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

Review: “Organized Networks”

In ‘organized networks”, Australian media theorist Ned Rossiter states the urgency for new institutional forms, while ‘the uncertainties of labour and life within network societies and informational economies have all too clearly exposed the limits of prevailing institutional systems...

By Tjerk Timan on 09/16/07 1

Review: From Counterculture to Cyberculture

What follows is a summary and review of Fred Turner’s book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Nerd Politics? A recent Ask Slashdot piece appeared...

By Michael Stevenson on 09/15/07 1

Interactivity is Affectivity

(cross posted on whateverbutton.com/blog) Over the summer I wrote an essay called ‘Interactivity is Affectivity’ for the tutorial ‘Current themes in new media’. You may like to read the following teaser, or even click pdf for the pdf.

By Michael Stevenson on 09/09/07 2

Essay: The Perceived Freshness Fetish

Why do I feel a need to blog daily? There seems to be some kind of consensus or norm in the blogosphere that blogs should be updated daily. Several blogs about blogging recommend posting daily and blog search engine...

By Anne Helmond on 06/22/07 1

Interactivity, Government and Affect

Partly in response to that stumper from a while back, ‘What’s a blog?’, this is another: What is interactivity? I’ll start with the top result from a “define: interactivity” google query: If your Web site is not interactive, it’s...

By Michael Stevenson on 06/16/07 8

A member survey on location-based social networks

I herewith include the essay I wrote for New Media Theories, which is about location-based social networking websites. I did a small member survey by interviewing members of sites like Dodgeball, Plazes and Meetro. The many responses I received were...

By Eva Kol on 01/26/07 Comments Off

delicious tags for our NM theories assignment

So I take it everyone has started researching their paper for new media theories? I’ve decided to tag all the useful papers and articles i find with nmtheories, while tagging related artwork or projects with locativeprojects. Anyone up to...

By Michael Stevenson on 10/29/06 1

Audio Book Review

Masters of Media presents another audio book review: Indonesian Transitions. Editor: Henk Schulte Nordholt. June 2006 The book review focuses on an essay by Bart Barendregt: Mobile modernities in contemporary Indonesia; Stories from the other side of the digital...

By Roman Tol on 10/22/06 7

Plato’s Republic: The decline of the state and the history of the World Wide Web

While reading through Plato’s conversation with Socrates in his classic writings of the Republic, I noticed an almost utopian allegory in Book VIII in which they discuss the decline of the state. The decline discussed by the ancient Greek...

By Twan Eikelenboom on 10/18/06 2

Dualism, Objectification and Gazing: A Philosophical View on Why Pro-Ana Blogs are so Succesful

Why are there so many pro-ana blogs? What makes them so attractive to people who suffer from anorexia nervosa? I would like to make clear that this post is not going to answer these big questions, but I will...

By Jeff van Schie on 10/18/06 3

We Are Iran

It all started in 2001 when Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian journalist living in Canada, published a how-to-blog guide in Farsi (Persian). By doing this he started what can be considered as one of the most thriving sub-cultures in the...

By Jeff van Schie on 10/16/06 Comments Off

Walter Benjamin and journalism in the age of electronic reproduction

Structurally, the printed press is a medium that operates as a monologue, isolating producer and the reader. Feedback and interaction are extremely limited, demand elaborate procedures, and only in the rarest cases lead to corrections. Once an edition has...

By Roman Tol on 10/16/06 1

‘Imagined Community’ applied to weblogs

One of my favourite philosophical themes is the the notion of nation, and how nations are created. Some argue they have been around forever, but currently the academic consensus rests on the idea that the concept of nation, or...

By Pepijn Uitterhoeve on 10/15/06 31

Surveillance – From Jeremy Bentham to Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze to blogs

On the left you can see the prison that philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed in the 19th century. In this design the prison cells are being build in a circle around a centre in which the guard resides. The guard...

By Heleen on 10/15/06 3

Generation here: 3G mobile phone technology

My presentation is on the Motorola-sponsored research “Generation here: exploring the impact of 3G mobile phone technology on global communications”. It talks about the key developments in the field of mobile phone technology of the third generation. Between 2004-2006 a...

By Eva Kol on 10/12/06 1

Presentation: Guy Debord – Theory of the Dérive

In my presentation about Guy Debord’s article Theory of the Dérive I would like to argue that the current trend of Urban Exploring is based on the dérive, but that it differs from it on the following levels: The...

By Anne Helmond on 10/11/06 Comments Off

What is social media? An e-book from Spannerworks

This e-book contains 32 pages and can be found here. Spannerworks is a company in the UK that provides search engine optimisation, and paid search and social media optimisation. Therefore this company has written a short e-book to explain...

By Heleen on 10/10/06 2

Writely frustrations… and ideas

In the Masters of Media class we’ve been trying out Writely.com for a couple of assignments in the past weeks. Not so long ago the online word processor was acquired by Google. The idea is very promising: “Share documents...

By Twan Eikelenboom on 10/10/06 14

A review of “Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production” (2005) written by Axel Bruns

“Gatewatching” is a fairly expanded study on collaborative publishing of online news. Bruns describes the practice of journalistic gatekeeping which refers to a regime of control over what content is allowed to emerge from production processes in the media....

By Eva Kol on 10/10/06 Comments Off