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

The Power of Social Media: Oil, Palm Trees and the Pedobear

Who doesn’t love social media? Facebook has recently celebrated more than 1 billion active users (becoming one the biggest countries in the world), Twitter has the power to put politicians on the throne or to throw them out in...

By Alex Manole on 10/16/12 2

Postagram – Reality is Awesome!

When was the last time you’ve sent someone a postcard? And not just over the e-mail e-cards that go directly to people’s spam folders, but the good old days genuine postcards brought home by the postman. In the age...

By Alex Manole on 10/03/12 2

A New Media Advertising Solution for a Classic Brand: Mercedes-Benz Romania

There’s Mercedes-Benz and there are other cars. I’ve always been an admirer of the German super-brand, not only for its outstanding four-wheeled pieces of art, but also for having a spectacular history and the power to constantly re-invent itself....

By Alex Manole on 09/10/12 Comments Off

So you think your a journalist?*

It started off as a protest, a personal objection to the poorly made yellow journalism we all come across on a daily basis. Being called a “grammar nazi” so many times before certainly has its perks. At first, you’re...

By Vicentiu Dinga on 09/10/12 Comments Off

Molecule F – A Story of Online Success in Romanian Fashion

“If you would concentrate the entire Romanian fashion inside a capsule, you would have as a result Molecule F, a small, but refined part of the Romanian design“ (www.molecule-f.com). This quote defines best what Molecule F, the first online...

By Diana Necula on 09/09/12 1

Getting real

“We have lived through more than half a century of being constantly told that the future of food was artificial, the future of books, newspapers, medicine and school was virtual. And that we would soon deal entirely with computerized teachers...

By Patrycja Szumacher on 09/08/12 Comments Off

Towards openness – A study about open design and its translation from theory into practice

For anyone interested in design, open source and open design, my recently finished (june 2012) MA Thesis is available for download here. Below is the thesis’ abstract: Following the course of web 2.0, user-generated content and open source software; design...

By Juliana Paiva on 07/12/12 72

Thou Speakest the Purest Nonsense! – On Politeness and New Media

Even though most of our parents have taught us the basic rules of how to be a civil and polite person, we seem to apply these rules in a completely random way. No one has ever told us to...

By Roos van Tongerloo on 10/25/11 Comments Off

SNS research proposal; Flickr

Now that the use of social networking sites has become pervasive in our daily lives, the deluge of images floating around in the cloud is growing larger then ever. The Internet has moved from a mostly text-based medium to...

By Martijn Dorresteijn on 10/06/11 Comments Off

How do YouTube personalities change in response to fame

One social media website that has more or less gone under the radar since the 2008 Facebook boom is the now-classic YouTube. While social media research has recently focused its efforts predominantly on Facebook and Twitter, where personal identities...

By Laura Burlacu on 10/05/11 Comments Off

Let’s talk iPhone? App-so-lutely!

The iPhone 4S In the advent of the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event, people were already looking for tutorials in order to sync and back up all of the various apps they have gathered from the moment they “went apple,”...

By Jeroen Rijskamp on 10/05/11 Comments Off

Cyber Recruiting: The US Army on Social Media

In my first post I shared my primary interest: Governments & New Media. For this particular research, I propose to look into a very specific part of government’s new media use: recruiting for the military. As most Western countries...

By Floris Spronk on 10/05/11 Comments Off

Thoughts about the unveiling of Iphone 4S

Today was the official release of Iphone 5. Oops, IPhone 4S I mean. I followed through the NY Times and The Guardian‘s live blogs and Twitter. While I was overwhelmed with an incredible amount of data, #letstalkiphone quickly become...

By Juliana Paiva on 10/04/11 1

Challenging Time: Google Plus and Facebook Timeline

‘The most fun thing about going out is when you run into friends unexpectedly. With Hangouts, this sort of meeting becomes possible on the internet for the first time. Let your friends know you’re available and find out who...

By Stijnie Thuijs on 10/04/11 Comments Off

Social media “recruitment 2.0”: questions

According to McLuhan’s ‘medium in the message’ concept, the medium influences how the message is perceived. Besides of light bulbs, this idea functions also in social media that happen to extend relations between not only people, but companies and...

By Natalia Miszczak on 10/04/11 Comments Off

The Future of Social Networking Sites

First of all, let me warn you that this week's blog post is a bit more personal than my previous entries. Furthermore, I also fall victim to relating everything I write about social networking sites to Facebook, Twitter and...

By Jorrit Schaap on 10/04/11 1

Social Network Abstinence

In this postmodern age, McLuhan‘s thoughts about medium as an extension of ourselves seems more and more accurate. However, if the medium is us and we are the medium, how we can detach from it? Nowadays, social media is one...

By Juliana Paiva on 10/04/11 2

How to do comparative media analysis on the web: Start small.

I’ve always thought that in order to understand a network, like the web, better, we should be able to understand as much of the objects and actors that the network itself is made of, as possible. Whilst finishing my...

By Demet Dagdelen on 10/03/11 Comments Off

Research proposal: Is it easier to obtain a job when you are googable.  

Googable: 1. The ability of an item to be found using a google search. 2. Also indicative of popularity. Alternative spelling: googlable Social networks have evolved and developed at fast pace in the last decade. They have not always...

By Clément Adam on 10/02/11 Comments Off

Relationships 2.0: Social media – taking the distance out of long distance relationships

Social media has drastically changed the way we go about our daily business – this has been firmly established by now. Media scholars are exploiting (in a good way) all the possibilities and data the exciting platforms provide for...

By Ave Tampere on 10/02/11 Comments Off

The revolutionary potential of Wikipedia’s equipotential paradigm.

This is part of the final paper I submitted for the course “Culture of Spectacle” As shown in the previous post, the “anyone can edit” philosophy of Wikipedia is often viewed with great skepticism in academic circles, while its...

By Ilektra Pavlaki on 06/19/11 Comments Off

The human race towards immortality or stupidity.

The idea of immortality plays a significant role in the human life. Within every generation, and within every culture this is an issue. The Chinese incorporate this with Ba Xian, the eight immortals. Within he Indian Mythology there is...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 10/21/10 1

Fashion is on the street: Fashion bloggers seated front row

Something has changed in the fashion industry. Since 2002 blogging about fashion started and has become more and more popular. In 2003 fashion blogger Kathryn Finney of the Budget Fashionista was invited to the New York Fashion Week....

By Hanneke Mertens on 10/17/10 12

Twitter: how it supports a fast spread of news

Last summer we had the Carglass-Twitter-incident in the Netherlands, which was caused by three Twitter-users. Two of them posted some negative tweets about the Dutch company Carglass and used the #carglasszuigt, next to that the third user created a...

By Hanneke Mertens on 10/15/10 Comments Off