Masters of Media

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

Seeing eye to I(t)

What became of the bionic contact lens? Since the digital display was introduced users have dreamt of breaking it free from its four encapsulating walls. Numerous attempts, from projected to integrated and even curved or rimless screens, have all...

By Tsjip van der Nat on 11/03/17 Comments Off

“De Sleepwet”: Why five students are trying to protect the privacy of Dutch citizens

A revised version of the Dutch law on intelligence and security is challenged by five students, because it violates the right to privacy. They started a campaign with the goal to enable a referendum, in an effort to protect...

By Leon Smits on 11/03/17 Comments Off

Creating awareness by visualizing the variety of “fake newses”

Our research objective is the phenomenon of fake news. We claim that fake news is not one thing, and also not a new phenomenon. Rather we would like to offer a new conceptualization by visualizing the various levels of...

By Yarden Skop on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Digital Literacy in Greece: Mapping the current issues in developing and deploying policies for digital literacy and education

Without question, the emergence of Web 2.0 has revolutionized many aspects of people’s lives. One of its most basic characteristics is how communication is now enabled globally, allowing information to flow easily from one part of the world to...

By Andy on 10/25/17 Comments Off

A Streamlined Explanation: The Problem with Streaming Games on YouTube

Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg is one of the most popular video game streamers on YouTube with more than 57 million subscribers (Orland, 2017). Because of a racial slur uttered in one of his recent Let’s Play videos, PewDiePie faced a...

By Ayse B. Tosun on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Where does your data go? Mapping the data flow of Nest

Introduction With this research project, we set out to investigate the volume of data created and shared from smart home devices. Intrigued by the claim that our homes are getting smarter and more connected, we aimed to find out...

By Aimee Dirkzwager on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Time and Algorithmic Music Composition

Time and Algorithmic Music Composition Information and communications technologies proliferate today, and with them, the continuous generation, processing, recording, circulation, and visualization of ever more data. The societies of control theorized by Deleuze and others are said...

By Giovanni Scala on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Make voting safe again? A selection and as-sessment of contemporary technologies in relation to their integration with i-Voting

By conducting an academic literature review along with an empirical analysis of the Estonian i-Voting system, our aim was to identify weaknesses in the i-Voting infrastructure, and assess whether biometric technologies can be implemented to help alleviate issues and...

By Mandy Theel on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Mediating Veganism: A look at vegan self-presentation on Instagram

Veganism is an alternative food diet and lifestyle that aims to exclude, as far as possible any exploitation and cruelty to animals for food, clothing, or other by-products (The Vegan Society). A cursory search on Google Trends reveals that...

By Amber de Zeeuw on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Snapchat Fams as a Subculture: How Influencers Use Emojis for Commodifying Cross-Platform Engagement

Introduction Communities on social media are an emerging phenomenon in today’s society. Within the framework of networks, people come together virtually, satisfying their needs of communication and belonging, usually by creating communities based on mutual interests. Often, these communities...

By Nefeli Gkoni on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Face the Bubble: Revealing How Facebook Selects Users’ News Stories

Introduction The media content we are exposed to is becoming increasingly personalised (Borgesius 2). Personalisation in this sense can be explained as online media content tailored to an individual for it to have a more personal appeal to the...

By Anna Lezard on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Blind Spots: The value of information about cloud services for user empowerment.

“Cloud” – a word that suggests the promise and experience of accessing files from anywhere you choose, much like pulling it down from the sky. However, when we think of the verb “to cloud”, it means ‘to make less...

By Renate Brulleman on 10/25/17 Comments Off

The Data-Ing Game: The Value Placed On Our Own Data; How Socio-Economics Play A Part And How Our App Will Help Educate Users On The Current Worth Of Data In The Market

Our project aimed to design an app called ‘The Data-ing Game’ that would educate people on the value of their data. Not many realised the valuable commodity that their own personal data has become*. We aimed to distinguish whether...

By Aisling Crabbe on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Being Friends With Yourself: How Friendship Is Programmed Within The AI-Based Socialbot Replika.

The new social-bot application Replika allows you to become friends with a 100% artificial intelligence replica of yourself. In doing so, it offers a whole new social media experience in which the notion of friendship is configured by an...

By Neb Nima on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Dissecting Facebook’s Censorship

Since September 2016, Facebook’s banning of the “Napalm Girl” photograph, one of the most powerful images that represented the atrocities of the Vietnam War, has sparked a debate on Facebook’s censorship power and policies. In the 1972 photograph, Kim...

By Tu Quynh on 10/24/17 Comments Off

MirrorMirror: Illuminating the black box for the everyday internet user

MirrorMirror is a web extension that tracks a user’s search engine queries ultimately compiling a digital profile that characterizes the user. The goal of the non-profit tool is to encourage awareness and potentially behavioural change surrounding user’s interaction with...

By David Schogt on 10/24/17 Comments Off

iClarify: About The Control and Understanding of Our Privacy.

iClarify: About The Control and Understanding of Our Privacy. “I HAVE READ AND UNDERSTAND THIS AGREEMENT, AND I ACCEPT AND AGREE TO ALL OF ITS TERMS AND CONDITIONS” This might be one of the biggest lies on...

By Ilja van de Rhoer on 10/24/17 Comments Off

You cannot log out from the grave: The implications of Facebook suggesting immortality within its death policy.

People are barely aware that all their online profiles, pictures, and status updates will remain available online after they decease. When uploading those memories onto Facebook, we create our “digital self”. But when signing up for Facebook, users are...

By Drea Rodriguez Cervantes on 10/24/17 Comments Off

Who controls your voice controlled world?

One of the latest trends in the tech world is the development of the smart digital voice assistant. It was first popularized by iPhone’s Siri, and now companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are developing software and hardware technology...

By Aleksandra Straczek on 10/24/17 Comments Off

The role of anonymity in discussing social anxiety online: A comparative platform analysis of Facebook and Reddit

We usually use social media to share photos or events, to see what our friends are up to, or to wish our colleagues a happy birthday. It is less common to use these platforms to share your insecurities, fears...

By Anne van Meerveld on 10/24/17 Comments Off

Growing up on YouTube – How family vloggers are establishing their children’s digital footprints for them

The internet knows what you shared on Facebook last week. It sees what video you posted on YouTube. It even knows you’re reading this blog post right now. Every action you make online creates a trail of data or...

By Frederike Lichtenstein on 10/23/17 Comments Off

“ToScan”: Media Literacy and Understanding of Terms of Service

We are posing the question “how can we operationalise a form of privacy literacy in order to better understand social media terms of service?” In this research we engage in an academic debate and as an end result propose...

By Gergana Ivanova on 10/21/17 Comments Off

Weeping Angel: The latest surveillance tool, that can turn your smart TV into a bug TV

Earlier this year, a revelation by Wikileaks called Vault7 refueled the privacy debate concerning intrusive media (Hacker News; The Verge, 2017). The series released documents on CIA activity between 2013 and 2016, showing how the intelligence agency gained access...

By Nina Welt on 09/25/17 Comments Off