Tag Archives: public sphere

The Public Sphere, New Media and Politics

Daan Fliervoet | 06 October 2011, 6:00 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , , , , , ,

According to Metareporter, a student blog for BA-student Media en Culture about new media in newspapers, a lot of articles in Dutch traditional media are about new media subjects. The top 3 tags that are being used are:  Twitter, Facebook and social media1.  This was exactly a year ago as well when I wrote by BA-thesis. These new media…

Twitter: an insignificance awareness engine?

ibtisam omer | 15 October 2010, 11:22 pm | tags: , , , , ,

@MA_Mel ahaahh nice my twitter makes you smile. If only it made men undress too!!10:17 PM Aug 4th via web from Garment District, New York in reply to MA_Mel

Mentioning your whereabouts, describing your breakfast, sharing links, and replying to other users, then perhaps sharing some more links, these are all essentials within this raid of commentaries shared…

The Dark Side of Twitter

Michal Kielbasa | 10 October 2010, 5:08 pm | tags: , ,

Amongst many for and against internet as a public sphere Paparachisi (2002) comes up with very important characteristic, I would like to focus on here. Namely, the potential of the internet to bring people from diverse backgrounds together, which is highly visible in web 2.0, twitter in particular. This issue is also realized by Tambini (1999), who states that internet provides devices, that link together individuals or groups with the most obscure common interests. And Twitter is a great example of all those above mentioned positive as well as negative characteristics of the web.

Information Visualization and the Public Sphere

Jan Bajec | 19 May 2010, 6:55 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , ,

Democratization of Data

Open Data is a practice (and philosophy) of making data freely available to everyone. Advocates of Open Data argue that restrictions, licenses, copyright, patents, or other mechanisms of control are against the communal good and that data should be made available without restrictions or fees. Recently, governments have been making some of their data publicly available (

The Public Library as Instigator of a Modern Public Sphere

Rutger van den Berg | 30 October 2009, 2:30 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , ,

The digitalization of information has been a hot topic ever since the arrival of the computer. The internet must be the world’s biggest library by now. The classical role of the library is becoming old fashioned and maybe even redundant. The reading-room and lending desk, the definitions of a classic library, are becoming less important to the visitors. What elements of a public library can still draw people to a library?

Twitter: Public Space or Public Sphere?

ellen sluis | 06 October 2009, 7:51 pm | 3 comments | tags: , , , , , , ,

Internet kills writing? According to Andrea Lunsford, researcher at the Stanford University, it is totally the other way around. There is an immense increase of people starting to write and digital writing is the biggest revolution in writing since the Greek era; bigger than the shift from the oral- to the writing era. Internet improves our writing skills!

The Habermasian implications of the Twittersphere

Marc Stumpel | 04 October 2009, 7:51 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , ,

‘Blogosphere’, ‘Twittersphere’, ‘Afrosphere’. We’re gradually getting used to a new media terminology whereby we quickly refer to new communication spaces and specified fields as ‘spheres’. As the Twittersphere is still rapidly growing, we might want to look back at Habermas’ classic concept of the ‘public sphere’, which was one of the earliest…

Personalizing the Public Sphere: From Personal Start Pages to Personal Webtops

Heleen Kerkman | 22 September 2008, 10:09 am | tags: , , ,

Your personalized Internet. You can add what you like and remove what you don’t like and it’s totally simple. - Pageflakes* -

Pageflakes is only one of the dozen sites that offer to personalize your internet experience by creating a personal start page for you. The amount of websites offering this personalization of these start pages reflects the need for a more personal, or even a more private part in the online public sphere. While every site tries to win over the user by stating that they are not just another personalized start page, they all claim that via this personal start page the user will be able to personalize their part in the private sphere.

‘Whisher’, Opening Up the Internet?

Stephan Barmentloo | 22 September 2008, 1:10 am | tags: , , , , ,

A short analysis of Whisher, a web 2.0 application. With the tagline ‘Building the world’s largest WiFi network’ the goal of Whisher doesn’t leave anything to the imagination. Whisher tries to create a global and dense WiFi network with the help of users who are willing to share their internet connection with the rest of the world.

LivingLabs recap – what exactly is a creative city?

Tjerk Timan | 07 October 2007, 2:39 pm | tags: , , , ,

With every major city in Europe calling itself ‘creative capitol’ these days, the question raises how creative these cities really are and in what way they distinct themselves from others. In a ‘creative race’ between Asia, the US and Europe in mobile services and locative media, the latter seems to be a step behind.
Without going focusing too much…