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

The Strawberry Dress, a VIRAL cure for the pandemic?

Amidst a pandemic, worldwide lockdowns, in time of sweatpants and cancelled galas how did a sweet $490 strawberry dress become “the dress of the summer”? An examination of the prolific spread of the strawberry dress and how ‘viral’ objects...

By on 09/28/20 Comments Off

AI Algorithm as Personal Style Tracker

Design specifically with a GAN, to overcome fast-fashion and overconsumption What will happen when designers can exactly produce what consumers want and need? The generative adversarial network (GAN) founded by online shopping company Amazon can actually do this by...

By Vera Seegers on 09/24/17 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

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

#VemPraRua

How the use of Social Media platforms can mobilize a whole nation and transform the history of a country “Vem pra rua, porque a rua é a maior arquibancada do Brasil” The sentence above was extracted from the song...

By Gustavo López on 09/12/13 3

Death of A Museum

‘No flash please.’ A handsomely uniformed Van Gogh Museum attendant gently reminds a befuddled middle-aged iPhone-toting museum patron. The woman appears confused — confused at the prospect of making that pesky flash go away and equally confused at the...

By Lani Shadduck on 09/11/13 Comments Off

Facebook enhances the brand image in consumer minds

Facebook is becoming a marketing tool involved in the 2.0. strategy, itself involved in the global brand’s strategy. The 2.0. strategy draws on social networks, as a marketing medium, and has a bidirectional communication that calls for creativity, rigor and...

By V Weydert on 09/08/13 Comments Off

Photoshop facilitates a new generation of image-makers and why it matters

There within most personal computers are applications that resolve the divide between creative thought and creative application. Today, there are hundreds of such applications but few have embedded themselves so deep in the digital era of creative production such...

By Geoff Kim on 10/17/12 Comments Off

Book Review: Media Life by Mark Deuze

“media are to us as water is to fish.” By Seah KIM and Mihaela Naftanaila This is the way Mark Deuze starts his new book Media Life, which he presented last Thursday evening at...

By Seah Kim on 10/01/12 Comments Off

Everyone loves a good story: immersing the audience with transmedia storytelling

Simply going to the cinema and watching a film just doesn’t cut it anymore. We, the audience, want more. We want a sequel, we want to look forward to seeing that sequel, we want to discuss what might happen...

By Lydia van der Spek on 09/11/12 Comments Off

Digital Activism, Revisited.

At the end of March, 2012, I attended the Unlike Us conference, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures. What followed was a series of conferences and insightful discussions. Unlike Us brought together activists, academics, students whom all discussed...

By Massiel Sánchez on 09/10/12 1

Transmedia in the Netherlands

Virtueel Platform Since November 2011 I work as an editor for Virtueel Platform, the knowledge institute for digital culture in the Netherlands. I write about Best Practices; good examples of Dutch digital culture. The projects vary from interactive installations, games, apps,...

By Katía Truijen on 09/10/12 7

Data visualizations: a global matter

Two levels of information processing Our world is saturated with information. Images, objects, texts, numbers, audio, moving visuals, and everything in between. There’s a reason some call the present the Information Age and invent terms like informatization. All...

By Stijnie Thuijs on 03/26/12 1

New Media in Brazil: An interview with the curator of FILE

FILE stands for International Festival of Electronic Language and is the biggest festival of new media in Brazil. The event happens annually in São Paulo and eventually in other cities of Brazil and holds projects, installations, screenings and presentations...

By Juliana Paiva on 10/29/11 Comments Off

How do YouTube personalities change in response to fame

One social media website that has more or less gone under the radar since the 2008 Facebook boom is the now-classic YouTube. While social media research has recently focused its efforts predominantly on Facebook and Twitter, where personal identities...

By Laura Burlacu on 10/05/11 Comments Off

Let’s talk iPhone? App-so-lutely!

The iPhone 4S In the advent of the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event, people were already looking for tutorials in order to sync and back up all of the various apps they have gathered from the moment they “went apple,”...

By Jeroen Rijskamp on 10/05/11 Comments Off

What Juliet Didn’t Ask

Deepening the Motivations and Consequences of Facebook Aliases I was a freshman in college when Facebook was fresh off the server. The social network’s inaugural class has since grown up, and so has its Facebook identity. An established social...

By Kendall Grady on 10/02/11 Comments Off

Book Review: opaque presence: manual of latent invisibilities ed. Andreas Broeckmann and knowbotic research

opaque presence instructs toward a mythology of suspended origin. Such a creation myth is necessarily one of destruction. Fully actualized, opaque presence could deposit the naked and the clothed in the Garden of Eden as a garden, an unbroken...

By Kendall Grady on 09/25/11 Comments Off

What cultural policy in the era of globalization and electronic media?

Cultural revolution has already taken place. What has changed is not only participation in culture, but cultural environment itself, characterized by such slogans as “culture 2.0” or “culture of participation”. Changes in forms of participation in culture (following the...

By Natalia Miszczak on 09/21/11 1

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

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Media So Different, So Appealing?

As any illustrator should be, I am obsessed by visual culture, art, design and media. The way contemporary creative conception and expression takes on new shapes and forms, catapulted through the fibre-optic network and available for all to consume,...

By Martijn Dorresteijn on 09/15/11 Comments Off