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

Feminist Movements in the Age of Social Media: Crossing the Thin Line Between Authentic and Performative Activism

By Irem Ergul, Emma Fuchsová, Alexandra Hagedorn 1. Introduction Activism is conventionally seen as a form of public protest, that is a rally, public meeting or a march (Anderson and Herr 20). In this day and age, however, activism...

By Alexandra Hagedorn on 10/21/20 Comments Off

Video Games as Infrastructures of Resistance

This blog post covers a heavily understudied area of digital activism: online video games. With people in self-isolation and trapped in their houses for over half a year now, it is crucial that we recognize the creative ways people...

By Frederikke Christiansen on 10/19/20 Comments Off

Extend the Flawless Beauty: Facetune Video Further Goes against Beauty Activism

With TikTok becoming increasingly popular in people’s daily life, such global prevalence of applications that focus on instant short video feeds indicates that people’s quest for a flawless face and a well-proportioned body shape no longer stops at still...

By on 09/28/20 Comments Off

Online Activism meets Digital Gaming: Protesters are now taking to the virtual streets

Online activism has allowed for many positive changes to occur within socio-political sectors via social media campaigns and online petitions; now, digital gamers have taken an interest in activism. The innovative form of online protesting has caused quite a...

By Frederikke Christiansen on 09/27/20 Comments Off

The Music Industry’s Latest Anti Capital-ist Movement: A New Form of Communicating Vulnerability and Authenticity

Minimalist typography has been an ongoing trend in online communities for many years, however, as shown by the recent incline in female artists releasing all-lowercase song titles, it has also been adopted into the music industry. The reasons for...

By Alejandra O'Connor on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Smoke Signals: A technical and ideological response to U.S. surveillance in 2020

Americans have a lot to say in 2020, and protests are the chosen platform of the year. With race-fueled police brutality reaching peak heights, people are occupying space physically and vocally to say their piece in the Black Lives...

By Gerry LaBarbera 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

Have You Gone Green? INFRAWARE as a Digital Intervention for Environmental Awareness

INFRAWARE (composed of the words infrastructure, awareness and hard/software) is a browser plug-in that displays how your personal use of technology is deeply entangled with the planet’s resources and the environmental crisis we are currently experiencing. Go green. Paperless...

By on 10/23/19 Comments Off

Free Trial Surfing or how to reshape affordances through institutional legitimization

DoNotPay is a company that announced a new app called ‘Free Trial Surfing’ which generates fake credit card details that users can use to sign up for free trials of (web) services without risking having to pay after the...

By Dimitri Koehorst on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Digital resistance: A brief introduction to decentralized data-right movements

This post provides a brief introduction to collective organization as a form of resistance, whose ambition is overcoming technological determinism and creating new paths to re-define our relationship with “new” technologies, connecting the labor and knowledge of so many...

By Marta Espuny on 09/22/19 Comments Off

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 Comments Off

“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 Comments Off

How Can Art Be Subversive in a Platform System? The Case of Benjamin Grosser

What would happen if one morning, a morning like many others, after you got up, you discovered that your Facebook home page is completely empty, without any type of content? I’m not talking about a crash or...

By Tommaso Campagna on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Supporting Female Empowerment through Dating App Bumble

ABSTRACT – For all the single Juliets who are looking for a Romeo or for another Juliet, look no further. After dating apps like Tinder and Happn now a relatively new dating app has emerged: Bumble. Why Juliets...

By Savannah Fernandez Cejas on 09/23/18 Comments Off

Make-Up Metrics: The Downfall of the Beauty Community on Youtube?

Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has been host to an ever-expanding community of people looking to showcase their artistic and creative ideas on the platform. With over a billion hours of videos watched every day and with tools available...

By Erika Grimes on 09/23/18 Comments Off

Blockchain- next step to ensure internet voting’s credibility?

Tsukuba -a Japanese city- is testing a blockchain based voting system to encourage citizens to vote on different municipal projects (O’Brian). It is a welcome move, a move that at first sight allows for a smoother and more secure...

By Hanna Jemmer on 09/23/18 Comments Off

Plastic never goes away – Can apps contribute to avoid plastic pollution?

Video: Plastic Pollution Coalition – OPEN YOUR EYES The Plastic Age There is more plastic in the sea, than stars in the galaxy. Each year, 13 million tonnes of plastic end up in the oceans, and by 2050,...

By Clara Bläser on 09/23/18 Comments Off

World Wide Web Consortium and Digital Rights Management: Innovating Stagnation

The history of “Digital Rights Management” software while relatively new, has been quite controversial. Oftentimes advocates of online privacy and security argue about the possibilities of abuse stemming from such DRM technologies, along with activists and proponents of the...

By Nikiforos Pingouras on 09/24/17 Comments Off

From Leiden to Livoberezhna:  How Memes of a Dutch Statue are Supporting Digital Activism in Ukraine

Introduction: Meeting the Awaiter As the old adage goes: “love makes you do strange things.” On August 18, love compelled me to cycle for over two hours in the sweltering and sweaty summer heat, from Amsterdam to Leiden University....

By Hayden Lutek on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Goalpost in the Ozone: The Deceptively Good Intentions of #Climate

As far as scientific consensus goes, it’s tempting to label the ‘debate’ around climate change as being over. However, to do so invites complacency, a willingness to delegate responsibility to a far-off unknown authority. News organisations, politicians and activists...

By David Molloy on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Terahertz Femtophotography: Bringing you the ancient world’s latest news

Earlier this week, reports started trickling through the web about a camera developed by the Camera Culture Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sure, a camera coming out of a MIT lab sounds interesting, but how can it...

By Harry Sullivan on 09/22/16 Comments Off

Share a Dream: A new way to connect people ?

Today more than ever, we are constantly connected and reachable. It has never been so easy to communicate with people around the globe. We can also observe new kinds of social relationships due to technology. In fact, connections between...

By Arnaud Muller on 09/21/16 1

Squarespace and Interfacification: How Much Does Knowing How to Code Matter Anymore?

In an age of intuitive design and slick interfaces, users nowadays are rarely challenged to question or understand the mechanics underlying digital media. In the early days of computing, one would need basic technical computing skills in order to...

By Sal Hagen on 09/21/16 Comments Off

Activism via social media is only a digital graffiti?

Recently it has become an online trend to be socially active and involved in public issues. This kind of activism is thriving: like if you care. Immediately there are hundreds/thousands/million likes and comments under a post that suggests supporting...

By Lina Ku_inskaite on 09/20/16 Comments Off