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

As Cookies Crumble, Publishers Come Out to Play

Introduction: In January 2020, Google announced that web browser Chrome would be dropping third-party cookies by 2022. According to Google, blocking third-party cookies is meant to “enhance privacy” for end-users and “to support publishers.”So, with the end of third-party...

By Carla Roman on 09/28/20 Comments Off

Skipping the Line or Skipping Time? How Foodsy Speeds Up Life

The new app Foodsy is an example to show how life is speeding up and how digital media contribute to this. Foodsy is an emergent app made for train passengers in the Netherlands which allows them to order food...

By Lisa Fluttert on 09/23/18 Comments Off

Minder, the app that wants to change content control

Disrupt SF 2014 Disrupt SF 2014, an event where new technology startups showed their products to the public and to prominent investors, took place last week in San Francisco. Launched by the web magazine TechCrunch in 2011, it has just reached its...

By Roberto Pizzato on 09/17/14 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

The BB.Suit: Wearable Tech as Fashion’s New Playground

Borre Akkersdijk’s BB.Suit combines built-in technology with 3D printed fabrics offering an aesthetic approach to electronics that challenges the notion of wearable technology. This high tech jumpsuit is a collaboration between the University of Technology in Eindhoven, 22Tracks, CRISP,...

By Ivar Dusseljee on 09/08/14 Comments Off

Digitized Classics – Printed Imperfections

“To change the material artifact is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably changes the meanings of the words as well” (Hayles 23). With this sentence N. Katherine Hayles summarizes the importance of considering...

By Nora Wohlfeil on 05/11/14 1

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

Thinking the unthinkable (some thoughts on the production of thought and access to knowledge)

A few days ago, Bret Victor, a researcher and software engineer, announced via Facebook that he had redesigned his talk “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable“, which he delivered on April 4th of this year at the MIT Media Lab. As...

By Fernando van der Vlist on 09/11/13 Comments Off

Twitternovels – More Twitter than novel

“Paradoxically, it is this very immutability of paper which is now increasingly proving to be an advantage rather than a weakness, particularly in the context of an ever-changing (thus ephemeral) digital publishing world.” (Ludovico 10, 2012) Though this by...

By Stella Rieck on 09/11/13 Comments Off

Total transparancy or personal privacy?

With the possibility to send, spread and pick up information online in a blink of an eye, the demand for transparancy is growing. Hackers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden publish classified and sensitive government information. According to them...

By Jennifer Veldman on 09/06/13 Comments Off

Book Industry: Time to Profile that Pirate (And then Seduce Him)

On February 15, 2012 library.nu was shut down since publishers accused the site of piracy. In his article The disappearing virtual library Christopher Kelty says that the website had offered ‘between 400,000 and a million digital books for free’,...

By Doris Zevenbergen on 03/17/13 Comments Off

Open-access journals: First Monday leads by example

At a time when publishers, academics and libraries are struggling to navigate a new publishing landscape, some are turning to Internet scholars to lead the way. First Monday is “one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet,...

By Larissa Hildebrandt on 03/13/13 Comments Off

Open Access; The Predicament of Learned Societies

Within academia, learned societies represent the pinnacle of higher educational study within their respective fields. Producing and compiling the works and research methods of the finest minds society has to offer, learned societies provide the finest examples of contemporary...

By Joseph Jackson on 03/12/13 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

Some Thoughts on Credulous Readers and Open Access

One of the advantages of open-access publishing is that it increases the visibility of science literature. Since the articles are free of charge, and therefore very easily accessible, many (non) academic readers around the globe can profit from them. What...

By Doris Zevenbergen on 03/10/13 Comments Off

Digital Comics in the face of DRM

With the dominating presence of smartphone and tablet technologies within todays current market, it is clear to see why major comic book publishers have placed large amounts of focus and resources into the digital publishing frontier. Both interactive elements...

By Joseph Jackson on 03/04/13 1

The Visual Language of New Media: the book as database

– By Katía Truijen, Eva Valkhoff, Serena Westra and Sasha Wood What happens when you transform a book into a new media object? Can you visualize a book in a new media way? And what happens to the narrative...

By Serena Westra on 11/03/12 1

CtrlC/CtrlV: News presentation across different online platforms

New technology is changing our society at full pace. Not only does it change the way people communicate with each other, it also impacts the way information is communicated to society. People are not satisfied with reading the morning...

By Sophie Waterloo on 10/17/12 Comments Off

Forgotten Realms: Revisiting the Classics

The revisiting of favourite films and novels is a common practice, in fact for many, the notion of ‘re-reading the classics’ can be even more enjoyable and enlightening than their initial interpretation. Yet for gaming, which has always and...

By Joseph Jackson on 10/03/12 1

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