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

Going to England, the city of trust? Internet eyes is watching you!!

If u have nothing to hide why should you care? Public to monitor CCTV from home I think the most of you ever heard of the famous story of Orwell “1984”. Its about an inhuman state, a state that...

By Layla Van Daalen on 10/08/10 2

Book Review – Access Controlled : the shaping of power, rights and rule in cyberspace

Access Controlled reports on the new normative terrain of internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance. The preface and foreword are clear about what the reader can expect per chapter and also...

By Elias van Hees on 09/20/10 1

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

I Fly with my Little Spy! New Stealth Techno-Toys.

The recent debate about the proposed use of military-style surveillance drones in the United Kingdom, and further afield, has fuelled fears and given rise to concern over the continual erosion of the individual’s right to privacy and safety. ...

By Isobel Gorman on 09/12/10 Comments Off

Persistence of Life-Streams – An Inquiry Into the Implications of Mixed Surveillance

Here’s the final version of my thesis which covers the nature and implications of (participatory) surveillance in the field of social media, and specifically in life-streaming services like Twitter and Facebook. (PDF can be downloaded here). Introduction: In this...

By Sjoerd Tuinema on 09/06/10 Comments Off

The Beast File: Google

This video, created for ‘Hungry Beast‘, a news program that airs in Australia on the ABC1, depicts Google as a dangerous, pretentious, ubiquitous and ever growing advertising giant: ‘building an empire on your street, in your phone, in your...

By Marc Stumpel on 03/17/10 4

Implications of Twitter: Crime 2.0

Sept. 30, 2008. White man about 20 years of age, wearing a blue shirt, yellow vest, safety goggle and a respirator mask. An ordinary road-worker going to work you might think. No you’re wrong, this is the story of...

By Tim van Essen on 10/11/09 Comments Off

Facebook, Connecting and Controlling People

Facebook connects people. Not a very new phenomenon, but the amount of people using the social network increases every day and so does the amount of information people show and share with (too many?) others.

By ellen sluis 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

CBS: 29.000 Predators on MySpace

The Internet gives the citizen possibilities for surveillance. Citizens use these possibilities when they think vertical surveillance fails. Especially children are put into discourses of surveillance as if they are members of a vulnerable group, not watched over by...

By Arno de Natris on 04/16/09 3

Twitter: a Member of the Big Brother Family?

My first experience with Twitter was a kind of déjà-vu. I had seen something like this before, a few years ago. It was, I think, at a music festival. There was a big screen with a telephone number. You could...

By Arno de Natris on 10/12/08 3

Google Analytics: The Implications of an Easy Setup

Here at Masters of Media it is time for a redesign. As students of the new year we are encouraged not only to contribute with fresh new content to the blog, but also to re-think its shape; both in...

By Andrea Fiore on 09/26/08 2

Watching You Watch Me!! (…on Facebook)

The Web 2.0 application FACEBOOK analysed through FOUCAULTS PHILOSOPHIES ON SOCIETY. WARNING|DANGER: With this knowledge a consciousness is created with which people become aware about the possibilities of people watching/observing/monitoring people, both virtually as in the real world.

By Kai Henriquez on 09/22/08 3

Vriendjespolitiek.net: research into post-demographics

Since 1998, and on paper since 1989 (Stemwijzer 2008), general elections in the Netherlands have spawned a variety of so called voting recommendation machines. These systems typically ask the user to answer some questions after which they offer the...

By Erik Borra on 06/11/08 1

Big Brother Award of 2007 goes out to … You!

Friday the 21st of September, the annual Dutch Big Brother Awards were held at the Balie in Amsterdam. It was organized by the – unfortunately no longer existent – Bits of Freedom, an organisation which came up for your...

By Erik Borra on 09/25/07 5

Smart Mobs: smart mob(ile)s or smart Men On Bits?

In this review, Howard Rheingold’s vision on the future of communication and interaction is explained, as layed out in his book ‘Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution’, 2002. Rheingold noted that SMS has been used for dating in teenage...

By Erik Borra on 09/16/07 21

New Network Theory – Review

For three executive sunny days last week, the humanity studies faculty of the University of Amsterdam hosted the New Network Theory conference. This four party collaborative initiative – consisting of Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, Institute of Network cultures,...

By Roman Tol on 07/09/07 5

New Network Theory – Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System and currently associate professor at NYU, is here to talk about the Googlization of...

By Michael Stevenson on 06/28/07 3

Streetview Aesthetics?

In 1965, Ed Ruscha photographed Every Building on the Sunset Strip, in a way that may sound familiar to those following the Google Streetview release: Ed Ruscha took the photographs contained in this leporello with a motorized Nikon camera...

By Michael Stevenson on 06/11/07 6

Illegal software allowed to be used for just cause?

On March 3rd 2005 Joseph Catterson, a British 44 year old man, was arrested in England because it was suspected he possessed child pornography on his computer. Previous to his arrest Catterson had removed all 1500 pornographic photographs and...

By Roman Tol on 05/30/07 9

The Whatever Button – Now for Firefox!

No longer just a metaphor for how we consumers fall for anything, the Whatever Button is now available as a Firefox add-on (Great big thanks to Erik, who coded it). More about the button below.

By Michael Stevenson on 04/25/07 8

True Crime Blogging

This site is an interesting mix of blogging and amateur online investigative journalism – trying to get more information on reported crimes by searching Google, MySpace, etc. Lots of advertising, though – true crime is a popular and lucrative...

By Michael Stevenson on 02/02/07 1

Wikipedia and AI

Lately I’ve been looking at the possibility of using Wikipedia’s interlinking to study collective memory – seeing what associations are made and so on. Here’s an article about using similar techniques to make computers smarter. For example, with anti-spam...

By Michael Stevenson on 01/08/07 Comments Off

Surveillance theory and ‘that video’

In Consumer Technology after Surveillance Theory, Richard Rogers and Sabine Niederer talk about how consumer technology unsettles old institutional power, possibly bringing a whole new set of problems along. There was the consumer-soldier, for example, who produced the Abu...

By Michael Stevenson on 01/03/07 5