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True Crime TikTok: Affording Criminal Investigation and Media Visibility in the Gabby Petito Case

True Crime TikTok: Affording Criminal Investigation and Media Visibility in the Gabby Petito Case

By: Gabrielle Aguilar, Sofia Ompolasvili, Luisa Garcia Amaya, and Sophie Kerstens On July 2, 2021, micro-influencer Gabby Petito set out on a cross-country road trip across the United States with her fiancé Brian Laundrie. Along the way, Petito hoped...
Digital resistance: A brief introduction to decentralized data-right movements

Digital resistance: A brief introduction to decentralized data-right movements

This post provides a brief introduction to collective organization as a form of resistance, whose ambition is overcoming technological determinism and creating new paths to re-define our relationship with “new” technologies, connecting the labor and knowledge of so many...
A Call for Collectivization: Addressing the atomization and exploitation of ‘lean platform’ workers

A Call for Collectivization: Addressing the atomization and exploitation of ‘lean platform’ workers

Sketching the Problem: Lean Platforms and ‘Precarity by Design’ The platform labor economy, epitomized by platforms such as Uber and TaskRabbit, is actively reshaping the relationship between workers and the labor that they perform. Sometimes referred to as the...
Mission Control: The changing boundaries of control and ownership in the world’s biggest crowd funding success.

Mission Control: The changing boundaries of control and ownership in the world’s biggest crowd funding success.

The latest controversy surrounding the in development game Star Citizen, struck me as illustrative of the pitfalls and complexities of new forms of financing, and how they manifest the sunk cost fallacy in new, unexpected ways. It isn’t just...
Winter is coming for Uber

Winter is coming for Uber

Knockout or next round? All eyes towards the battle between Uber and London’s transport regulation system ‘TfL’. Employee conditions and security affairs are the big issues in this public discussion. Is there a bright new future for digital labor...
Share a Dream: A new way to connect people ?

Share a Dream: A new way to connect people ?

Today more than ever, we are constantly connected and reachable. It has never been so easy to communicate with people around the globe. We can also observe new kinds of social relationships due to technology. In fact, connections between...
Picturing a community: Imgur’s evolution from photo to family

Picturing a community: Imgur’s evolution from photo to family

Not so long ago, sitting in a café with a long-time friend, our conversation turned to our favourite teenage movies. With this came a brief mention of Michael Cera, the typecast Hollywood ‘nice guy’. In passing, I happened to...
They tried to make me go to Talkspace I said, “no,no,no”.

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...
Get Water! Have fun and make a difference

Get Water! Have fun and make a difference

What if someone told you that by playing a fun digital game you could raise awareness to a current global issue, promote learning and education, or perhaps even help solving relevant problems at a local, national and/or international level?...
Does gameful solar power pay off?

Does gameful solar power pay off?

Imagine you could produce your own electricity, charge the batteries of your electronic devices and even get rewarded. The German startup Changers tries to make that true. They designed a solar power charger for USB devices and a software...
Garry Trotter and the Interactive Hallows

Garry Trotter and the Interactive Hallows

Gray Trotter, Donald Measely and Sermoine Ranger are best friends and study at the RowBards School of Storytelling & Fictionry.   Our story opens on a day, when the 3 of them are travelling to school by the RowBards...
Finite FM | Podcast with Franco Berardi

Finite FM | Podcast with Franco Berardi

In 2011 Franco – Bifo – Berardi, an Italian media theorist and media activist, published the book After the Future with AK Press, an anarchistic publishing company. He writes about the idea of the future and the way it is...
From Geo to Neo: Can NeoCities Provide a Creative Utopia for Contemporary Web Culture?

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...
We Are Here: Locating micro-social dynamics of mediation

We Are Here: Locating micro-social dynamics of mediation

We Are Here (Dutch: Wij Zijn Hier) sums about 220 refugees that are actively searching for security and shelter in Amsterdam on a daily basis. In their very first blog post, they have stated their core objective: We are...
Global Internet Censorship – ACTA

Global Internet Censorship – ACTA

The internet as we know is a place with limitless accessibility and constant access to all shareable online information within an open exchange where media exist and co-exist in the way of informing and entertaining. It also means to...
Brazil Left Facebook

Brazil Left Facebook

Although it’s winter in Brazil, the so-called ‘Brazilian Spring’ has clearly arisen in June and July 2013. The protests in Brazil show parallels to the ‘Arab Spring’ demonstrations (Dec. 2010-Feb. 2011), in which network communications were used to form a grassroots movement. Through...
Our Future Will Last Up To Ten Seconds: Could Snapchat be used as a revolutionary tool?

Our Future Will Last Up To Ten Seconds: Could Snapchat be used as a revolutionary tool?

Developed by Stanford University students in 2011, Snapchat is an application which allows users to send and receive picture messages and videos in real time. As well as many other features, the USP of Snapchat is that it only...
Wanted: skilled volunteers to change the world

Wanted: skilled volunteers to change the world

New media has been offering many possibilities for non-profit and social enterprises to find volunteers online, but an initiative called Catchafire is taking the center of attentions within the web. The purpose of the website is simple: provide a...
Digital Activism, Revisited.

Digital Activism, Revisited.

At the end of March, 2012, I attended the Unlike Us conference, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures. What followed was a series of conferences and insightful discussions. Unlike Us brought together activists, academics, students whom all discussed...

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...
App Review: Waze, a social GPS

App Review: Waze, a social GPS

As the fever of Geolocation apps continues, Waze seems to stand out with integration in different media and personal communication among their users. Waze is a GPS application available for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Nokia and Windows Mobile that blended...
For the Love of Material!

For the Love of Material!

Posthumanism, Protocol and Techno-Craft at Mediamatic’s Ignite Amsterdam 10 If androids dream of electric sheep, we posthumous dream of the Jetson family’s flying car. “Posthuman” because, as foreseen by early prostheses now as natural as eyeglass, human identity consciousness...

Know your meme, Wikipedia

Questioning whether one can sabotage Wikipedia is out of the question; there have been many cases throughout the last years. Some were humourous, others were insulting, many were vulgar. These cases were all to be found by Wikipedia editors...

TOP: Networks and Resistance

What are the role of networks in the Arabic revolution? Can we then speak about a network that is being changed from within? And what, in that respect, is within? The situation in Egypt became so chaotic that defining...