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

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...

By Hailey Beaman on 03/25/19 Comments Off

The only way to save the Internet is to claim it back from Big Data

Sometime in November, the proportion of humans on earth using the web will exceed 50%. Close to 4 billion people will have become internet “users”, bringing with them 4 billion sets of data. Tim-Berners Lee created the internet and...

By Lucie Chateau on 09/23/18 Comments Off

Using Personal Data to buy Art: The Data Dollar Store

Recently, Kaspersky Lab has been in the news due to so-called suspicious activity within their security software system and a supposed link with the Russian government. Both TechCrunch and Wired state that the Department of Homeland Security has “banned...

By Nadine Werner on 09/24/17 Comments Off

You Snooze, You Lose? Temporary Time-Out from Friends on Facebook

Brace yourselves! Facebook is testing out a ‘snooze’ button that reportedly mutes people on your feed for up to 30 days. With the help of the emerging feature, you could (and hopefully will very soon) walk away from...

By Hanna Yerega on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Share a Dream: A new way to connect people ?

Today more than ever, we are constantly connected and reachable. It has never been so easy to communicate with people around the globe. We can also observe new kinds of social relationships due to technology. In fact, connections between...

By Arnaud Muller on 09/21/16 1

The UvA Research Hub

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is a non-campus-based university embracing the motto: “the city is our campus”. The various UvA faculties are scattered across Amsterdam. Consequently, students and researchers from different disciplines rarely meet each other. A study by...

By Dominique Verschragen on 10/17/14 Comments Off

SCiO: the Star Trek tricorder in real life

One of the most emblematic and authentic motifs from the American sci-fi television series Star Trek involves the medical officer Leonard McCoy using a tricorder in order to scan and analyse living beings and environments. He records data with a small...

By Josip Batinic on 09/16/14 Comments Off

Garry Trotter and the Interactive Hallows

Gray Trotter, Donald Measely and Sermoine Ranger are best friends and study at the RowBards School of Storytelling & Fictionry. Our story opens on a day, when the 3 of them are travelling to school by the RowBards...

By Sameena on 09/11/14 Comments Off

On the Road Trip Mixtape

I grew up listening to albums from beginning to end. Each of my CDs had a character of its own, presented as a cohesive piece over the course of a half hour or more. Songs flowed in a narrative bound by mutual...

By Max Kortlander on 09/09/14 Comments Off

The Digital Book: curating emails via the EPUB format

During the first block of the Spring semester, a group of MA New Media students took part in the elective The Digital Book. This course aims to contextualise the rise of digital publishing in theoretical terms, focussing on themes...

By Rose Rowson on 03/21/14 1

8tracks and web-radios: the contemporary music consumption is personal and social

Since the growth of the Internet and its collection of interactive platforms and social networks, the cultural industry has turned a critical corner. This statement is especially true for the music industry in term of music creation and consumption,...

By V Weydert on 10/31/13 Comments Off

Beamer + Art + Space x 1 night

What is BYOB? Bring Your Own Beamer is a concept originated by Amsterdam-born, NY-based artist Rafaël Rozendaal. Since the first event in 2010 in Berlin, the idea has spread to many cities worldwide, reaching upwards to 150 editions. In...

By Paula Carmicino on 10/12/13 Comments Off

The Building Blocks of Mobile Innovation

“Mobile innovation is over” – Marcus Wohlsen (Wired Magazine) A lot has happened since the first call from a mobile phone has been made by Martin Cooper 1973 from a Motorola phone. Since then the market has been ruled...

By Inte Gloerich on 10/09/13 Comments Off

From Geo to Neo: Can NeoCities Provide a Creative Utopia for Contemporary Web Culture?

Established in 1994, one of the most popular websites worldwide by 1997, and bought by Yahoo! For $3.57bn in 1999, the US branch of GeoCities closed in 2009. Hailed as a structural precursor to the socially centred web as...

By Cristel Kolopaking on 10/09/13 1

Scrum project management: The Commune between the Cathedral and the Bazaar

Scum is a framework that has been used to manage complex adaptive problems. Scrum is particularly popular in software development and in digital media projects. Characteristic to Scum is its iterative and agile approach in contrast to classic more...

By Joram Binsbergen on 10/09/13 1

Flipboard: the tasteful social curation

News consumption has somehow taken a different path since the development of RSS feed, but how is it different? And why? Let’s look at this fairly recent application, Flipboard, to answer those questions. Flipboard is a free social...

By V Weydert on 10/07/13 Comments Off

SteamOS: Openness & the Future of Gaming

Valve Corporation recently announced their own operating system streamlined for games called SteamOS. With SteamOS Valve wants to bring their popular online gaming platform Steam (with 50 millions accounts) into the living room. Valve already had developed an interface,...

By Michael Kerssens on 10/07/13 Comments Off

MOOCs: nothing more than the latest craze… or are they?

“Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” – Thomas L. Friedman (May 15, 2012) 2012 was a year of many events and breakthroughs. The global economic crisis continued to be pervasive, the release...

By Rebecca Cachia on 09/10/13 Comments Off

Open Knowledge and Visual Information

Open knowledge takes root What exactly is at stake with the advent of open knowledge and widely shared information? Let’s take ourselves back just over a decade to a time in which information and especially creative information was being...

By Geoff Kim on 03/11/13 Comments Off

Collages by Broken Kindle Screens

A collaboration between artists Sebastian Shmieg and Silvio Lorusso, this project examines and documents 56 images of broken Amazon Kindle display screens that result in quite astonishing pieces of collage art. In an era of highly advanced computing technology,...

By Geoff Kim on 09/09/12 1

Google Web Lab: a global museum exhibition

Until next summer, a visit to the Science Museum in London can be more than a thrilling experience. Among seven floors of exhibitions, it can be found in the basement the new Google Web Lab, which is running until...

By Juliana Marques on 09/08/12 Comments Off

Towards openness – A study about open design and its translation from theory into practice

For anyone interested in design, open source and open design, my recently finished (june 2012) MA Thesis is available for download here. Below is the thesis’ abstract: Following the course of web 2.0, user-generated content and open source software; design...

By Juliana Paiva on 07/12/12 72

you will _KNOW how_ : interview with Nancy Mauro-Flude

I first encountered the work of Tasmanian performance artist and media researcher Nancy Mauro-Flude during The Art of Hacking exhibition opening at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk) on September 9, 2011. Mauro-Flude’s Error_in_Time(V.T_3), a poetic coding performance featuring...

By Kendall Grady on 10/31/11 Comments Off

Gaming can save the world – A gamer’s perspective (interview)

Could it? I may have exaggerated Jane McGonigal’s thoughts on gaming’s potential possibilities, but her optimism and enthusiasm may well agree with the title. McGonigal talks of gaming’s collaborative potential, that if harnessed correctly, could lead to better and...

By Christopher Mead on 10/31/11 Comments Off