web 2.0 in particular, have been celebrated for their liberatory potential, setting free the individual consumers once bounded by industrial inertia. We only need to take a quick look at the Arctic Monkey’s success through the social networking website MySpace to conclude that potentially, everyone can become famous with hardly any costs or…

Reducing the ministries’ excessive use of paper

Lennard Torbijn | 20 October 2010, 5:27 pm | tags: , ,

In the early nineteen-eighties, computers became widely adopted by the Dutch ministries. Then, for a decade or so, the computer mainly acted as a replacement of the typewriter. The computer was primarily used for word processing and doing calculations. However, when the promise arose that the Internet would become widely used, the ministries were the first to be connected to…

Twitter: immediacy and collective intelligence

Lennard Torbijn | 10 October 2010, 11:51 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , , , ,

When working on a Wikipedia entry just last week, I was confronted once again with the helplessness one might experience when the computer does not work properly or when the internet connection is down. Upon typing in the Wikipedia URL, nothing happened. I found myself staring at the blank page before me. What is one to do? I refreshed the…

Contributing to Wikipedia: a painstaking task on an too open platform

Lennard Torbijn | 02 October 2010, 8:45 am | tags:

Ever since Wikipedia has been embraced by millions, the online and collaboratively created encyclopedia has been heralded as the manifestation of Web 2.0’s possibilities. Often, Wikipedia has been ascribed characteristics that belong to online media that are approachable to any individual. However, the question here is: does every potential contributor know how Wikipedia works? Is Wikipedia that approachable? The…

The panopticon is just a prison, guys: On a new approach to understanding new media

Lennard Torbijn | 30 September 2010, 3:37 pm | tags: ,

Numerous academic books and articles that have claimed to address the workings of new media tend to merely present an online phenomenon’s lineage or draw an analogy between older (media) theory and newer media (theory). Let us, for instance, consider the central role Foucault’s analysis of power relations and the panopticon has played and still plays in new media’s…

Book review: Andrew Lih – The Wikipedia revolution

Lennard Torbijn | 20 September 2010, 2:48 pm | tags: , , ,

How have a bunch of nobodies created the world’s largest encyclopedia? In his book, The Wikipedia revolution (2009), Andrew Lih set himself the goal to answer this question. And he has done so quite successfully. He exstensively maps the landscape from which Wikipedia emerged as well as addresses Wikipedia’s own inherent characteristics that have made Wikipedia to…

The Leonard Cohen Files: bridging the gap between artist and fans

Lennard Torbijn | 11 September 2010, 4:07 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , ,

In 1993, legendary poet, singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen stopped performing and writing. He planned not to perform anymore. In 2008 an official announcement told the world he would return. At Leonard Cohen’s personal request, the announcement was not made through a press release. Rather, the official message was posted on the Leonard Cohen fan forum.

This is the story of how one fan created an online fan network that would ultimately be recognized and embraced by Leonard Cohen himself, his management, and his record company