Masters of Media

A Capitalist Does Not Always Pay His Debts: On Debt, Rentism, and Inequality

Debt, governance, and inequality are three of the main building blocks of capitalist economies. These economies have features that allow great wealth to essentially reproduce itself in the absence of strong governance regulation, which in turn typically leads to...

By Mahmoud Badry on 02/17/19 0

China’s Dystopian Social Credit System Within Western Borders

Imagine a world where your every move, online and offline, gets monitored and scored by big companies and the government. This idea gets even more chilling when your online activities, behaviour, relationships and financial data ultimately determine whether you...

By Oana Patrichi on 10/24/18 0

How are gender norms reconstructed through app store ecologies and visual interfaces?

A look at popular medical, health & fitness apps in the Google Play store (NL) Figure 1: Google Play Store search results for “period” mobile applications Introduction This research project interests itself in the gender dynamics at play in...

By Holly Foxton on 10/24/18 0

Am I—Reflections on the search recommendations, algorithmic identity and the datafied subject

“The endless, continuously updated streams of information online are selected, processed and made available through recommendations calculated by complex algorithms. Am I explores how these algorithmic recommendations shape our everyday existence – and both reflect as shape our sense...

By Jing Shi on 10/24/18 0

VR as a Tool to Prevent Sexual Offenses

According to an article by Refinery29, 81 percent of women and 43 percent of men report having experienced some form of sexual assault or harassment in their lifetimes (Ohikuare). With 2017 being the year of trailblazing campaigns such as...

By Mahmoud Badry on 10/24/18 0

Monetization on Twitch: Investigating the Relationship Between Audience, Creator and Content

The social and interactive nature of web 2.0 (O’Reilly) and new media platforms provide a sense of freedom for users to produce or consume content according to their preferences. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have, over the...

By Rama Adityadarma on 10/24/18 0

Life in the Amazon(e)

Introduction In 1995, the then thirty-year-old Jeff Bezos founded Amazon and by using the emerging World Wide Web, he was able to sell books globally, from his garage. Although he could probably not imagine that he would one day...

By Lieve Keizer on 10/24/18 0

Swipe you left out of my life!

How the features of tinder encourage both connectedness and social indifference As the world is becoming more digitally connected and people are becoming more reliant on the Internet and digital technologies for various aspects of their lives, it comes...

By Camille Godineau on 10/24/18 0

You Won’t Believe What These Young Liberal Students Did Their Project On

Fake news When Pheidippides burst into the Greek assembly to exclaim ‘nenikēkamen’, after running from the battle of Marathon to Athens where the Greeks had just conquered the Persians, his death gave birth to the concept of the marathon...

By Elise van der Linde on 10/24/18 0

Smart Home Technologies and the Transformation Of Domestic Space

Since Gordon Moore’s prophetic law in 1965, in which he claimed that microchips would develop so that the speed would double while size would decrease every year, has allowed for the evolution of ubiquitous computing and its introduction into...

By Erika Grimes on 10/24/18 0

Cookie Monster: building awareness around free labour and data-exploitation

Introduction Users that roam the European Internet on a daily basis will have come across them countless of times. Each time a new website is visited it pops up in the middle of the screen or it rests...

By Aranka Kooi on 10/24/18 0

Join the HIVE: The AR future of social networks

The Age of AR Augmented Reality (AR) is set to be the next big step in computing, and experts are predicting a big growth of the AR sector, estimating it at around 140 billion Euros worth by 2024. Many of...

By Max Rogall on 10/23/18 0

Free as in ‘labor’, not as in ‘movement’: Google’s Local Guides and Gamifying Digital Maps

In the past few years, tourism has hit an all-time high across the globe. With decreasing costs of transportation and travel, more and more countries are seeing unprecedented numbers of visitors. By May 2018, Turkey had received 11.8 million tourists,...

By Eliza Connolly on 10/23/18 0

Do the Robot: A critical alternative to gendered humanistic virtual assistants

“Alexa, how deep is the ocean?”, “Alexa play some music!”, “Alexa, call the plumber!” Mundane tasks such as making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, and searching for weather, traffic, sports, and other real-time information are all outsourceable in...

By Katarzyna Wiercioch on 10/23/18 0

Culture, Art & Digitisation

Being art lovers, we’re always looking for what’s new in the world of art. This led us to an article about L’Atelier des Lumieres in Paris which is exhibiting the works of Gustav Klimt in a digitally immersive manner....

By Kanchana Varghese on 10/23/18 0

“Grassroots Maptivism”: Mapping Feminist Movements Around the World

The virtual space has become the preferred place to demand for change. There are several examples of such movements from all over the world – Occupy Wall Street, The Arab Spring, #BlackLivesMatter, #NiUnaMenos #15-M Movement. With over 4 billion...

By Tommaso Campagna on 10/23/18 0

Reality Slap Plugin: You Never Know When It Hits You

With the number of Tweets, Facebook statuses, Instagram pictures and Stories many users share on a daily basis, we think it can be exhausting to keep track of the wide-ranging visibility a single post can have. With a public...

By Jason Park on 10/22/18 0

EcoScanner: Self-tracking Sustainability

Piloting the EcoScanner: A Self-tracking Solution to Sustainability Annika Heinemeyer, Daniel Jurg, Molly Doell, Ziwen Tang Abstract Modern consumers are using apps to track all types of behavior (sleep, running, eating etc.). But while there are some...

By Annika Heinemeyer on 10/22/18 0

Empowered by Data: Streaming Platforms Becoming Media Distributors

Introduction Media streaming platforms have transformed traditional media industries and continue to do so. Netflix successfully started their own in-house production company based on insights from their...

By Sophie Wandzilak on 10/22/18 0

Red, Greyscale, Blue: Mapping Colour Intensity against Political Bias in News Media

In a world where mainstream media outlets are increasingly being bought by tech corporations, fake news sites might sway elections, and supporters of different political viewpoints rarely read sources with opinions that differ to their own, it is important...

By Sarah Dear on 10/21/18 0

Trigger Block: A plug-in making online life easier for people living with mental illness

18.5% of Americans experience mental illness in a given year (National Institute of Mental Health). With this percentage increasing throughout the years, one can wonder if the online world could bring comfort for those suffering with mental illness. To...

By Thienthai Sangkhaphanthanon on 10/20/18 0

Game of Fakes: An Entertaining Approach to Analyzing How Awareness of Fake News Affects Trust in News Media

‘Fake news’: to Donald Trump, it’s a well-loved, catch-all phrase for the mainstream news media, but to scholars and politicians, it’s a trend of great concern. Fake news, and dis-, mis-, and mal-information is becoming harder for the average...

By Emma Knight on 10/20/18 0

Bubble Trouble – Venture Out of Your Filter Bubbles

The world we live in today has been bestowed with epithets such as fake news era, post-truth world and misinformation society in the press as well as academic literature. These discussions call attention to how the news we encounter...

By Darsana Vijay on 10/19/18 0

“Hidden Cost”: Social Commerce Practices and the Collaboration between Snapchat and Amazon

In an era when S-commerce (social commerce) is dominating digital environments, social media platforms use more and more tools to achieve this combination of commercial and social activities. Like Instagram and Pinterest, now Snapchat jumped onto this trend and...

By Aikaterini Mniestri on 10/19/18 0