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

Book Review: ‘Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media’ by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo van Leeuwen (Editors)

I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am trying to find my voice. (Maybe I should just steal it). “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.” (Polonius’ advice Laertes...

By Liam Voice on 09/20/11 Comments Off

Book Review: From Image to Interaction by Arjen Mulder

“Every form of contemporary art contains a kernel of life, a possibility for growth or development, even if a few decades later we may scarcely be able to sense it, thanks to the canonization of the once-contemporary – whether...

By Duohuai Zhang on 09/19/11 Comments Off

Book Review: The new rules of the game

Note: this is a review on a Dutch book called De nieuwe regels van het spel. This book is not available in English. Visit the RMO website for more information. In this advisory report, the Dutch Counsil for Social...

By Leonie Nijenmanting on 09/19/11 1

Book review: ‘Designing Culture: the technological imagination at work’ by Anne Balsamo

In this book, ‘Designing culture: the technological imagination at work’, Anne Balsamo, Professor of interactive media at the University of Southern California, calls for a new approach to technological innovation arguing that culture must be taken into account when...

By Philip Breek on 09/19/11 Comments Off

Book Review: The Book of Ice, by Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky)

In December 2007, composer and artist and writer Paul D. Miller a.ka. DJ Spooky a.k.a That Subliminal Kid boarded a decommissioned naval ship and traveled to Antarctica. The book that resulted from this journey is The Book of Ice,...

By Autumn Hand on 09/18/11 Comments Off

Book Review: The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading. Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading. Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine is a brilliant piece written by UCLA professor and digital media theorist Peter Lunenfeld, in which he sets out to explain his envisioning of the...

By Luana Pascu on 09/18/11 Comments Off

Book Review: Crowdsourcing, How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe.

What do YouTube, Wikipedia, IMDB, Tripadvisor, Linux, iStockphoto and Firefox all have in common? They exist through the collective efforts of millions of ordinary users like you and me. The strategy behind the success of these websites is crowdsourcing:...

By Leander Roet on 09/18/11 1

Book review: Check in / check uit – Christian van ‘t Hof, Rinie van Est, Floortje Daemen

By Annet Bos on 09/18/11 2

BOOK REVIEW The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism

BOOK REVIEW Title: The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism Author: Pascal Gielen Year: 2009 Publisher: Valiz In The Murmuring of the Artistic multitude, art-sociologist Pascal Gielen reflects on the increasing co-incidence of, and structural...

By Daniel de Zeeuw on 09/18/11 Comments Off

“Letters, Postcards, Email” Three ways of communicating by Esther Milne

One of my favorite moments of all is when I open my mailbox and find there a letter waiting for me. I don’t mean my emai box, but the traditional letterbox. It’s always full of advertisements and bills which...

By Urszula Jurgiel on 09/18/11 1

Book Review : Vu a la web-cam (essai sur la web-intimité) by Nicolas Thély

Nicolas Thély published in 2002 his PhD thesis on web intimacy. As he started doing research on webcams, Nicolas Thély was surprised to find so few (if any) specialized literature on the subject of webcams. The book presents and...

By Clément Adam on 09/18/11 1

Book Review: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

As a follow up of his first book, Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky now present to us the concept of Cognitive Surplus. In previous years of this so called “new world”, criticizing the Television became a common thing. The...

By Juliana Paiva on 09/17/11 1

Book review: Peter Olsthoorn – De macht van Google

What does Google know from us? Since search engines are able to track the user’s search queries, personal information can be gathered in order to improve the engine’s accuracy and provide better results. In De macht van Google (The...

By Erik van Mastrigt on 09/17/11 Comments Off

Book Review: The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser

The Filter Bubbler refers to the personalization processes taking place on the Web, which shape what content you see and more important what content you don't get to see. Big players like Google and Facebook feed you what they...

By Jorrit Schaap on 09/17/11 1

Review of Nancy Baym’s Personal Connections in the Digital Age

It is often the narcissistic tendencies of academics which alienates a much wider potential readership of their work. A use of language and content that predicates a certain level of cultural capital renders many articles inaccessible to a number...

By Jamie Franklin on 09/16/11 Comments Off

Book review: Virtually You by Elias Aboujaoude, MD

The humankind is moving online. Our work, relationships, communications, banking and even shopping can be done online today, and where possible we’ll happily take the easy ‘one click away’ shortcut, because it’s faster, more efficient and more convenient. For...

By Ave Tampere on 09/16/11 1

Book Review – Open 20: The Populist Imagination

The Populist Imagination comes in a timely moment. The 20th issue of Open, the cahier on art and the public domain published by NAi, is a collection of essays dealing with “the role of myth, narratives and identity in...

By Nicola Bozzi on 03/07/11 2

Book Review Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

O’Reilly published this year a new updated edition of the book Hackers: Heroes of the Digital Revolution from Stevy Levin. The book tells the history of a subculture that arose in the late fifties. The book starts in Building...

By Marije Rooze on 10/18/10 5

Bookreview: Communication Power

Where lies the power in network society? That’s the question Manuel Castells tries to answer in his book ‘Communication Power’. An interesting and relevant question considering our changing society. According to Castells, power relationships operate in networks. In his...

By Mathijs Voordenberg on 10/02/10 Comments Off

Review: Anne Friedberg’s “The Virtual Window”

book cover In The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006, MIT Press), (the late) Anne Friedberg traces the history of the relationship between the window...

By Ashiq Khondker on 09/27/10 1

Book Review: “L’umanista digitale” by Teresa Numerico, Domenico Fiormonte and Francesca Tomasi

Starting from its very title (“The digital humanist”), all in this book is clearly rooted into a hybrid philosophy, a way of looking at things from an interdisciplinary point of view. The context is that of Digital Humanities or...

By Alberto Angelini on 09/24/10 1

Book Review: “Nach Feierabend: Daten” [After work: Data]

Data have an incredible argumentative potential. Data can be produced, filed, saved, evaluated, spread, sold, aggregated, falsified, interpreted, transmitted, protected, processed and combined. Data show relations, support theses and disprove assumptions. Data can also change over the time and...

By Anne Lukas on 09/23/10 Comments Off

Book review: Public Netbase: Non Stop Future/ New practices in Art and Media

“New information technologies have become ubiquitous and thoroughly established in our everyday life. This marks the end of a period of intense experimentations and speculations related to the introduction of global communication systems more than a decade ago. Artists...

By Ourania on 09/22/10 Comments Off

Book Review: “BOM” by Rik Van de Walle

Endless rows of audio recordings, video tapes and all kinds of other audio-visual information can be found in archives all over the world. According to UNESCO there is over 200 million hours of audio-visual material on our planet, the...

By Bob Nefkens on 09/21/10 Comments Off