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

Like, swipe, match… “you vaxxed?”

How Hinge and Tinder have adapted their affordances to the COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in dating app usage while simultaneously altering the standard dating practices. To analyze how dating apps have responded to this change,...

By Simran Tamber on 10/27/21 Comments Off

Instagram’s @browngirlgang: feminist research ethics, digital diaspora, and intimate publics

In recent years, public Instagram pages have become spaces to express, contest, and create shared gendered ethnic identities. Utilizing @browngirlgang as a case study, this blog explores the implications of theorizing such spaces as intimate publics while functioning as...

By Simran Tamber on 10/04/21 Comments Off

Health Code, a tool to tackle COVID-19 or automatize social control?

“Please show your Health Code.” A few months since the COVID-19 pandemic started, almost all public places in China have posted such requests at the entrances. Health Code, a color-based application, is rolled out to control people’s movements and...

By on 09/28/20 Comments Off

Looking behind the shiny, shiny lights – The tremendous rise of DOOH Advertising

Looking behind the shiny, shiny lights – The tremendous rise of DOOH Advertising Imagine walking around Amsterdam Centraal Station during the day. Feel the eyes of strangers coveting you, hear the sounds of the multiple vehicles whizzing by, see...

By Sushanth Shyamsundar on 09/24/18 Comments Off

How Can Art Be Subversive in a Platform System? The Case of Benjamin Grosser

What would happen if one morning, a morning like many others, after you got up, you discovered that your Facebook home page is completely empty, without any type of content? I’m not talking about a crash or...

By Tommaso Campagna on 09/24/18 Comments Off

ecoarttech: techno-art connecting people with nature

The New Media art partnership between Cary Peppermint and Leila Christine Nadir entitled ecoarttech aims to repurpose the use of common technologies (e.g. smartphones) with the intent of bringing global communities closer together, as well as local communities closer to,...

By Megan Phipps on 11/15/17 Comments Off

A click away from giving up our autonomy? – A critical view on Amazon’s new Dash button

The alarm clock rings, you slowly make your way to the coffee machine since there is no other way of functioning at a time like that, but then realize you ran out of coffee yesterday. What a disaster! But...

By Mariessa Radermacher on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Is Apple our Online-Privacy Vigilante?

Abstract: Apple purports that its new Intelligent Tracking Prevention Technology integrated in Safari browser prevents 3rd-party cookies from collecting users’ data, therefore, reducing online ads, and ultimately protecting users’ privacy. This paper challenges this by arguing that ITP’s functionality...

By K. Abdulghani on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Goalpost in the Ozone: The Deceptively Good Intentions of #Climate

As far as scientific consensus goes, it’s tempting to label the ‘debate’ around climate change as being over. However, to do so invites complacency, a willingness to delegate responsibility to a far-off unknown authority. News organisations, politicians and activists...

By David Molloy on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Encountr: Sharing Experiences in a Media City

With the ubiquitous presence of new media in our urban environments, we can refer to the context that we live in as The Media City. Taking this concept as a main element in our research, our approach has been...

By Talía Cu on 10/21/16 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

A new enemy in our control society

From an army of sabotage to a slippery enemy Ouroboros, the famous snake virus, crawled into the digital systems of Ukraine in 2013 and until today it has attacked large parts of the country’s infrastructure. There are many allegations that Russia is responsible for...

By Wouter Klaase on 11/07/14 Comments Off

Why questioning the code in Facebook and Twitter matters

The Internet has created more possibilities for the individual and civil society. Now they can engage in higher connectivity, collective action, and freedom of expression in what Robert Harris and Rebekah Heacock term as “the creation of social capital online.”(1)...

By Mahsa Alimardani on 09/08/14 3

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

Invading Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear

Sonic Warfare: Sound. Affect and the Ecology of Fear is a book written by Dr. Steve Goodman, who has a PhD in Philosophy, but to a whole group of people he might be better known under his alias: Kode9,...

By Vincent Sloof on 10/31/13 Comments Off

We Are Here: Locating micro-social dynamics of mediation

We Are Here (Dutch: Wij Zijn Hier) sums about 220 refugees that are actively searching for security and shelter in Amsterdam on a daily basis. In their very first blog post, they have stated their core objective: We are...

By Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez on 10/09/13 Comments Off

Focusing on the future: Visualise the ‘tsunami of data’

If journalism is to die, at least it dies in a better shape. By help of interactive visualizations, journalists have new means to tell stories and build context around them. It is already a few years since data journalism...

By Mihaela Naftanaila on 03/20/13 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

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

Rhythmanalysis – Henri Lefebvre

This post functions as an introduction to a project by Charlotte van Dalfsen, Egle Mykolaityte, Mihaela Naftanaila, Lydia van der Spek and Laura Zimmermann. Our project is an interpretation of Henri Lefebvre’s seminal book “Rhythmanalysis” (1992). In doing so,...

By Lydia van der Spek on 11/02/12 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

Plan (Your) Obsolescence – Archive (as) Art

This article is a co-creation by Autumn Hand, Juliana Paiva, Kendall Grady and Mario Gesteira. Archive (An Informal Introduction) Let’s blow the dust and grime off the archive. Let’s get to the art of this matter too. Whether archive...

By Juliana Paiva on 03/13/12 2

The Switch: from Matthew Fuller to mobile apps

Erupting Irruption Ask Elk Grove, launched ten days ago for the city of Elk Grove, California, numbers among the newest localized smartphone applications for reporting civic repairs. Most follow agendas similar to GRCity311, an app developed for Grand Rapids,...

By Kendall Grady on 10/10/11 2

For the Love of Material!

Posthumanism, Protocol and Techno-Craft at Mediamatic’s Ignite Amsterdam 10 If androids dream of electric sheep, we posthumous dream of the Jetson family’s flying car. “Posthuman” because, as foreseen by early prostheses now as natural as eyeglass, human identity consciousness...

By Kendall Grady on 09/29/11 Comments Off