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

Review, ‘Internet Governance Forum (IGF), The First Two Years’, Edited by Avri Doria and Wolfgang Kleinwächter in cooperation with IGF Secretariat

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue. It is a direct outcome of the World Summit on the Internet Society (WSIS). Its purpose is to facilitate open and inclusive dialogue about the World Wide...

By Marte Lindstrom on 09/18/10 Comments Off

‘A Collection of Many Problems’ by Garnet Hertz – A Review

Alternative post title: The Good, the Bad & the Downright Crazy. Mail-by-rocket, cat pianos, astrolabes, Inca quipu knots and musical fingers. Seems like a fairly random collection of things, doesn’t it? They do have one thing in common, though. They’re...

By Laurent Hubeek on 09/18/10 Comments Off

Who do you think you are?

Review: Karin Spaink, Wie is U? Ever had a Déjà vu, the feeling that you have experienced something before? It’s a strange feeling. You can’t exactly explain what it is and where it comes from, but it’s there. You...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 09/15/10 Comments Off

Connectivity, Interactivity, and Extreme Personalization – Zero to Infinity: Behind the Scenes of New Media at IBC 2010

Technology is advancing FAST and it’s only getting bigger, better and faster. Information that was once readable for the few became reachable for the masses, and the reachable has now became searchable for the whole world. As we’re all aware,...

By Ekaterina Yudin on 09/13/10 1

A video game’s tale

The video game industry has come a long way lately; what with the recent example of Sony Playstation celebrating 15 years and announcing the debut of their new smart multimedia console. A device that is clearly competitive to Nintendo Wii,...

By Ourania on 09/12/10 Comments Off

Blogging and IKEA

Knowing I have the opportunity to express my feelings in a blog, makes me feel content. Yes, this may seem as the perfect outlet for my thoughts. They only need some organization. Normally I would buy boxes, at the...

By Mareline Heijman on 09/12/10 Comments Off

Television Viewership and IP Video: Adopting a New Business Model

“From 2007 – 2009, I coordinated website content and online initiatives for a community television station. In this time I was able to experience first hand the fear traditional television stations have of losing viewership to the Internet.” The...

By Ronen Shay on 09/12/10 Comments Off

Google-izing the television

For a couple of years now scientists and new media enthusiasts have been talking about the merging of television and personal computers. Nowadays there are a couple of examples through which this merging takes place and last week almighty...

By Bob Nefkens on 09/11/10 6

McLuhan in Annie Hall

In light of this weeks readings, here’s a clip of McLuhan’s short cameo in Annie Hall. Whenever his writing might seem to be a bit too…self-indulgent, it’s good to remember the man had a sense of humor.

By Onur Yilmaz on 09/11/10 Comments Off

No school like the old school

Schools are complicated places, they not only mirror society’s obstacles and challenges but also represent our collective hopes for youth, education and knowledge. Teaching is to an extend an individual enterprise in that many teachers adopt a style of...

By Bram van der Kruk on 09/08/10 2

New Media Shaping of Perception and the New Space of the Body

The past few months I have been working on my master thesis. The aim of this thesis was to research human perception of space and of time, as well as of the body, and how digital new media have...

By Marta Colpani on 09/05/10 Comments Off

Master of Media spin-off selected for EU blogging competition TH!NK3

www.ICT4Accountability.wordpress.com , one of the blogs started by a former New Media student of the UvA, is officially selected to compete in the internationally renowned blogging competition’ TH!NK3’. This blogging competition, set up by the European Journalism Centre, will...

By Wouter Dijkstra on 03/17/10 1

A story about YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community

<p style=”text-align: justify;”>“From You to Tube: YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community” is a short video created by Lasse Timmermann and me for the Digital Methods Seminar. It follows the conceptual and methodological framework of “distilling the ‘textual grammar’...

By Simeona Petkova on 11/20/09 1

BEACON and the use of datasets in media art

When I attended at the ‘Accelerated Living’ conference as a part of the Impakt Festival (Utrecht), it once more appeared there’s plenty of academic prospect on the subjects of time and space. As the works often build on theory...

By Sjoerd Tuinema on 11/01/09 Comments Off

Git Virtue?: Github and Commons-based Peer Production

Github, online beginning in 2008, has quickly changed the face of source code hosting. Called “social coding” by participants and commentators alike, the site has propelled the adoption of distributed version control systems (DVCS) in general, and git in...

By John Haltiwanger on 11/01/09 6

Snapping Profile Snaps

Recently, checking my RSS reader I came across this: Profile Snaps. TechCrunch was serious about it: Recently launched Profile Snaps allows for additional context for content on news websites and blogs, by providing in-text profiles that gives the reader...

By Simeona Petkova on 10/31/09 Comments Off

A Wiki Noob

Posting a new entry on Wikipedia is not very difficult, but keeping it online is an impossible mission. These were the first lines of this post when I started writing it a couple of weeks ago. By now I...

By Kimberley Spreeuwenberg on 10/30/09 1

New Media Protocols and the Artist (Rasing his Voice?)

In my research paper – which I will be writing the next two months, I want to deepen the discussion around new media art and its relation to political and social engagement. While net.art has always taken a very...

By Marta Colpani on 10/24/09 Comments Off

Wikipedia = Local-Narrative

Jean-François Lyotard, a French philosopher and postmodern theorist, talks about “meta-narratives” and “local-narratives”. According to him, a meta-narrative is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. Briefly, in concept of...

By Siying Yang on 10/22/09 1

Changing Turn in Copyright Debate: Cultural Industry is to Move

Many theorist have already expressed their concern with the current copyright system; Simon Frith (1987), Lawrence Lessig (2002), Yochai Benkler (2005), Hal R. Varian (2005), Chris Anderson (2009) and many others. A lot of their arguments are based on...

By Harro Heijboer on 10/21/09 2

The Anti-Googlization: How Alternative Search Engines Find Their Way on the Web

On the website googlizationofeverything.com, theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan states that the current web is dominated in several ways by search engine Google. Google related sites and ‘Googleware’ like Google Books and Google Earth and the video channel YouTube. In a...

By Desiree de Jong on 10/21/09 2

Empire forces in contemporary videogames, hyperbole or justified concern?

In a discussion between the Paris-based culture theorist Paul Virilio and Jérôme Sans titled ‘The game of love and chance’, Virilio questions what kind of form virtuality has currently taken on nowadays: The imminent home installation of domestic simulators...

By Sjoerd Tuinema on 10/19/09 2

WAR GAMES

In the movie War Games (1983) Matthew Broderick wanted to hack a new computer game, in the process he accidently hacked the actual American defensive system. He engaged in global thermonuclear war in the process. While he’s playing a game the...

By Rakesh Kanhai on 10/18/09 Comments Off

Cell Phone Apps and Scaling the Local

Cell phones applications for development might be what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls countergeographies – they piggy back on mainstream infrastructure produced by a global corporate economy, but for their own aims, including political struggles (or crime). It helps to...

By Morgan Currie on 10/17/09 Comments Off