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

The posthuman cyborg: Technological telepathy

Researches have recently published an article where they have done an experiment with some kind of technological telepathy. A man in India wearing a BCI (Brain-Computer Interface), has successfully transmitted different kind of words through thoughts to a man’s...

By Chaïm Wijnberg on 09/18/14 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

Anti-drone clothing: fashionably paranoid?

Privacy, surveillance, technology and design: in the workshop ‘Warzone Wearables’ clothes and accessories are being adapted in order to escape the all-seeing eye of your physical and social surroundings.

By Safia Akkus on 09/15/14 Comments Off

Unplugging the cyborgs

While this week’s tech-press has devoted much space to the launch of yet another better, bigger and more amazing set of consumer electronics, it was a seemingly unexciting object with the looks of a humble notebook-charger passing by the...

By Sebastian Bertoli on 09/15/14 Comments Off

Online celebrity leaked pictures. An ongoing debate about security and privacy in the Digital era.

Last day of August ended with startling news. On Sunday 31, a hacker leaked naked celebrity pictures online. He apparently breached the cloud storage and cloud computing service from Apple, iCloud, thanks to a supposedly security vulnerability in the...

By Giovanna Salazar Ojeda on 09/11/14 Comments Off

Google Spreads Its Wings: Will Flutter Soar or Burn?

Flutter. The name implies flight, but it is actually described as to wave or fly rapidly in an irregular manner or to flap the wings without flying. However, a third way to describe flutter is that it’s the name...

By Vincent Sloof on 11/18/13 1

Genres for the Digital Hangover

As boundaries between the private and public sphere are beginning to blur. It is getting harder and harder to keep private content private. Most of the times nothing major happens when you send out a personal message into the...

By Bart Schoenmakers on 11/11/13 Comments Off

The Onion Router. Escaping the prying eyes of Control Society

Last week, first of October, the FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht who is the alleged operator of the digital drug network known as the Silk Road. The Silk Road is a website which is accessible through The Onion Router (TOR)...

By Wannes Sanderse on 10/11/13 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

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

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

[Research] Trade Your Location Information For Security?

A Liberty-Security Tradeoff in Public Policy for the Location Information Technology in South Korea This afternoon, you might tag where you have been for lunch on facebook, or even a few minutes ago, your smartphone might update you with new...

By Seah Kim on 09/07/12 Comments Off

The Cyber Cafe Is Dead. Long Live The Cyber Cafe!

In the Western world, cyber cafes are nearing the point of total extinction, but less protected as say, pandas. However, many seem to find a new lease on life in the various developing – soon to take over Total...

By Daniel de Zeeuw on 10/31/11 Comments Off

Book review: Peter Olsthoorn – De macht van Google

What does Google know from us? Since search engines are able to track the user’s search queries, personal information can be gathered in order to improve the engine’s accuracy and provide better results. In De macht van Google (The...

By Erik van Mastrigt on 09/17/11 Comments Off

#You’re fired

Thoughts and funny incidents on… contemporary ways to lose your job ( via Blogspot/ WordPress, Facebook, Twitter) There are many valid reasons for an employee to lose his job: the pretense of economic crisis, the company closing down, the...

By Ourania on 11/01/10 9

The Invention of the Century: Privacy

Privacy is considered to be an important issue for it is not just a social structure within a community, which can be regulated by social control anymore. It has developed to a dialectic notion of widespread surveillance activities within...

By Fenneke Mink on 10/27/10 2

The Privacy Paradox in a control society

Nowadays a lot of people are in some form represented on the internet. These virtual forms can include profiles on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also as writings on a personal websites and blogs. They has...

By Sander Jansma on 09/24/10 4

Who do you think you are?

Review: Karin Spaink, Wie is U? Ever had a Déjà vu, the feeling that you have experienced something before? It’s a strange feeling. You can’t exactly explain what it is and where it comes from, but it’s there. You...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 09/15/10 Comments Off

The Battle for the Internet

Things seem to be looking up in the battle for the Internet. For years now ACTA negations have been mired in secrecy and controversy. The leaked documents from the negotiations painted a bleak picture of corporations using their lobbying...

By Onur Yilmaz on 09/10/10 Comments Off

Post-Privacy: Talk by Christian Heller

The first session at the Geneva Lift Conference covered “The Redefinition of Privacy” and what privacy and personal security means in the 21st Century. Independent Futurist Christian Heller spoke on the topic of Post-Privacy. Below is a summary on his views on...

By Sarah Moore on 05/06/10 1

Paranoid of the Proprietary: To Skype or Not to Skype

Today at the eComm conference, Sten Tamkivi presented an informative range of statistics of Skype use. Some 8% of all telecom “minutes” are routed by Skype as of last year. This is a huge portion of the total for...

By John Haltiwanger on 10/29/09 Comments Off

Twitter and the Rise of Impersonal Communication

Before the rise of twitter there already existed older -digital- communication devices that shared the same idea: short and fast communication between people. Those were mainly writing, faxing, emailing, chatting and later sms text messaging. In the case of...

By Charlotte van Brakel on 10/07/09 2

Social Networking Sites (SNS); are we helping in the shrinking of our own privacy?

Social Networking Sites (SNS) are commonly known to just about everyone nowadays or so it seems, who doesn’t at least own a FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Hyves, Ning account or combinations of these and many, many others! But do you...

By Sander Leegwater on 09/28/09 Comments Off

Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society. (Study Review)

Christian Fuchs was born in Austria in 1976 and is currently an associate professor at the University of Salzburg. He is mainly interested in Media and in Information society research and he's the author of many scholar papers and of...

By Margarida Fonseca on 09/13/09 3