Masters of Media

Can we find true love through the internet?

The popularity of online dating is increasing. It’s no longer a taboo. This low-profile way of meeting new people is increasingly finding a place in our busy society. Barriers to contact unknown people are being blurred due to social...

By Denise Pires on 09/19/09 Comments Off

Social Networking with African Journalists

In the smallest room in the Balie, the Dick Scherpenzeel stichting, in cooperation with a handful of donors, held a debate on the opportunities of new media to link local African reporters with western media. Can Twitter, Facebook, linkedin,...

By Wouter Dijkstra on 09/18/09 2

Book review: UBERMORGEN.COM

UBERMORGEN.COM might be always trying to combine some nice entertainment with very intellectual European subversive art, but God Christ, we need to relax sometime and sell Google ad space on eBay and write a book about it and sell...

By Hania Piotrowska on 09/18/09 Comments Off

Interactive Media Artworks for Public Space: Does Art Hold the Potential to Influence Consciousness and Behavior in Relation to Public Spaces?

“Individual bodies moving through urban space gradually became detached from the space in which they moved, and from the people the space contained. As space became devalued through motion, individuals gradually lost a sense of sharing a fate with...

By Liliana Bounegru on 09/18/09 1

Review of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet

Lisa Nakamura’s book Digitizing Race and Culture: Visual Cultures of the Internet covers a range of issues involving race and gender on the internet. Nakamura is an associate professor in the Institute of Communication Research with a joint appointment...

By Sarah Moore on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Book review of “Against The Machine – Being Human In The Age Of The Electronic Mob” by Lee Siegel

Lee Siegel was born in New York in 1957 and has Bachelor, Master and Master of Philosophy degrees from Columbia University. While working as a staff writer at The New Republic, an American magazine on politics and the arts,...

By Maarten Hoogvliet on 09/17/09 Comments Off

A review of: Blogging

Blogging is written by Jill Walker Rettberg. She is a blogger her self. On her blog she presents her self as “an associate professor at the University of Bergen, and I do research on how people tell stories online.”...

By Suzanne Schram on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Planet Google – Book Review

From the perspective of a professor of Business one can expect the focus on Google as a commercial company. With this book Randal Stross proves to have a deep insight in many facts, that mostly evolve around the ideology...

By Ramses Petronia on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Book Review: Mathieu O’Neil’s Cyber Cheifs

In 2004, after researching the allometric growth of antlers between extinct and extant deer, trapped deep within the dungeons of my university’s vertebrate collections, I whizzed over to the Wikipedia entry on the Irish Elk, sure I could add my two...

By Allison Guy on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Book Review of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture

Show off your favorite videos to the world. Take videos of your dogs, cats, and other pets. Blog the videos you take with your digital camera or cell phone. Securely and privately show your videos to your friends and...

By Tim van Essen on 09/17/09 10

Anomalous Assemblages: A Review of The Spam Book

The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture, edited by Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, uses a relatively unique approach to add to the discourse surrounding critical understanding of the...

By John Haltiwanger on 09/17/09 1

Review of The Digital Campfire – An Ethnography of Online Social Networking

Ever felt guilty about spending so much time online, browsing through your friends Facebook pages and leaving them massages on their walls? No need for that anymore, this is what we’ve been doing for centuries and it can actually...

By Gwen Keupe on 09/17/09 1

BOOK REVIEW ‘say everything’ by Scott Rosenberg

Rosenberg, a former newspaper journalist and co-founder of Salon.com, gave himself the difficult task of recounting the history of blogging and – as the subtitle indicates – providing an idea of what’s to come and ‘why it matters.’

By Kimberley Spreeuwenberg on 09/17/09 1

Michael Rush’s “New Media in Art”: A Review

In the 19th century the art world was shaken by the introduction of new technologies that threatened contemporary ideas of art and what people considered art to its core. Since then, there have been both major developments in the...

By Thomas Wielemaker on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Book Review of Political Campaigning on the Web

The brand new (31th of August 2009 according to Amazon) book “Political Campaigning on the Web” is a bundle of essays around the relatively new field of political campaigning in new media in its broadest sense. The book contains...

By Han Rusman on 09/17/09 Comments Off

A Review of: Mapping E-Culture, Navigating E-Culture, Walled Garden

Mapping E-Culture, Navigating E-Culture, and Walled Garden, the three books coming along in a box, picture the general look of the electronic scenery we are in through the decade. Besides interviews to several key influencers, research essays and some...

By Sisi Yu on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Book Review ‘What You See Is What You Feel’ by Koert van Mensvoort

In our age of computer mediated images the distinction between reality and the virtual seems to be more blurred than ever. The white beach with palm trees, coconuts and turquoise ocean is no longer that white beach, it has...

By Harro Heijboer on 09/16/09 1

Book review of Media Work

All optimism associated with studying to work in the media industry dies by the time a student tries to actually find a job after graduation. Working within media industries is often much more uncertain and much more complicated then...

By Rakesh Kanhai on 09/16/09 Comments Off

Book Review: ‘Free’ by Chris Anderson

When Chris Anderson wrote 'The Long Tail' it radically changed the way new media professionals look at the supply and demand chain on the internet. Especially for those of us with a background in marketing, Anderson's book contained compelling...

By Joery Bruijntjes on 09/16/09 1

Review of Expanded ORIGINAL. Cornelia Sollfrank

A smart artist makes the machine do the work. Cornelia Sollfrank German artist Cornelia Sollfrank’s career has been linked to hacking, conceptual art, cyberfeminism and net.art. Since the nineties, she examines the digital cultural techniques of copying and the...

By Susana Zaragoza on 09/16/09 Comments Off

Review of Re-Inventing Radio – Aspects of Radio as Art

The conference '100 years of radio' in 2006 which was an collaboration between the Ludwig Botzmann Institute Media.Art.Research, Linz, Austria and Kunstradio became a key point of departure for the realization of the book where media theory, art history...

By Charlotte van Brakel on 09/15/09 Comments Off

Review of Media Dancer, Who Sets the Tune?

This is a book that claims itself a non-book at the very beginning. As confusing it could seem to first-time readers, Media Dancer, Who Sets the Tune? has a major flaw in the book’s overall organization and edit, which...

By Yu-Fen Chen on 09/15/09 Comments Off

Review of Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology

Les Immatériaux is the name of the exposition the well-known theorist Jean-François Lyotard held in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in 1985. At the exhibition, a digital interactive catalog, written by several writers, was shown. This experimental encounter with...

By Desiree de Jong on 09/15/09 Comments Off

Graeme Turner’s Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn

Revenge of the nerds: digital optimism, the ‘produser’, and the politics of blogging The Internet is the prime location for those in cultural and media studies who argue that the contemporary spread of media choices constitutes a form of...

By Geert Lovink on 09/15/09 Comments Off