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

Book Review: ‘You Are Not a Gadget’ by Jaron Lanier

The preface of this book is the most pessimistic and exaggerated one of probably all times. “It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons – automatons or numb mobs composed...

By Philip Man on 09/20/10 1

Review: Eric Kluitenberg, ed. – Book of imaginary media

“Communication media are endowed with a nearly sacred capacity for qualitative transformation of human relationships. Many of the limitations of everyday life, especially the trappings of interpersonal communication, are to be alleviated by technological apparatuses that promise seamless and...

By Erik van Bemmelen on 09/20/10 1

Book review: Rethinking Curating – Art after New Media by Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook

Rethinking Curating explores the characteristics distinctive to new media art, including its immateriality and its questioning of time and space, and relates them to such contemporary art forms as video art, conceptual art, socially engaged art, and performance art....

By Jidi Guo on 09/20/10 1

Book review: Andrew Lih – The Wikipedia revolution

How have a bunch of nobodies created the world’s largest encyclopedia? In his book, The Wikipedia revolution (2009), Andrew Lih set himself the goal to answer this question. And he has done so quite successfully. He exstensively maps the...

By Lennard Torbijn on 09/20/10 Comments Off

Book Review: “Abstract Hacktivism” by Otto von Busch and Karl Palmås

Every social or cultural change in which we view the world is debatable. Everyone has his or her own opinions on how the world is perceived and which parts are important in that. That is fine, that is interesting,...

By Frank Molenaar on 09/20/10 Comments Off

Book Review: Mythologie du Portable (Laurence Allard)

In an age where the iPhone and similar devices have become staple accessories of an always connected global citizen, it is high time to track the origins of the mobile phone, its emergence as a crucial tool for economic...

By Catalina Iorga on 09/20/10 Comments Off

Book review: John Freeman, “The tyranny of e-mail” – The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to your Inbox

I ‘ve read once a story about a Japanese man who got married to the virtual girlfriend he dated in a Nintendo DS video game called Love Plus– a wedding blessed by a priest and not a virtual one....

By Ilektra Pavlaki on 09/20/10 Comments Off

Book Review – Access Controlled : the shaping of power, rights and rule in cyberspace

Access Controlled reports on the new normative terrain of internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance. The preface and foreword are clear about what the reader can expect per chapter and also...

By Elias van Hees on 09/20/10 1

Book review, Richard Coyne, “The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media” MIT Press (2010)

In his fourth book, “The Tunign of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media”, Richard Coyne provides a fundamentally different perspective for examining the new technological advancements and the way they are appropriated by humans and are integrated into...

By olga paraskevopoulou on 09/20/10 Comments Off

Review – THE DOUBLE CRISIS

Crisis threatens education millions of children // U.S. schools in ‘category 5’ budget crisis // Crisis fears on university places // Europe's Education Crisis: College Costs Soar // Students Protest Fee Hikes at California Campuses // Education in crisis...

By Laila Koubia on 09/20/10 1

Book Review: ‘The Public Domain’ – James Boyle

'The Public Domain' - Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, by James Boyle is an attempt to tell the story...

By Janice Wong on 09/20/10 1

Book Review: Network Power – David Singh Grewal

Globalization is reintroduced to society in David Singh Grewal’s “Network Power”. A volume that contains so much information, it can easily be viewed as a contemporary globalization handbook. Grewal’s perspective is fresh and bold, albeit not empirically substantiated....

By Ronen Shay on 09/20/10 1

Book review: Business Model Innovation Cultural Heritage

'Business Model Innovation Cultural Heritage' is a result as well a report of a project carried out in Netherlands in 2009 by two Dutch institutions, The DEN Foundation as well as Knowledgeland; and commisioned by the Ministry of Education,...

By Michal Kielbasa on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Blog theory by Jodi Dean reviewed

Jodi Dean is professor of political science at Hobart an William Smith Colleges. She focus on the contemporary space or possibility of politics. Dean is a blogger herself and in her book she makes some points clear by...

By Floor Broer van Dijk on 09/19/10 1

Review: Franco Berardi-Precarious Rhapsody

When Franco “Bifo” Berardi invokes McLuhan in the introduction to Precarious Rhapsody, it gives a strong indication of what to expect in the coming pages. Not necessarily regarding his arguments and theories- Berardi is more clearly aligned with the...

By Onur Yilmaz on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book Review- Imaginal Machines: Autonomy and Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life, by Stevphen Shukaitis

In the era of New Media, where the multiple identities of social movements find their best way of expression, Stevphen Shukaitis recalls the power of radical and collective imagination giving a new perspective on radical social movements nowadays. What...

By Cristina Reyna on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book review: Uncorporate Identitity

Welcome to Europe shows us a picture of a painted sun in red, yellow and black colors. This logo was created by the Spanish artist Joan Miró in 1980. This logo, or brand had as main purpose to...

By Hanneke Mertens on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book Review: “What do you mean, no internet?!”

What do you mean, no internet?! Is a collection of argumentative essays written by 28 3rd year Media Production students . In 2009 over three hundred students wrote these essays to fulfill the requirements of their Media and Society...

By Bram van der Kruk on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book review: “Proud to be Flesh” – Mute Magazine Anthology of cultural politics after the net

Proud to be Flesh is an Anthology of Mute Magazine, and consists of a big amount of articles from the magazine’s archives dating from 1994 till 2009. Tho it is an anthology, it’s not written to be a “best...

By Sander Jansma on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book Review: “Netze und Netzwerke” – by Sebastian Gießmann

In Netze und Netzwerke, Sebastian Gießmann makes a quiet daring attempt to historically map the rise of grids and networks between 1740 and 1840. He views such as not only rising technologies and methods of scientific research, but also...

By Agathe Wiedemair on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book Review: Files: Law and Media Technology – by Cornelia Vismann

In here book, Vismann writes a geneology of the media-technological conditions of files and recording devices with a view to their largest area of application, the law. Files in this geneology are defined as the medium between the authority...

By Xander Stolwijk on 09/19/10 1

Book Review: ‘The World as Flatland – Report 1: Designing Universal Knowledge’ – by Gerlinde Schuller

Designing Universal Knowledge is one of those books you often come back to, not only because of its innovative and universal content, but also because of its original structure and visual attractiveness. Gerlinde Schuller, the author of this piece,...

By Bart Brodzki on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book review: “Deep Search. The Politics of Search beyond Google”

It is hard to imagine life without search engines. Information is everywhere and we seem to need it all the time. So the importance of being able to access all information at any particular time of our choosing cannot...

By Rosanne Sliuzas on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Book Review: “Engineering Play – A Cultural History of Children’s Software” – By Mizuko Ito

Ito weaves a compelling tale of the dynamic and rapidly changing face of the children’s software industry from the pioneering days of the early 1980s to the late 1990s when she completed her case studies.

By Isobel Gorman on 09/19/10 Comments Off