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

Digital Preservation and Online Journals

Paper documents can be neglected for long periods of time, digital documents on the other hand, cannot. Digital documents have to be transferred to new storage media or software environments in order to keep the document accessible. Storage media...

By Gwen Keupe on 11/02/09 2

“iWATCH my neighbor, because iTHINK he is up to no good.”

Last week I came across an internet posting about the new commercial for a new campaign by the Los Angeles Police Department. This commercial shows different kinds of American people all promising to do their best in order to...

By Thomas Fonville on 11/01/09 Comments Off

Weerwoord.nl as a Digital Public Sphere

Weerwoord.nl is a Dutch website that functions as a political en social forum where people can deliberate. The subjects that people deliberate on are various and their viewpoints are often contradictory, making Weerwoord.nl a divers and interesting website to...

By Gwen Keupe on 11/01/09 Comments Off

Augmenting your way through walls (and other applications)

Our world today becomes more and more penetrated by screens. Wherever we go, information is made available through dynamic surfaces, which can adapt to whichever piece of information that is relevant at that specific time and place. More than...

By Charlotte Hendriks on 10/31/09 Comments Off

“Frames of War” meets Games of War

In Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Judith Butler posits that modern warfare is waged both on the battlefield and in the media. As this is nothing new to propaganda studies, Butler qualifies her views by propounding that the...

By Thomas Wielemaker on 10/31/09 1

Social Signifiers on Social Networking Sites

The days when ‘fellas’ in high school gave their gals their class rings to establish their relationships are long gone and in its place dudes are getting away with simply changing their relationships statuses on Facebook or MySpace when...

By Thomas Wielemaker on 10/31/09 2

Contesting our Cultural Heritage

There has always been fear towards new technologies that create new ways of recording and sharing cultural products. The videotape made owners of these products extremely nervous, because it allowed viewers stay at home to record and share what...

By Albert Cornelissen on 10/30/09 Comments Off

The Public Library as Instigator of a Modern Public Sphere

The digitalization of information has been a hot topic ever since the arrival of the computer. The internet must be the world’s biggest library by now. The classical role of the library is becoming old fashioned and maybe even...

By Rutger van den Berg on 10/30/09 1

RFID & wireless surveillance in the Internet of Things

In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices. These will probe and monitor our bodies, even our dreams.” A RFID chip consists of...

By Maarten Hoogvliet on 10/29/09 1

Fear And Leisure In São Paulo

A few weeks ago I watched Richard Williams’ lecture about ‘Architecture and Economies of Violence in São Paulo’ as part of the workshop ‘Globalization and Violence’. It doesn’t have to do so much with new media in particular but...

By ellen sluis on 10/29/09 Comments Off

God how I love technology…

This extremely short blogpost serves to introduce two crazy interesting developments : The Iphone driven car & The supercool use of Augmented Reality by Lego one word… wow

By Rakesh Kanhai on 10/25/09 1

Bringing media back to space

Every day our lives seem to require more and more ‘new media’ to keep up the pace. GPS on cellphones, possibility of instant communication either online or via phone, a wii to make sure we do some sports, and...

By Ramses Petronia on 10/22/09 3

GPS moving beyond locating

GPS in daily life is mostly used for connecting to the internet and navigating through an area. The focus of these types of GPS is giving you a precise location or finding a precise location. What would happen if...

By Albert Cornelissen on 10/21/09 Comments Off

Gender trouble in a virtual criminal world

The video game Grand Theft Auto IV (1) breathes violence. Not only does the title, which is the police term for motor vehicle theft, indicate this matter of unlawfully conduct. Also the story line and goals that need to...

By Thomas Fonville on 10/18/09 Comments Off

Stelarc’s Ideas Brought to Life in the Movie “Gamer”

“Gamer is a high-concept action thriller set in a near future when gaming and entertainment have evolved into a terrifying new hybrid. Humans control other humans in mass-scale, multi-player online games: people play people.. for keeps. Mind-control technology is...

By Charlotte van Brakel on 10/18/09 Comments Off

The vigilance of the Wikipedians

In the last couple of weeks I got some responses to my post concerning the revisitation of my Wikipedia article about Richard A. Rogers – in which I told that I was stupefied by the speed with which I...

By Sander Leegwater on 10/17/09 1

The use of locative media in post-catastrophe response

I wonder, therefore, is there any other way we can look into the function of locative media, other than retrieving geo information, playing GPS treasure hunting game (geocaching), or babbling where we have been to? Can we (as...

By Yu-Fen Chen on 10/17/09 Comments Off

The Rise of the Network Library

Times change, and, as it seems, our time has changed a lot. The Internet can be blamed for many a change, since the constant information stream that is generated through the Internet influences a major part of our everyday...

By Charlotte Hendriks on 10/17/09 Comments Off

Intellipedia: Intelligence of the 21st Century

One of my main interests, besides new media, is the world of intelligence. Spies, long leather jackets, newspaper with spy holes, espionage, cold war, totally my cup of tea. Since the United States Intelligence Community (IC) came up in...

By Tim van Essen on 10/16/09 Comments Off

Google Takes Command: Shaping the Web

Even though the web doesn’t have a central point, sometimes Google, or search engines in general, seem to form the center of this universe. Bringing together all these different websites into one database, ready to be searched. Google’s software,...

By Harro Heijboer on 10/14/09 Comments Off

The Complexity of the Online Self

Cyberspace can both be considered a communication medium for “real” people and a place for people to take on different roles, for experimenting with different ways of behaviour, maybe even different identities. This possible online identity experimentation could change...

By Rutger van den Berg on 10/14/09 Comments Off

Dolphins, Spectograms, and Scorescapes: an interview with Yolande Harris

Did you know Herman Melville’s sperm whale was silent? That’s because he wrote Moby Dick in 1851, seventy years before bioacoustic devices revealed that whales, insects, and other seemingly dumb creatures create sounds beyond human hearing range. So what...

By Morgan Currie on 10/13/09 4

NOVA College Tour: Interview with Steve Ballmer CEO Microsoft

Yesterday evening Steve Ballmer visited NOVA College Tour. Steve Ballmer is CEO of Microsoft and is well known of his flamboyant appearances at conferences. In this interview with 500 students of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam he talks about...

By Tim van Essen on 10/12/09 Comments Off

South Park and the Demise of the Big Other

Unsurprisingly, yet another South Park episode has made the news recently. And as usual, the comments have ranged from praise and approval to shock (and even subtly worded death wishes?). In pure South Park fashion, “Dead Celebrities” is a...

By Nicola Bozzi on 10/12/09 Comments Off