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

Book Review: “What do you mean, no internet?!”

What do you mean, no internet?! Is a collection of argumentative essays written by 28 3rd year Media Production students . In 2009 over three hundred students wrote these essays to fulfill the requirements of their Media and Society...

By Bram van der Kruk on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book review: “Proud to be Flesh” – Mute Magazine Anthology of cultural politics after the net

Proud to be Flesh is an Anthology of Mute Magazine, and consists of a big amount of articles from the magazine’s archives dating from 1994 till 2009. Tho it is an anthology, it’s not written to be a “best...

By Sander Jansma on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book Review: “Netze und Netzwerke” – by Sebastian Gießmann

In Netze und Netzwerke, Sebastian Gießmann makes a quiet daring attempt to historically map the rise of grids and networks between 1740 and 1840. He views such as not only rising technologies and methods of scientific research, but also...

By Agathe Wiedemair on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book Review: Files: Law and Media Technology – by Cornelia Vismann

In here book, Vismann writes a geneology of the media-technological conditions of files and recording devices with a view to their largest area of application, the law. Files in this geneology are defined as the medium between the authority...

By Xander Stolwijk on 09/19/10 1

Book Review: ‘The World as Flatland – Report 1: Designing Universal Knowledge’ – by Gerlinde Schuller

Designing Universal Knowledge is one of those books you often come back to, not only because of its innovative and universal content, but also because of its original structure and visual attractiveness. Gerlinde Schuller, the author of this piece,...

By Bart Brodzki on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book review: “Deep Search. The Politics of Search beyond Google”

It is hard to imagine life without search engines. Information is everywhere and we seem to need it all the time. So the importance of being able to access all information at any particular time of our choosing cannot...

By Rosanne Sliuzas on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book Review: “Engineering Play – A Cultural History of Children’s Software” – By Mizuko Ito

Ito weaves a compelling tale of the dynamic and rapidly changing face of the children’s software industry from the pioneering days of the early 1980s to the late 1990s when she completed her case studies.

By Isobel Gorman on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Review, ‘Internet Governance Forum (IGF), The First Two Years’, Edited by Avri Doria and Wolfgang Kleinwächter in cooperation with IGF Secretariat

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue. It is a direct outcome of the World Summit on the Internet Society (WSIS). Its purpose is to facilitate open and inclusive dialogue about the World Wide...

By Marte Lindstrom on 09/18/10 Comments Off

‘A Collection of Many Problems’ by Garnet Hertz – A Review

Alternative post title: The Good, the Bad & the Downright Crazy. Mail-by-rocket, cat pianos, astrolabes, Inca quipu knots and musical fingers. Seems like a fairly random collection of things, doesn’t it? They do have one thing in common, though. They’re...

By Laurent Hubeek on 09/18/10 Comments Off

Who do you think you are?

Review: Karin Spaink, Wie is U? Ever had a Déjà vu, the feeling that you have experienced something before? It’s a strange feeling. You can’t exactly explain what it is and where it comes from, but it’s there. You...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 09/15/10 Comments Off

Book review: UBERMORGEN.COM

UBERMORGEN.COM might be always trying to combine some nice entertainment with very intellectual European subversive art, but God Christ, we need to relax sometime and sell Google ad space on eBay and write a book about it and sell...

By Hania Piotrowska on 09/18/09 Comments Off

Review of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet

Lisa Nakamura’s book Digitizing Race and Culture: Visual Cultures of the Internet covers a range of issues involving race and gender on the internet. Nakamura is an associate professor in the Institute of Communication Research with a joint appointment...

By Sarah Moore on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Book review of “Against The Machine – Being Human In The Age Of The Electronic Mob” by Lee Siegel

Lee Siegel was born in New York in 1957 and has Bachelor, Master and Master of Philosophy degrees from Columbia University. While working as a staff writer at The New Republic, an American magazine on politics and the arts,...

By Maarten Hoogvliet on 09/17/09 Comments Off

A review of: Blogging

Blogging is written by Jill Walker Rettberg. She is a blogger her self. On her blog she presents her self as “an associate professor at the University of Bergen, and I do research on how people tell stories online.”...

By Suzanne Schram on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Planet Google – Book Review

From the perspective of a professor of Business one can expect the focus on Google as a commercial company. With this book Randal Stross proves to have a deep insight in many facts, that mostly evolve around the ideology...

By Ramses Petronia on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Book Review: Mathieu O’Neil’s Cyber Cheifs

In 2004, after researching the allometric growth of antlers between extinct and extant deer, trapped deep within the dungeons of my university’s vertebrate collections, I whizzed over to the Wikipedia entry on the Irish Elk, sure I could add my two...

By Allison Guy on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Anomalous Assemblages: A Review of The Spam Book

The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture, edited by Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, uses a relatively unique approach to add to the discourse surrounding critical understanding of the...

By John Haltiwanger on 09/17/09 1

BOOK REVIEW ‘say everything’ by Scott Rosenberg

Rosenberg, a former newspaper journalist and co-founder of Salon.com, gave himself the difficult task of recounting the history of blogging and – as the subtitle indicates – providing an idea of what’s to come and ‘why it matters.’

By Kimberley Spreeuwenberg on 09/17/09 1

Book Review of Political Campaigning on the Web

The brand new (31th of August 2009 according to Amazon) book “Political Campaigning on the Web” is a bundle of essays around the relatively new field of political campaigning in new media in its broadest sense. The book contains...

By Han Rusman on 09/17/09 Comments Off

A Review of: Mapping E-Culture, Navigating E-Culture, Walled Garden

Mapping E-Culture, Navigating E-Culture, and Walled Garden, the three books coming along in a box, picture the general look of the electronic scenery we are in through the decade. Besides interviews to several key influencers, research essays and some...

By Sisi Yu on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Book Review ‘What You See Is What You Feel’ by Koert van Mensvoort

In our age of computer mediated images the distinction between reality and the virtual seems to be more blurred than ever. The white beach with palm trees, coconuts and turquoise ocean is no longer that white beach, it has...

By Harro Heijboer on 09/16/09 1

Book review of Media Work

All optimism associated with studying to work in the media industry dies by the time a student tries to actually find a job after graduation. Working within media industries is often much more uncertain and much more complicated then...

By Rakesh Kanhai on 09/16/09 Comments Off

Book Review: ‘Free’ by Chris Anderson

When Chris Anderson wrote 'The Long Tail' it radically changed the way new media professionals look at the supply and demand chain on the internet. Especially for those of us with a background in marketing, Anderson's book contained compelling...

By Joery Bruijntjes on 09/16/09 1

Review of Expanded ORIGINAL. Cornelia Sollfrank

A smart artist makes the machine do the work. Cornelia Sollfrank German artist Cornelia Sollfrank’s career has been linked to hacking, conceptual art, cyberfeminism and net.art. Since the nineties, she examines the digital cultural techniques of copying and the...

By Susana Zaragoza on 09/16/09 Comments Off