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

Book Review: Mathieu O’Neil’s Cyber Cheifs

In 2004, after researching the allometric growth of antlers between extinct and extant deer, trapped deep within the dungeons of my university’s vertebrate collections, I whizzed over to the Wikipedia entry on the Irish Elk, sure I could add my two...

By Allison Guy on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Anomalous Assemblages: A Review of The Spam Book

The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture, edited by Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, uses a relatively unique approach to add to the discourse surrounding critical understanding of the...

By John Haltiwanger on 09/17/09 1

BOOK REVIEW ‘say everything’ by Scott Rosenberg

Rosenberg, a former newspaper journalist and co-founder of Salon.com, gave himself the difficult task of recounting the history of blogging and – as the subtitle indicates – providing an idea of what’s to come and ‘why it matters.’

By Kimberley Spreeuwenberg on 09/17/09 1

Book Review of Political Campaigning on the Web

The brand new (31th of August 2009 according to Amazon) book “Political Campaigning on the Web” is a bundle of essays around the relatively new field of political campaigning in new media in its broadest sense. The book contains...

By Han Rusman on 09/17/09 Comments Off

A Review of: Mapping E-Culture, Navigating E-Culture, Walled Garden

Mapping E-Culture, Navigating E-Culture, and Walled Garden, the three books coming along in a box, picture the general look of the electronic scenery we are in through the decade. Besides interviews to several key influencers, research essays and some...

By Sisi Yu on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Book Review ‘What You See Is What You Feel’ by Koert van Mensvoort

In our age of computer mediated images the distinction between reality and the virtual seems to be more blurred than ever. The white beach with palm trees, coconuts and turquoise ocean is no longer that white beach, it has...

By Harro Heijboer on 09/16/09 1

Book review of Media Work

All optimism associated with studying to work in the media industry dies by the time a student tries to actually find a job after graduation. Working within media industries is often much more uncertain and much more complicated then...

By Rakesh Kanhai on 09/16/09 Comments Off

Book Review: ‘Free’ by Chris Anderson

When Chris Anderson wrote 'The Long Tail' it radically changed the way new media professionals look at the supply and demand chain on the internet. Especially for those of us with a background in marketing, Anderson's book contained compelling...

By Joery Bruijntjes on 09/16/09 1

Review of Expanded ORIGINAL. Cornelia Sollfrank

A smart artist makes the machine do the work. Cornelia Sollfrank German artist Cornelia Sollfrank’s career has been linked to hacking, conceptual art, cyberfeminism and net.art. Since the nineties, she examines the digital cultural techniques of copying and the...

By Susana Zaragoza on 09/16/09 Comments Off

Review of Re-Inventing Radio – Aspects of Radio as Art

The conference '100 years of radio' in 2006 which was an collaboration between the Ludwig Botzmann Institute Media.Art.Research, Linz, Austria and Kunstradio became a key point of departure for the realization of the book where media theory, art history...

By Charlotte van Brakel on 09/15/09 Comments Off

Review of Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology

Les Immatériaux is the name of the exposition the well-known theorist Jean-François Lyotard held in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in 1985. At the exhibition, a digital interactive catalog, written by several writers, was shown. This experimental encounter with...

By Desiree de Jong on 09/15/09 Comments Off

Book review:’Tracking back communities’ by Annalisa Pelizza

In her Phd thesis “Tracking back communities”, Annalisa Pelizza reconsiders the notion of online communities. It is impossible to give a comprehensive outline of this extensive thesis in such a brief review and I will try to tackle some...

By Radmila Radojevic on 09/15/09 Comments Off

Book Report: Virtualpolitik by Elizabeth Losh

Elizabeth Losh is the Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at U.C. Irvine where she teaches courses on digital rhetoric and public communication. Her research specialty is digital rhetoric and the discourses of information culture, especially the...

By Jan Bajec on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Book Report of ‘Ourspace – Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture’ by Christine Harold

This book really hit an personal snare with me, because I have been trying to avoid most commercial expressions by any medium for years now. I really regard it as an invasion of my privacy – I didn’t ask...

By Sander Leegwater on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Chasing Away Ghosts: a Review of Brian Rotman’s Becoming Beside Ourselves

Q: “In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. New Land is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears there?” A: “I don’t know; I’ve seen a...

By Morgan Currie on 09/14/09 1

The Multilingual Internet, or Where the Green Ants Dream

In one of the last scenes of Werner Herzog‘s Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) an Aborigine stands up in a court room to speak up against some mineral excavations happening in a sacred tribal ground. The judge asks...

By Nicola Bozzi on 09/14/09 Comments Off

A Review of: Taken Out of Context

She’s being called the rockstar of social network sites and has done some extensive research on the subject. The American academic Danah Boyd has now completed her PhD dissertation, “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics”,...

By Jelle Kamsma on 09/14/09 1

Book review of The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader

Art comes in a lot of different divisions. Mostly related to a culture, often a critique of an era. The fact that this reader focuses on culture is immediately noticeable from the title. Carrying “Aotearoa” in the title, which...

By Thomas Fonville on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Book review of: Animal Spirits

In Animal Spirits, Matteo Pasquinelli takes on a burdensome task of elaborating on modern digital culture (or capitalism) from the viewpoint of complicated philisophical sociology. This goes alongside John Keynes’ definition of the animal spirits as a dynamic endogenious...

By Sjoerd Tuinema on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Review of: When Code Meets Place: Collaboration and Innovation at WiFi Hotspots

Someone wakes up from a night’s sleep. After having breakfast he or she kisses the kids goodbye and takes the long stairs down to the street. The Coffee Company is only a two minute walk, so a freshly made...

By Albert Cornelissen on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Book review of: Online a lot of the time

A slightly contradictory book title due to medium in which it was written and the issues it addresses, but a rich volume in theory and striking examples about the virtual phenomena of avatars, webcam personas, rituals, fetish and signs....

By Denise Pires on 09/13/09 Comments Off

Review of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright – Lucas Hilderbrand

In his latest book: Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape (2009) Lucas Hilderbrand explores the analog past of video nostalgically, and shows its importance and relevance to (new) media studies. Hilderbrand mainly focuses on the aesthetic, cultural and legal...

By Marc Stumpel on 09/13/09 Comments Off

Book Review of: (In)visible – Learning to Act in the Metaverse

In his book: (In)visible: Learning to Act in the Metaverse, the author, Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, deals with the challenges and difficulties of the global data culture. By exploring the constituents of today’s network culture, he tries to map out new...

By Niels de Hoog on 09/13/09 Comments Off

Review of “The Blogging Revolution” by Antony Loewenstein

This book, named “The Blogging Revolution” is written by Antony Loewenstein, an Jewish-Australian free-lance journalist, author and blogger. During the year of 2007, he travelled to Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and China for interviewing bloggers in order...

By Siying Yang on 09/13/09 1