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

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

Has internet worsened our grammar?

Since the advent of the internet and the world wide web, it has never been easier to exchange and share information with people from all around the world. A good part of the technological inventions developed in the last...

By Josip Batinic on 09/08/14 Comments Off

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

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

Global Internet Censorship – ACTA

The internet as we know is a place with limitless accessibility and constant access to all shareable online information within an open exchange where media exist and co-exist in the way of informing and entertaining. It also means to...

By Christoph Rauch on 09/13/13 1

Watch Me If You Can (1 of 3): Anonymous and Secure Browsing

This is the first post in a short series on how to remain secure and anonymous online. Part one will cover internet browsing, part two will cover communicating online, and part three will cover file transferring and downloading. Parts...

By Philip Anderson on 09/13/13 Comments Off

From the Digital into the Physical: 3D Printing

In the west district of Amsterdam there is a building called the “old ACTA”, which is an old dentist academy and is now used for student housing and as a place where artists have their workshops. A few weeks...

By Pascal Janssens on 09/07/13 Comments Off

Fabbing in Brussels!

The official opening of Fablab.iMAL that took place on Friday 14th in the well-known Brussels-based Media Lab iMAL (Center for Digital Cultures and Technology) gave us the chance to look closer at personal fabrication and to observe curious artifacts....

By Aurelie Ghalim on 09/24/12 1

Google and the Principles of the Semantic Web

One of the first goals of the Internet was to expand the knowledge of the users by connecting different data. However, the contemporary web is by no means comparable to this initially academic network. The web expanded unprecedentedly and...

By Lauressa Ford on 09/10/12 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

App Review: Waze, a social GPS

As the fever of Geolocation apps continues, Waze seems to stand out with integration in different media and personal communication among their users. Waze is a GPS application available for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Nokia and Windows Mobile that blended...

By Juliana Paiva on 10/04/11 1

Free labor? An attempt to determine the value of user generated content – for the user

Writings on the value of user generated content tend to stress the (market) value users produce for companies such as Facebook by adding content, labeling these activities as "free labor". Assuming that there must also be something in it...

By Joep Hegger on 10/04/11 1

Book Review: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

As a follow up of his first book, Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky now present to us the concept of Cognitive Surplus. In previous years of this so called “new world”, criticizing the Television became a common thing. The...

By Juliana Paiva on 09/17/11 1

The Unbound Book Conference, May 19-21

Reading and publishing in the digital age The conventional notion of the book, based on centuries of print, is rapidly growing outdated. The book is coming unbound in a double sense: both freed from the bindings of the printed...

By Elias van Hees on 04/12/11 Comments Off

Holmes Wilson on Universal Subtitles: Collaborative, Volunteer Subtitling for any Video on the Web Using Free Software

(A blogpost on Holmes Wilson’s presentation, originally published @ Video Vortex #6 website. The original text can be found here) The importance of subtitles is an undeniable fact for Holmes Wilson, co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Through the foundation’s latest open source, software-based project Universal Subtitles,...

By Ourania on 03/13/11 Comments Off

Online Video Aesthetics: Florian Schneider Talks about the Open Source Documentary

Originally published on the Video Vortex #6 conference blog German filmmaker, media artist and activist Florian Schneider ambitiously set out to present a mission statement for a novel type of documentary, the open source mode, and launched into a...

By Catalina Iorga on 03/11/11 1