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

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...
Like, swipe, match… “you vaxxed?”

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,...
Extend the Flawless Beauty: Facetune Video Further Goes against Beauty Activism

Extend the Flawless Beauty: Facetune Video Further Goes against Beauty Activism

With TikTok becoming increasingly popular in people’s daily life, such global prevalence of applications that focus on instant short video feeds indicates that people’s quest for a flawless face and a well-proportioned body shape no longer stops at still...
Signal – Speaking with no one listening

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

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...
Covid-19 Contact Tracing Apps: a Threat or a Solution?

Covid-19 Contact Tracing Apps: a Threat or a Solution?

In the last few months, we have witnessed a new wave of technological innovations with the goal to help contain the Covid-19 pandemic, including contact tracing applications developed by numerous countries to track the contamination cases and help identify...
Letterboxd: A transformation of film criticism culture in the digital age

Letterboxd: A transformation of film criticism culture in the digital age

It’s 22:30 PM on a Friday night and you have just come out of the latest blockbuster that has been released in the cinema. Do you have to wait until tomorrow’s newspaper to read your favorite critic’s take on...
Dirty Greenwashing: How two apps cash in on the conscious consumer trend

Dirty Greenwashing: How two apps cash in on the conscious consumer trend

Hashtags like #cleanbeauty, #nontoxicskincare and #greenbeautyproducts are circling popular social media platforms, displaying a recent development of the beauty industry towards cleaner, more ethical products. Rooted in consumers’ “frustration over regulatory oversight of cosmetics and personal care products” (Wanner...
App Store Killer? The Storm of WeChat Mini Programs Swept Over The Mobile App Ecosystem

App Store Killer? The Storm of WeChat Mini Programs Swept Over The Mobile App Ecosystem

Are you a “app for everything” type of guy? How many apps you have installed on your phone? For me, there are 85! Have you ever imagined accessing to all of these apps just through one single entry point?...
“Checkout on Instagram”: Chance or risk for e-commerce businesses?

“Checkout on Instagram”: Chance or risk for e-commerce businesses?

Ever since Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012, the platform has not only grown from ten million active users to over one billion, but has also introduced a number of new features. Instagram Stories, live streams, television and shopping –...
Free Trial Surfing or how to reshape affordances through institutional legitimization

Free Trial Surfing or how to reshape affordances through institutional legitimization

DoNotPay is a company that announced a new app called ‘Free Trial Surfing’ which generates fake credit card details that users can use to sign up for free trials of (web) services without risking having to pay after the...
Amicus Instagram, sed magis amica veritas?

Amicus Instagram, sed magis amica veritas?

Last November, Instagram introduced a new functionality to its app, the “close friends” list (Constine). This feature was a years-late response to the rise of finstas, aka “fake instas”, private alternative accounts intended for a smaller audience than the...
A Call for Collectivization: Addressing the atomization and exploitation of ‘lean platform’ workers

A Call for Collectivization: Addressing the atomization and exploitation of ‘lean platform’ workers

Sketching the Problem: Lean Platforms and ‘Precarity by Design’ The platform labor economy, epitomized by platforms such as Uber and TaskRabbit, is actively reshaping the relationship between workers and the labor that they perform. Sometimes referred to as the...
China’s Dystopian Social Credit System Within Western Borders

China’s Dystopian Social Credit System Within Western Borders

Imagine a world where your every move, online and offline, gets monitored and scored by big companies and the government. This idea gets even more chilling when your online activities, behaviour, relationships and financial data ultimately determine whether you...
Smart Home Technologies and the Transformation Of Domestic Space

Smart Home Technologies and the Transformation Of Domestic Space

Since Gordon Moore’s prophetic law in 1965, in which he claimed that microchips would develop so that the speed would double while size would decrease every year, has allowed for the evolution of ubiquitous computing and its introduction into...
Join the HIVE: The AR future of social networks

Join the HIVE: The AR future of social networks

The Age of AR Augmented Reality (AR) is set to be the next big step in computing,  and experts are predicting a big growth of the AR sector, estimating it at around 140 billion Euros worth by 2024.  Many of...
Bubble Trouble – Venture Out of Your Filter Bubbles

Bubble Trouble – Venture Out of Your Filter Bubbles

The world we live in today has been bestowed with epithets such as fake news era, post-truth world and misinformation society in the press as well as academic literature. These discussions call attention to how the news we encounter...
Qutoutiao: Make Digital Reading More “Valuable”

Qutoutiao: Make Digital Reading More “Valuable”

With 48.8 million “employees”,Qutoutiao Inc. (means “fun headlines”), a two-year old mobile-news company becomes one of the biggest news and video aggregator in China. Being available at application stores since Jun. 2016, the number of Qutoutiao’s users has witnessed...
Online to Offline, Customers Have Nowhere to Hide —A New Targeting Technology via Wifi on Mobile Devices

Online to Offline, Customers Have Nowhere to Hide —A New Targeting Technology via Wifi on Mobile Devices

Have you ever received the promotion advertisements from some brands? The answer for most of us probably is: yes. Based on customers’ preferences, retailers offer the information of their upcoming products by the eye-catching advertisements. However, have you ever...
Talkspace: how reliable and responsible is mobile psychotherapy app?

Talkspace: how reliable and responsible is mobile psychotherapy app?

Just two days ago, Apple started its sale for the company’s latest smartwatch Apple Watch Series 4. Boasting the new ECG sensor and much improved health functions including fall detection and emergency SOS, Apple claims its newest device to...
Supporting Female Empowerment through Dating App Bumble

Supporting Female Empowerment through Dating App Bumble

  ABSTRACT – For all the single Juliets who are looking for a Romeo or for another Juliet, look no further. After dating apps like Tinder and Happn now a relatively new dating app has emerged: Bumble. Why Juliets...
Is your personal safety app keeping you safe?

Is your personal safety app keeping you safe?

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports, “one in three women globally have been sexually or physically abused- amounting to some 800 million people world-wide.” One of the tools gaining acceptance among women to help prevent harassment is ‘Safetipin:...
Don’t ask my name, just scan!

Don’t ask my name, just scan!

Say, you met a new group of people who are bon vivant just like you, and you spent a nice evening with them. Before you meet each other again next time, you wanna exchange your social media accounts to...
Financial superpowers? Cryptocurrency and the next generation

Financial superpowers? Cryptocurrency and the next generation

Pigzbe, a digital piggy-bank has just appeared on the market, with one goal: introducing children to the world of cryptocurrency. Filippo Yacob, CEO of the company, claims that this device will give a new generation of children “financial superpowers”....