New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Now on Sale: Sleep and Relaxation

Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism (Crary, 10). We seem to be living in a time that is known for sleep deprivation, and many other activities that are being linked to...

By Guido vanderMeer on 09/19/16 Comments Off

VR, too soon for journalism?

Last month, for the very first time in history, people in the United States were able to follow a presidential debate through Virtual Reality (VR). Together with NextVR, CNN offered the service to viewers and promised them an experience wherein they could get to...

By Lars Kntl on 10/30/15 Comments Off

Google’s DeepDream: Algorithms on LSD

Last July a vast variety of psychedelic strange images flooded the social media. From Edward Munch’s The Scream to Porn and landscapes, surreal hallucinatory depictions of eyes, birds and dogs were generated in every image, recreating almost a LSD...

By Konstantinos Gkotzos on 10/30/15 Comments Off

Butter as the Legal Version of Popcorn Time?

by Hans Kok The most popular video streaming service Popcorn Time stopped working on October 23. Although it’s not the first time the service is down, it might be down forever now since the threats of possible legal actions...

By Hans Kok on 10/29/15 Comments Off

Yeah, the “dislike” button is finally here – but it does not like this!

Finally a “dislike” button! Well, not really… The long-awaited Facebook “dislike” button is finally here, but presumably it looks a little bit different than you might have expected it to look like. Probably you cannot even call it...

By Leonie Herma on 10/29/15 1

The Logout Project

We might all have felt this way at some point– scrolling through endless posts and photographs of people who seem like they are living “The Life”: getting that promotion they have dreamed of, marrying the most perfect person in...

By Izumi Otsuka on 10/16/15 Comments Off

The CensorSensor – Revealing Localized Censorship through Interactive Maps: A Maptivist Approach to Corporate and Government Censorship

Almost all countries filter the Internet to varying degrees; anything from illegal downloading to child pornography and from human rights activities to government criticism. Filtering the Internet has a potential to reinforce the hegemonic power structures and to constrain...

By Pepijn Bierhuizen on 10/16/15 Comments Off

EveryArtoF It

Hutspot is a concept store in which upcoming designers share a space to present their work for a monthly fee. This store was not only the place of our first group meeting, but also triggered a discussion about the...

By Julia Wissel on 10/16/15 Comments Off

AdBlock Fair: Supporting content online, ad blocking awareness

By Ryan de Ruiter, Jennifer Swagers, Hidde van der Beek, Lara Molendijk, Frans Bootsman & Hans Kok Project idea Already in 2007 a New York Times article by Noam Cohen forecasted the “potential for extreme menace to the online-advertising...

By Hans Kok on 10/16/15 Comments Off

Post Mortem

How to Quit Facebook (or Make It Quit You) At the start of 2015, it seemed that Facebook was losing users, especially among younger people (Lang). According to an article in the Washington Post, teenagers...

By Kyra Delsing on 10/16/15 Comments Off

Is This Legal?

The Is This Legal? smartphone app. provides users with easily accessible and transparent information about legal systems they are subject to in their current, geotagged location – complicating users’ readings of foreign national identities. ITL’s concept arose from brainstorming,...

By Richa Watts on 10/15/15 Comments Off

FeelReal: The social media app where reality is more important than fakeness

Nowadays, you can’t make a friend without having them connected to you on Whatsapp, Facebook, or Instagram. The social media hype is only understandable given the fact that your connection with these new friends is taken to another social...

By Willemijn van der Holst on 10/15/15 1

Internet of things – chances and challenges

The first edition of the Internet of Things Congress took place on the 29th of September 2015 at the Mercure Hotel Amsterdam City. Approximately 200 delegates, experts and entrepreneurs gathered together to talk about the chances and challenges the...

By Alina Niemann on 10/06/15 Comments Off

Data-Dumped: Understanding Data (and Being Understanding) in the Time of Ashley Madison

Ever since the hacker group, self-dubbed the ‘Impact Team,’ published 9.7 gigabytes of information from an estimated 37 million Ashley Madison users on the dark web, the extramarital dating site has been an unavoidable topic of discussion. It seems...

By Brittany Mcgillivray on 09/17/15 Comments Off

‘Colby Does America’: A Queer Porn (R)evoloution

Colby Does America is a free, independent, anti-capitalist queer art/porn project. Pornstar and artist Colby Keller is creating unique pornographic films for every U.S. state (and some Canadian provinces). Each film involves different teams of volunteer actors, editors and...

By Richa Watts on 09/17/15 Comments Off

Mobile Ad Blocking: Publisher’s New Nightmare?

Online advertisements are a great source of income for both web publishers and advertisers. These advertisements can be found in multiple ways, such as banners, pop-ups, news feed ads (sponsored stories) and trick banners. Banners and news feed ads...

By Ryan de Ruiter on 09/16/15 Comments Off

iBeacons at SXSW: How technology adds to the festival experience

While beacons have become mainstream since the introduction of the iBeacon by Apple in 2013, there are still fields fairly undiscovered. One of these fields is integrating beacon technology at festivals and events. In march this year (2015) the...

By Sjoerd Noorhoff on 09/16/15 Comments Off

Don’t be afraid of robots – be afraid that you become one!

Our fantasies about becoming cyborgs are getting ever closer to reality. We have been creating robots and software to do work for us. And now we are on the best way to become robots ourselves. A new achievement in...

By Leonie Herma on 09/15/15 Comments Off

Women and Soccer Do Go Together – EA Sports FIFA 16

I’m no soccer fan, I actually belong to that group of people that is only into soccer during the World Cup, however as I crossed to the headline of arstechina.com “The tech that’s putting women in EA’s FIFA games...

By Ana Garza Ochoa on 09/15/15 1

Need a companion? never walk home alone at night again

The sense of personal safety, “rape culture” and privacy are some of the most hotly-discussed issues on US campuses nowadays . It was reported this year by the American Justice Department that just about over 293,000 rapes occur...

By Dean Brandt on 09/15/15 Comments Off

Do Not Track: together let’s track Big Brother

After four years of negotiations, an agreement was reached on September the 8th over data protection on the internet between the United States and the European Union. Many privacy violations scandals later (i.e.: Edward Snowden’s revelations on the NSA’s...

By Mathilde Grenod on 09/15/15 Comments Off

Computers can now paint – Reproduction of famous artists’ work

The last four hundred years have been crucial in human history as major changes were analyzed. During these years, the evolution of human kind grew exponentially with the help of increased communication and increased mastery over nature (Wiener). Our...

By Alixia Garceau on 09/15/15 Comments Off

“Buy buttons”: Is this the new shopping mecca?

If you just rewind back to the past, freeze your memory in the ‘90s and try to recall the retail websites of this era, it will be obvious how boring and indifferent purchases could be. But it was time...

By Christina Giannouli Kyrimi on 09/15/15 Comments Off

The Survival of the Shopping-Malls

Imagine a project developer, Mrs. Smith, who is developing a shopping-mall with her team. Mrs. Smith wants to attract future customers (and storeowners) by offering them a personalized and comfortable shopping experience. First of all she wants to achieve...

By Willemijn van der Holst on 09/15/15 Comments Off