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

A MEDICAL DOSE ON TIKTOK: AN ANALYSIS OF THE GROWING EDUCATIONAL SUB-GENRE

New Media Research Practices WG5-A2 Final Project Carla Roman, Lynn Kastalio, Alexia Miehm ABSTRACT As of September 2021 popular video-sharing app TikTok has reported more than one billion users (TikTok Newsroom 2021). This “global community” presents itself as an...

By on 10/28/21 Comments Off

Like, swipe, match… “you vaxxed?”

How Hinge and Tinder have adapted their affordances to the COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in dating app usage while simultaneously altering the standard dating practices. To analyze how dating apps have responded to this change,...

By Simran Tamber on 10/27/21 Comments Off

The Face As An Infrastructure

In media studies, infrastructures are defined as foundational technologies, services and facilities that enable the communication of information and expression. “The face” has become an increasingly significant aspect of many of these infrastructures and thus, we may argue that...

By on 10/26/21 Comments Off

Big Data And AI: Fake Fake News or Fight Fake News

In nowadays, the booming of information technology allows individuals to become content creators and publishers, a great number of data quickly spreads globally on the Internet. Meanwhile, new dimensions for Fake News are born in the rising of social...

By on 10/04/21 Comments Off

Big data behind China’s “Health Code” system

As a common application of digital epidemic prevention, China's "Health Code" system has played an important role in epidemic prevention and control and has become one of the highlights of China's digital epidemic response to the COVID -19 outbreak....

By Kristen Zheng on 10/03/21 Comments Off

“Hey Siri, are you sharing my private data”: A commentary on the impact virtual personal assistants have on surveillance capitalism and user information consumption

For a digitally immersed society driven by technological developments and innovations, personal voice-controlled virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri have become a crucial component to task completion, user interaction, and information consumption. Virtual personal...

By on 10/03/21 Comments Off

Tracking the Stars: Co-star and the Creation of the Digital Celestial

Ayoub Samadi Introduction A centuries old practice clad in contemporary systems of information processing. For millenia, astrology has been engulfed in the depths of time and rationality and has not only until recently began to regain the reverence it...

By on 10/03/21 Comments Off

Can you change the world with a homemade DeepFake?

Kenza Sabri (kenzasabri5@gmail.com) Zuzanna Kędzia (zuzanna.k0987@gmail.com) Daria Kochetkova (daria.kochetkova.08@gmail.com) “At the most basic level, deepfakes are lies disguised to look like truth. If we take them as truth or evidence, we can easily make false conclusions with potentially disastrous...

By Kenza Sabri on 10/21/20 Comments Off

Contact tracing: an aid for humanity or a Trojan horse of surveillance?

By Sophie Letschert (smwletschert@outlook.com), Caroline Stanislawczyk (claarecaro@gmail.com) and Karlygash Nurdilda (k.nurdilda@gmail.com) Introduction Can contact tracing apps become the ultimate flooding gates for private data to flow into the hands of the third parties, bringing out health surveillance en masse?...

By Karlygash Nurdilda on 10/20/20 Comments Off

Signal – Speaking with no one listening

Signal is a messaging app that has been around since 2013. It is said to be one of the most secure messaging apps on the market. Whistleblower Edward Snowden uses it daily and describes Signal as the safest messaging...

By Alexandra Hagedorn on 09/28/20 Comments Off

As Cookies Crumble, Publishers Come Out to Play

Introduction: In January 2020, Google announced that web browser Chrome would be dropping third-party cookies by 2022. According to Google, blocking third-party cookies is meant to “enhance privacy” for end-users and “to support publishers.”So, with the end of third-party...

By Carla Roman on 09/28/20 Comments Off

Health Code, a tool to tackle COVID-19 or automatize social control?

“Please show your Health Code.” A few months since the COVID-19 pandemic started, almost all public places in China have posted such requests at the entrances. Health Code, a color-based application, is rolled out to control people’s movements and...

By on 09/28/20 Comments Off

Smoke Signals: A technical and ideological response to U.S. surveillance in 2020

Americans have a lot to say in 2020, and protests are the chosen platform of the year. With race-fueled police brutality reaching peak heights, people are occupying space physically and vocally to say their piece in the Black Lives...

By Gerry LaBarbera on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Health QR code (system): reasonable data collection or tracking surveillance under the fantasy of Big Data?

Health Code, a personal QR code created by the government of Hangzhou in cooperation with mobile giant Alipay and designed for collecting and controlling the covid-19 cases, was initially launched in Hangzhou on February 11th, 2020 and was widely...

By Li Shen on 09/27/20 Comments Off

A(m)I beautiful? – Questioning AI through a Biometric Mirror

As AI integrates its way into everyday life, it raises more and more questions on whether to see this technology as assisting or oppressive. Facial recognition art installation Biometric Mirror (2018) contributes to this critical approach, challenging the ethics...

By on 09/26/20 Comments Off

Shattering a totalitarian monopoly?

This blog post covers the struggle between Epic Games on one side and Apple and Google on the other. By suing Google and Apple over anti-competitive practices, Epic Games hopes to break the tight grip the platforms have on...

By David Dijkhuis on 09/24/20 Comments Off

Have You Gone Green? INFRAWARE as a Digital Intervention for Environmental Awareness

INFRAWARE (composed of the words infrastructure, awareness and hard/software) is a browser plug-in that displays how your personal use of technology is deeply entangled with the planet’s resources and the environmental crisis we are currently experiencing. Go green. Paperless...

By on 10/23/19 Comments Off

Ceci n’est pas une Influencer; the rise of ‘Virtual Influencers’ a fad or the future of online interaction?

Not everything we see on the internet exists outside of our computers and in 2019 we’re not that easily fooled anymore, or so we think… Instagram influencer Lil Miquela truly seems like any other influencer these days; she has...

By Anniek de Koning on 09/23/19 Comments Off

Beware of Stalkerware

In our modern age as internet users, our data is constantly being collected and used, location services can easily track us, and websites monitor our presence online. We make ourselves vulnerable to location tracking, information gathering, and privacy infringement...

By on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Deepfakes, Privacy Paradoxes and Black Boxes

“I do worry about my privacy,” Huang said. “Because no one cares about my data when I’m a nobody. But if people think they can make money from my information, it makes me worry about the security of my...

By on 09/22/19 Comments Off

How to be thoughtful without thinking, new app promises stronger relationships

The latest trend for the digitally immersed is having an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant app teach how to be a more thoughtful human. ‘Monaru’ is a start-up app that intends to overcome the disconnection that has resulted from constant...

By on 09/22/19 Comments Off

AI Fact Checking: Artificial? Yes. Intelligent?

The phenomenon of ‘Fake news’ is now a household discussion, journalists and fact-checking platforms working solely to analyze and debunk these false pieces of information are now becoming increasingly visible. While it’s becoming harder than ever to tackle the...

By Sagar Hugar on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Sherlock Holmes of the Data-Driven world: ‘Big Data Policing’

The emergence and rise of ‘Data Policing’, all around the world, is noticeable. And it is not a traditional use of technology by police, For instance, surveillance cameras in some public places. Nowadays we are encountering a completely novel...

By Arman Eslambolchi on 09/21/19 Comments Off

How are gender norms reconstructed through app store ecologies and visual interfaces?

A look at popular medical, health & fitness apps in the Google Play store (NL) Figure 1: Google Play Store search results for “period” mobile applications Introduction This research project interests itself in the gender dynamics at play in...

By Holly Foxton on 10/24/18 Comments Off