Masters of Media

Bittorrent: the future of the television broadcast model

Today I read that open source peer-to-peer software Bittorrent, is making an attempt to reach out to the market commercially. The downloading software was developed through a participation structure, where people on the internet contributed to the co-creation of...

By Roman Tol on 10/25/06 1

Research blogging do’s and don’ts

I’ve been thinking a bit what to publish about my research on my weblog, and went to search for other examples of research blogs to give me some guidelines. I stumbled upon this website jilltxt.net/txt/researchblogs.html by Jill Walker who...

By Twan Eikelenboom on 10/25/06 4

Adorno and Horkheimer, The Game Industry and Steffan Amande

The thirty year old game industry is peaking at this moment and the top of the mountain is still far away. Also in the Netherlands the future seems nothing less then positive. Games have become new territory for researchers....

By Roman Tol on 10/23/06 Comments Off

For your information: PhD position

Dear all, I recieved this announcement from Jeroen Jansz of ASCor: ASCoR, the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (University of Amsterdam) advertizes a new PhD position in research about digital entertainment games. The project is supervised by Prof. Dr....

By Jan Simons on 10/23/06 1

Audio Book Review

Masters of Media presents another audio book review: Indonesian Transitions. Editor: Henk Schulte Nordholt. June 2006 The book review focuses on an essay by Bart Barendregt: Mobile modernities in contemporary Indonesia; Stories from the other side of the digital...

By Roman Tol on 10/22/06 7

Warning Signs for Tomorrow

an inventory of future warning signs is funny: should the masters make stickers and distribute accordingly? Of course, the warning signs we have now are not so bad, either. via Schneier

By Michael Stevenson on 10/22/06 6

Jan Pronk has to leave Sudan after remarks on his weblog

UN envoy for Sudan Jan Pronk has to leave Sudan because of a weblog post about the Sudanese army. The post in question can be read here: www.janpronk.nl/index120.html. Pronk states that the army has lost a lot of soldiers...

By Twan Eikelenboom on 10/22/06 3

Is e-mail really for old people? And happy 35th birthday e-mail!

How to keep up as schools in a world where even e-mail is outdated and social networking is the new big thing? Some schools say that the answer is setting up a MySpace page. Can it be that education...

By Twan Eikelenboom on 10/21/06 4

YouTube and the preservation of artistic expression

Today various Japanese media companies forced YouTube to remove 29,549 videos from its archive because of its copyrighted disposition. Google, which recently attained YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars, will most certainly have to do this more frequently. In my...

By Roman Tol on 10/21/06 5

Internet killed the video star

As I was getting ready to turn off the computer, I decided to do some last minute browsing through YouTube. Wondering if there would be any drastic changes after its takeover by Google, I came across an intriguing title:...

By Roman Tol on 10/20/06 7

Mauri!

Mauri is “hello!” in I-Kiribati. Why are you telling me this? You probably ask yourself. Well, let me explain… I was just checking out our statistics and the first three countries on the “visitors per country list”were no surprise:...

By Jeff van Schie on 10/19/06 6

Plato’s Republic: The decline of the state and the history of the World Wide Web

While reading through Plato’s conversation with Socrates in his classic writings of the Republic, I noticed an almost utopian allegory in Book VIII in which they discuss the decline of the state. The decline discussed by the ancient Greek...

By Twan Eikelenboom on 10/18/06 2

Comments on Danah Boyd’s article about MySpace

I’ve only been using MySpace for about half a year now and I can’t say I’ve been using it intensively. I’ve “only” got 39 friends of which thirteen are artists and six are venues I often go too. I...

By Anne Helmond on 10/18/06 5

Dualism, Objectification and Gazing: A Philosophical View on Why Pro-Ana Blogs are so Succesful

Why are there so many pro-ana blogs? What makes them so attractive to people who suffer from anorexia nervosa? I would like to make clear that this post is not going to answer these big questions, but I will...

By Jeff van Schie on 10/18/06 3

Exporting the Amazon model for behavioral profiling

In the book Profiling Machines, new media theorist Greg Elmer looks at how consumers are tracked and how their data is fed back to them, affecting change in the spaces they navigate. His examples include recommendation systems like those...

By Michael Stevenson on 10/17/06 2

More archiving of the archived Internet

Not unlike Yahoo’s Timecapsule, BBC points to a British initiative to use a mass blog to record ‘everyday life’ on October 17th. We used to only come together to commemorate the past or yell at the present, now we...

By Michael Stevenson on 10/17/06 3

We Are Iran

It all started in 2001 when Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian journalist living in Canada, published a how-to-blog guide in Farsi (Persian). By doing this he started what can be considered as one of the most thriving sub-cultures in the...

By Jeff van Schie on 10/16/06 Comments Off

Walter Benjamin and journalism in the age of electronic reproduction

Structurally, the printed press is a medium that operates as a monologue, isolating producer and the reader. Feedback and interaction are extremely limited, demand elaborate procedures, and only in the rarest cases lead to corrections. Once an edition has...

By Roman Tol on 10/16/06 1