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

Plan (Your) Obsolescence – Archive (as) Art

This article is a co-creation by Autumn Hand, Juliana Paiva, Kendall Grady and Mario Gesteira. Archive (An Informal Introduction) Let’s blow the dust and grime off the archive. Let’s get to the art of this matter too. Whether archive...

By Juliana Paiva on 03/13/12 2

Avaaz.org: Click for Change

These are harsh times. There’s an economical crisis and a climate crisis. There’s drought in the Horn of Africa and flooding in Thailand, chaos in Libya and war in Afghanistan, protests on Wall Street and censorship in China. If...

By Floris Spronk on 10/31/11 1

The Limitations of Protocol

Internet is often praised for allowing people to speak up and publish freely, rather than opinions are suppressed by higher powers. On the one hand, everyone has the ability to start a blog and publish whatever they like. On...

By Erik van Mastrigt on 10/31/11 Comments Off

Thou Speakest the Purest Nonsense! – On Politeness and New Media

Even though most of our parents have taught us the basic rules of how to be a civil and polite person, we seem to apply these rules in a completely random way. No one has ever told us to...

By Roos van Tongerloo on 10/25/11 Comments Off

Hey Jimmy Wales, Nobody Cares About your Life in the Spanish Wikipedia

What happens when you knock on the ‘door’ of the Wikipedia founder? Apparently nothing, if you are Spanish language speaker. Compelled to create an article for ‘the mother of all wikis’, I assumed that writing about some hobby or...

By Jacobo Corujeira on 10/25/11 1

App Review: Google Goggles

I have to admit that I do not own the app I'm about to review. In fact, I have never used it. But I want to discuss this app here because I feel that in the long run it...

By Jorrit Schaap on 10/10/11 2

Facebook, towards ubiquitous computing?

Last week an opinion piece by sociologist Ben Caudron was published in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. In it, Caudron expressed his views on the latest announcements by Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg at F8. The most interesting new changes...

By Bree Tahapary on 10/10/11 Comments Off

Mobile Application Review: Grindr. It’s a guy thing.

Since Facebook has gained such worldwide success, it was long overdue for gay people to have their own social network. Joel Simkhai made their wish come true and created Grindr. I have to admit, I first found out about...

By Luana Pascu on 10/09/11 2

SNS research proposal; Flickr

Now that the use of social networking sites has become pervasive in our daily lives, the deluge of images floating around in the cloud is growing larger then ever. The Internet has moved from a mostly text-based medium to...

By Martijn Dorresteijn on 10/06/11 Comments Off

The Public Sphere, New Media and Politics

According to Metareporter, a student blog for BA-student Media en Culture about new media in newspapers, a lot of articles in Dutch traditional media are about new media subjects. The top 3 tags that are being used are: Twitter,...

By Daan Fliervoet on 10/06/11 3

Your Baby Will Google You

Whether by design or by default, the current generation whose lives are playing out in social networks, in the blogosphere and throughout the Internet are leaving traces of their lives online. Controversy was anticipated as guardians and future employers...

By Autumn Hand on 10/06/11 Comments Off

How do YouTube personalities change in response to fame

One social media website that has more or less gone under the radar since the 2008 Facebook boom is the now-classic YouTube. While social media research has recently focused its efforts predominantly on Facebook and Twitter, where personal identities...

By Laura Burlacu on 10/05/11 Comments Off

Let’s talk iPhone? App-so-lutely!

The iPhone 4S In the advent of the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event, people were already looking for tutorials in order to sync and back up all of the various apps they have gathered from the moment they “went apple,”...

By Jeroen Rijskamp on 10/05/11 Comments Off

Downvoting god – atheist discourse and anonymity on social recommendation platforms

Introduction We are all witnessing, in the last few years, a new wave of secular thought permeating different spheres of society. As the mediatic discussion of religious fundamentalism is on the rise, its dialectic opposite also gains momentum, as...

By Daniel Luiz dos Santos on 10/05/11 Comments Off

Cyber Recruiting: The US Army on Social Media

In my first post I shared my primary interest: Governments & New Media. For this particular research, I propose to look into a very specific part of government’s new media use: recruiting for the military. As most Western countries...

By Floris Spronk on 10/05/11 Comments Off

Thoughts about the unveiling of Iphone 4S

Today was the official release of Iphone 5. Oops, IPhone 4S I mean. I followed through the NY Times and The Guardian‘s live blogs and Twitter. While I was overwhelmed with an incredible amount of data, #letstalkiphone quickly become...

By Juliana Paiva on 10/04/11 1

Challenging Time: Google Plus and Facebook Timeline

‘The most fun thing about going out is when you run into friends unexpectedly. With Hangouts, this sort of meeting becomes possible on the internet for the first time. Let your friends know you’re available and find out who...

By Stijnie Thuijs on 10/04/11 Comments Off

Social media “recruitment 2.0”: questions

According to McLuhan’s ‘medium in the message’ concept, the medium influences how the message is perceived. Besides of light bulbs, this idea functions also in social media that happen to extend relations between not only people, but companies and...

By Natalia Miszczak on 10/04/11 Comments Off

The Future of Social Networking Sites

First of all, let me warn you that this week's blog post is a bit more personal than my previous entries. Furthermore, I also fall victim to relating everything I write about social networking sites to Facebook, Twitter and...

By Jorrit Schaap on 10/04/11 1

Social Network Abstinence

In this postmodern age, McLuhan‘s thoughts about medium as an extension of ourselves seems more and more accurate. However, if the medium is us and we are the medium, how we can detach from it? Nowadays, social media is one...

By Juliana Paiva on 10/04/11 2

How to do comparative media analysis on the web: Start small.

I’ve always thought that in order to understand a network, like the web, better, we should be able to understand as much of the objects and actors that the network itself is made of, as possible. Whilst finishing my...

By Demet Dagdelen on 10/03/11 Comments Off

Right man for the job: how LinkedIn is changing the way employees are recruited.

In today’s highly competitive market companies are increasingly turning to look at how to best attract one of their most valuable resources: people (Wilson and Sayers, 1997). Facing the troubles concerned with the phenomenon of ‘jobhopping’, the tendency of...

By Leander Roet on 10/03/11 4

Research proposal: Is it easier to obtain a job when you are googable.  

Googable: 1. The ability of an item to be found using a google search. 2. Also indicative of popularity. Alternative spelling: googlable Social networks have evolved and developed at fast pace in the last decade. They have not always...

By Clément Adam on 10/02/11 Comments Off

How Do Facebook and Technology Influence Child Behavior?

When I was growing up in the early 90s there was no such thing as social media. We had never heard of Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Google+ or MySpace, reason for which we spent all of our free time interacting...

By Luana Pascu on 10/02/11 Comments Off