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

5G Network Rollout Expected to Stir Things Up

Three point three billions. This is the amount of smartphone users around the world for the year 2019 (Statistica). For the following two years, the expected amount of users is to reach 3.5 and 3.8 billions (Statistica). Among what makes...

By Romane Donadini on 09/20/19 Comments Off

“Hidden Cost”: Social Commerce Practices and the Collaboration between Snapchat and Amazon

In an era when S-commerce (social commerce) is dominating digital environments, social media platforms use more and more tools to achieve this combination of commercial and social activities. Like Instagram and Pinterest, now Snapchat jumped onto this trend and...

By Aikaterini Mniestri on 10/19/18 Comments Off

Are we compromising our privacy and safety for comfort and ease?

We are becoming more and more used to the idea of new technology being embedded, into our everyday lives and activities. Marshall McLuhan believes that we treat “technologies as extended bodily organs.” (Durham Peters) We are continuously experimenting...

By Cecilie Overgaard on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Power according to Foucault

Introduction This article gives a short overview about several concepts related to ‘power’ from 20th century French social theorist Michel Foucault. He was highly influenced by Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. Foucault is both associated as a structuralist and...

By Vera Seegers on 05/09/18 Comments Off

A Streamlined Explanation: The Problem with Streaming Games on YouTube

Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg is one of the most popular video game streamers on YouTube with more than 57 million subscribers (Orland, 2017). Because of a racial slur uttered in one of his recent Let’s Play videos, PewDiePie faced a...

By Ayse B. Tosun on 10/25/17 Comments Off

“One More Thing…” – A critical approach to the Apple 2017 Keynote Presentation

But there is “One more thing.” There it was again. These famous words, first introduced by Steve Jobs, where presented at the 2017 Keynote Presentation. It was the first presentation in the official Steve Jobs Theater and the “One...

By Tijs Koops on 09/25/17 Comments Off

A click away from giving up our autonomy? – A critical view on Amazon’s new Dash button

The alarm clock rings, you slowly make your way to the coffee machine since there is no other way of functioning at a time like that, but then realize you ran out of coffee yesterday. What a disaster! But...

By Mariessa Radermacher on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Is Apple our Online-Privacy Vigilante?

Abstract: Apple purports that its new Intelligent Tracking Prevention Technology integrated in Safari browser prevents 3rd-party cookies from collecting users’ data, therefore, reducing online ads, and ultimately protecting users’ privacy. This paper challenges this by arguing that ITP’s functionality...

By K. Abdulghani on 09/24/17 Comments Off

The New Digital Mall: How Social Media is Changing the Way We Shop

E-Commerce and Web 2.0 Before the Internet – if you wanted to buy something, you had to physically enter a store to purchase it: ‘going shopping’ was a social experience by nature because of the...

By Caroline Nisenson on 09/21/16 Comments Off

They tried to make me go to Talkspace I said, “no,no,no”.

Introducing Talkspace, the budding therapy app that claims to accommodate the ‘on demand’, ‘on the go’, ‘in the know’ culture. Therapy in the modern world. Ironically the need to be mindful has become an inevitable trend, digital...

By Kyra Teklu on 09/17/15 Comments Off

Too long; Didn´t watch

We all know the feeling – there are just not enough hours in the day to attend to all the interesting things out there. There might now be a solution for at least one aspect of the dilemma, a solution, that people...

By Alina Niemann on 09/16/15 Comments Off

Has internet worsened our grammar?

Since the advent of the internet and the world wide web, it has never been easier to exchange and share information with people from all around the world. A good part of the technological inventions developed in the last...

By Josip Batinic on 09/08/14 Comments Off

The Digital Book: curating emails via the EPUB format

During the first block of the Spring semester, a group of MA New Media students took part in the elective The Digital Book. This course aims to contextualise the rise of digital publishing in theoretical terms, focussing on themes...

By Rose Rowson on 03/21/14 1

Have we all become cyborgs?

Since the Internet’s first foray the world has changed drastically. As John L. Friedman explained in his book «The World is Flat» in 2006, the Internet has globalized the world in ways we could not imagine, because people now...

By May Andersen on 11/17/13 4

From Geo to Neo: Can NeoCities Provide a Creative Utopia for Contemporary Web Culture?

Established in 1994, one of the most popular websites worldwide by 1997, and bought by Yahoo! For $3.57bn in 1999, the US branch of GeoCities closed in 2009. Hailed as a structural precursor to the socially centred web as...

By Cristel Kolopaking on 10/09/13 1

Reputation Economy: Digital behavior and data as a benchmark for e-trust

As Alison Hearn argues in her article, many different user activities such as Blogging, ‘Facebooking’, posting videos on YouTube, writing (informational) reviews and rating services or products are considered as a contribution to the development of the digital public...

By Serkan Yildizeli on 09/11/13 1

Facebook enhances the brand image in consumer minds

Facebook is becoming a marketing tool involved in the 2.0. strategy, itself involved in the global brand’s strategy. The 2.0. strategy draws on social networks, as a marketing medium, and has a bidirectional communication that calls for creativity, rigor and...

By V Weydert on 09/08/13 Comments Off

The failure of Interactive Whiteboard

But did it really fail? Rather, Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) is in fact a huge success from the business perspective of educational technology. Introduced in early 2000s and richly funded by educational technology industries and governments, IWB has obtained the...

By Yoojin Chelsea Jang on 09/07/13 2

Tracking a nations mood through Twitter: visualizing how you feel

There has been a shift from static to dynamic information visualization. Lately, information visualizations are being created by user generated input. Datasets can be created by scraping Twitter for certain keywords. The project “Pulse of the Nation” has visualized...

By Alex Maat on 03/20/13 1

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

Helping Neighborhoods Get Social Again. Or not?

Every good idea is a solution to a problem. In the case of San Francisco based start-up Nextdoor the problem is that neighbors no longer get to know each other and truly communicate. The small-scale social network is trying...

By Ineke Scheffers on 10/04/12 Comments Off

Towards openness – A study about open design and its translation from theory into practice

For anyone interested in design, open source and open design, my recently finished (june 2012) MA Thesis is available for download here. Below is the thesis’ abstract: Following the course of web 2.0, user-generated content and open source software; design...

By Juliana Paiva on 07/12/12 72

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

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