Masters of Media

Did a Human Write this Blog Post?

At the end of June 2020, Microsoft laid off 50 contract news producers for its MSN website. Until then, journalists curated headlines and articles paid for by Microsoft from news organizations and decided which content to promote. These contract...

By Christopher Murphy on 09/27/20 Comments Off

‘Digital Wellbeing Experiments’ – Confronting Technology and Health’s largest questions in the simplest ways.

In 2019 Google launched the platform “Digital wellbeing Experiments”. In recognition of the negative impacts our digital devices are having on our lives Google is striving for a more innovative approach to help people find a balance with technology....

By on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Fawkes: “Cloaking” Your Photos to Elude Facial Recognition Systems

For too long we have lived under the fear brought by the deepfake. In that case, it’s time for us to meet the photo-editing tool, Fawkes. Since the deepfake is generally based on images, Fawkes can fool the AI...

By on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Who gets previewed? Racial Bias and User Experiments within Twitter’s Algorithmic Image Cropping

Recently Twitter users have been discovering the algorithmic bias of Twitter's image cropping system. How have they experimented and what do we do with the results? Why is Twitter selecting white faces? Why does it prefer Ted Cruz with...

By on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Media Minimalism: Big Twitter and the Small Data Revolution

Our mediascape has a value problem. "The methods of social science are dear in time and money," writes Su Golder, "and getting dearer every day." Enter media minimalism: a new school of thought, spearheaded by a gang of logistically-minded...

By on 09/27/20 Comments Off

From Cartography to Digital Mapping: Do you know the truth?

An online exhibition called ‘Bending Reality’ reflects on how the history of persuasive cartography is relevant for a contemporary society consumed by an overabundance of visual data that doesn’t always show what it claims to

By on 09/27/20 Comments Off

The Liar’s Dividend: dismissing reality as fake

From face swapping applications to uncanny videos of politicians, everybody has, knowingly or unknowingly, seen a fake video. They are ubiquitous and they are becoming increasingly more realistic, which makes them harder to identify as ‘fake’. This poses a...

By on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Health QR code (system): reasonable data collection or tracking surveillance under the fantasy of Big Data?

Health Code, a personal QR code created by the government of Hangzhou in cooperation with mobile giant Alipay and designed for collecting and controlling the covid-19 cases, was initially launched in Hangzhou on February 11th, 2020 and was widely...

By Li Shen on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Bilibili: a media platform for young Chinese generation

Sunday, 27 September 2020, 12:34 CEST A Brief Introduction “Bilibili is China’s biggest anime streaming site, as well as one of the country’s biggest video-sharing sites” (Josh), “which derived from a Japanese video-sharing website, Niconico” (Zhou 7). On the...

By on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Fighting Fake News: A closer look at Sleeping Giants Brazil

This article is a descriptive exploratory research based on data collected on Sleeping Giants Brazil’s Twitter account, @slpng_giants_pt. It aims to briefly describe the conditions that stimulated the organization of Sleeping Giants in Brazil and whether there are impacts...

By Sandy Rafaela Krambeck on 09/27/20 Comments Off

The switch from live to digital during COVID-19

The whole world is changing due to COVID-19. ‘The pandemic emerges a stressful and even traumatic event that requires individuals to make sense of the new situation and choose appropriate coping actions’ (Yanjun, Hong and Xinyi, 2020 p.1). It has...

By Sophie Letschert on 09/27/20 Comments Off

A(m)I beautiful? – Questioning AI through a Biometric Mirror

As AI integrates its way into everyday life, it raises more and more questions on whether to see this technology as assisting or oppressive. Facial recognition art installation Biometric Mirror (2018) contributes to this critical approach, challenging the ethics...

By on 09/26/20 Comments Off

Instagram Poetry as an Untouched Equilibrium: The Issue of Representation

Since popular writer Rupi Kaur’s rise to prominence in 2015, the concept of ‘Instagram poetry’ has been undeniably omnipresent in the world of digital art (Kovalik and Curwood 2019). Yet, as inherently new as the name concretely mentioning the...

By on 09/26/20 Comments Off

From Liking to Consuming: the Liking Economy of Social Media

As one of the most used social buttons, social media “like” now carries strong social significance including impression management, identity construction, and maintenance of social ties online for individual user (Eranti & Lonkila, 2015). In economic terms, social media...

By Xiaoya Zhou on 09/26/20 Comments Off

VvG: Virtual van Gogh

With the rise of COVID-19, many institutions shut down. This allowed an accelerated advancement of organizations to shift on a digital platform. One such case is the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam which allows users to experience the museum...

By on 09/25/20 Comments Off

Shattering a totalitarian monopoly?

This blog post covers the struggle between Epic Games on one side and Apple and Google on the other. By suing Google and Apple over anti-competitive practices, Epic Games hopes to break the tight grip the platforms have on...

By David Dijkhuis on 09/24/20 Comments Off

Pay or you are a porn star: The problem with RansomFakes

When in the beginning of 2017 deep fakes of politicians arose, people assumed that the new technology would be a threat to democracy. In a world in which we believe everything we see, the Katie Hill scandal has shown...

By Yentel Boot on 09/24/20 Comments Off

What is Feminist-Monarcho-Primitivism?

Introduction A couple of years ago, the prospect of a wealthy TV star owning multiple corporations with no background in politics entering the presidential elections would not have been considered realistic. Fast forward to the end of his mandate,...

By robert baciu on 03/02/20 Comments Off

rMGTOW or The New Wave Within The Manosphere

This article is fictional and was made for the course Radical Subcultures Online.Written by:Jasemin UysalJasper van der Heide Another day, another odd internet subculture – as it appears in today’s digital world. “Reflective Men Going Their Own Way,” rMGTOW...

By on 03/02/20 Comments Off

The latest rage on Instagram: creating your own AR face filters and effects

Instagram is a platform that continuously changes, and its latest rage has been the new ability to create your own face filters and effects and share them with other users. The fact that anyone can now create augmented reality...

By on 11/13/19 Comments Off

Mirror, mirror on the App Store

Why people are editing their face to perfection, and the dangers that lurk in these ‘subtle’ changes. A genealogy of face editing appsIn 2013 the Oxford English Dictionary chose ‘selfie’ as its word of the year. At around the...

By on 10/24/19 Comments Off

YouTube and the LGBT+ Community: Demonitizing Pride

Yonathan Tesfai Introduction How many of us have a YouTube channel? How many of us have even created videos of our own? YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim in 2005 as a simple video...

By on 10/24/19 Comments Off

Musical Horizons: Spotify the Secret Nudger

We aim to investigate whether Spotify is impacting our musical horizons by comparing our perceived music taste to Spotify’s suggestions curated by their recommender engines over time. For these purposes, we used data from our four Discover Weekly, Yearly...

By Angélique Jutand on 10/24/19 Comments Off

Tinder vs. Bumble: Can You Afford Falling in Love?

From its very beginning, “the Internet has supported social interaction and the search for a soul mate” (Whitty 212). This research explores the dating app phenomenon in-depth, comparing two popular dating apps: Tinder and Bumble. How do Tinder’s affordances...

By Joshua McDonald on 10/24/19 Comments Off