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

Pirates vs. Publishing Industries: a Stalemate

Scenario #1: Pirates are vicious freeloaders, the artists are their victims and the publishing industries have the artists’ best interests at heart. Scenario #2: the publishing industries are evil, capitalist scum who only care for money, the artists are...

By Crispijn Sleeboom on 03/18/13 Comments Off

iTunes U – one billion downloads of open knowledge

One billion is a solid number. That’s the amount of downloads Apple’s iTunes U has collected as of late February 2013, as specified by their press statement. Released in 2007, just before the first iPhone, it provides free educational...

By Vicentiu Dinga on 03/12/13 Comments Off

Open Knowledge and Visual Information

Open knowledge takes root What exactly is at stake with the advent of open knowledge and widely shared information? Let’s take ourselves back just over a decade to a time in which information and especially creative information was being...

By Geoff Kim on 03/11/13 Comments Off

Apple’s textbooks – too cool for school?

.ibooks is Apple’s proprietary ebook format based on the EPUB standard, created with the free iBook Author layout software for publishing ebooks. Due to some dissimilarities between CSS tags used in the iBooks format file, it isn’t compatible with...

By Vicentiu Dinga on 03/04/13 Comments Off

Please, let’s take book out of e-book

The e-book, threat or treasure, is definitely a hot topic within the book industry . As we all know, there is still quite some room for improvement and innovation. But how to approach the e-book? That remains the central...

By Doris Zevenbergen on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Subverting the System: How to Annoy Amazon in Five Neat Little Steps

It’s a disquieting idea: everything you do on the web, on your smartphone and on your tablet is being tracked, and all that data is gathered somewhere in the void of the internet. Thankfully, most of that data is...

By Crispijn Sleeboom on 03/03/13 2

Is HTML the solution for digital reading?

As you may have noticed, we live in quite an interesting time regarding publishing. As the digital revolution evolves, new publishing forms are coming up. At this point we can not yet say which format we will be using...

By Sebastiaan Andeweg on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Digital books: The end of private reading?

Digital books are touted for their new possibilities: portability, searchability, durability and ubiquitous notes and bookmarks, to name a few. But while readers benefit from this, so do third parties. The thought of someone reading over your shoulder feels...

By Larissa Hildebrandt on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Web Aesthetics ‘book adaption’ on Facebook

By: Basri Hoogstrate, Jeroen Rademakers, Jules Mataly and Juliana Marques The Wild Card Symposium, part of our Master Degree at the University of Amsterdam gave us the occasion to read a book as a group, discuss it and came...

By Juliana Marques on 11/20/12 1

The Visual Language of New Media: the book as database

– By Katía Truijen, Eva Valkhoff, Serena Westra and Sasha Wood What happens when you transform a book into a new media object? Can you visualize a book in a new media way? And what happens to the narrative...

By Serena Westra on 11/03/12 1

[Wild Card Symposium] The Control Revolution

— Alain Otjens, Daan Smith, Richard Zimmerman and Seah Kim For the Wild Card Symposium of 2012 New Media Theories, we created the interactive timeline website, The Control Revolution. To create exposure for this hidden classic of Beniger, we also created...

By Seah Kim on 11/02/12 Comments Off

Interview with Andrew Goffey – Our Approach to Evil Media

As part of our New Media Theories Master’s symposium we chose to look at the recent MIT press publication from Media Theory scholars Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey – namely ‘Evil Media’. The expectations that we had of the...

By Isabel Theissen on 10/30/12 Comments Off

The Social Catwork

The project The Social Catwork is based on the initial concept of Facebook, where the users were asked to pick which person out of two pictures they find more attractive. Our version, however, gives the user a choice of...

By Ineke Scheffers on 10/23/12 Comments Off

Second Chance Serendipity: Missed Connections on Craigslist

“Had I said anything at the time, it would have come out as a disorganized mix of the different things going through my mind. So, opting for ‘better to be thought of a fool than to open one’s mouth...

By Maya Livio on 10/20/12 Comments Off

Breaching Experiments on Facebook

Breaching Experiments Two recent events on my Facebook newsfeed made me think of breaching experiments, and what their possible value would be within the context of research on (relatively) new online social environments. The breaching experiment is a research...

By Alain on 10/19/12 Comments Off

Ebay – The Future of Commerce. Description and comparison of the website’s redesign

The online shopping and auction website Ebay has launched a new and improved website redesign in order to expand its audience and provide the shopper with an ultimate online shopping experience. The new website was launched on October 11th...

By Paola Gulian on 10/19/12 Comments Off

What do the web search engines “think” of the Pussy Riot case?

The Pussy Riot sentence has become the unprecendented event concerning the global resonance, compared to other news from Russia in the recent years. 86% of the world mass media have covered the Pussy Riot case, media monitor NewsEffector reports....

By Daria Koreniushkina on 10/19/12 Comments Off

‘It Gets Better’ and the Power of Online Media Activism

Not everyone on this earth gets the respect or at least tolerance that they deserve. In this world discrimination is such a big problem that it seems almost unsolvable. People get discriminated against for all sorts of reasons. LGBT...

By Ineke Scheffers on 10/19/12 3

Big Think: The Importance of Yesterday

Archiving online can be a tricky undertaking. On the one hand we can’t get enough of it when it comes to news and scholarly articles or any other form of factual information but on the other hand there...

By Richard Zimerman on 10/19/12 2

Do Not Disturb – Smartphone Etiquette

We’ve all been there. That moment that you wake up, I’m sorry no – have a small panic attack, because your (social) network decides that three o’clock in the morning is the best moment for: emailing, telling you things...

By Jolien Siemerink on 10/18/12 Comments Off

Go minimalist with your social media?

Why minimalist approach steps into our online life and what is the level of its effectiveness? We all have heard about the popular minimalist approach by now. Most of us have probably seen reportage on TV, or YouTube about some new-born...

By Patrycja Szumacher on 10/18/12 2

MSDOS and floppy disks are alive and well (in Canadian curriculum)

In the short six years since I left high school, a lot has changed. Facebook and smartphones are now transforming the lives of younger generations . In light of the upcoming Media Literacy Week in Canada (November 5-9), I...

By Larissa Hildebrandt on 10/18/12 Comments Off

Facebook + Performance Society = ?

Last week, the documentary ‘Nooit Meer Slapen’ (No more Sleeping) was broadcasted on the Dutch television. The documentary stated that at 3 o’clock in the night, over 1 million Dutch citizens are wide-awake. ‘At home, night rest is becoming...

By Serena Westra on 10/17/12 Comments Off

Memeification of the News

Internet memes (specifically image memes) have taken the role of a media format for civic journalism, ever evolving and reproducing cultural/political concerns which reflect our social condition. As an amalgamated entity, memes are constantly integrating themselves within social platforms...

By Joseph Jackson on 10/17/12 Comments Off