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

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

World Wide Web Consortium and Digital Rights Management: Innovating Stagnation

The history of “Digital Rights Management” software while relatively new, has been quite controversial. Oftentimes advocates of online privacy and security argue about the possibilities of abuse stemming from such DRM technologies, along with activists and proponents of the...

By Nikiforos Pingouras on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Minder, the app that wants to change content control

Disrupt SF 2014 Disrupt SF 2014, an event where new technology startups showed their products to the public and to prominent investors, took place last week in San Francisco. Launched by the web magazine TechCrunch in 2011, it has just reached its...

By Roberto Pizzato on 09/17/14 Comments Off

8tracks and web-radios: the contemporary music consumption is personal and social

Since the growth of the Internet and its collection of interactive platforms and social networks, the cultural industry has turned a critical corner. This statement is especially true for the music industry in term of music creation and consumption,...

By V Weydert on 10/31/13 Comments Off

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...

By Christoph Rauch on 09/13/13 1

The Issues of Winning The Ecosystem War

“WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A COLD WAR BETWEEN THE LARGEST TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES IN THE INDUSTRY*”, boldly states tech journalist Dieter Bohn in his overview of Apple’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s battling ecosystems . This “war” won’t be won...

By Bozhan Chipev on 03/27/13 Comments Off

Is piracy democratising education?

Piracy, be it of software, music or books, is rarely spoken of in a positive light (Liang 356). Governments and organisations around the world are scrambling to stop copyright infringement from eating into profits. My relationship with piracy started...

By Larissa Hildebrandt on 03/19/13 Comments Off

Book Industry: Time to Profile that Pirate (And then Seduce Him)

On February 15, 2012 library.nu was shut down since publishers accused the site of piracy. In his article The disappearing virtual library Christopher Kelty says that the website had offered ‘between 400,000 and a million digital books for free’,...

By Doris Zevenbergen on 03/17/13 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

[Interview] Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – “Content is a king, not a Cinderella”

Many people still think they can manipulate search engines in order to get top rankings. A well-known example is the campaign against George Bush, when a lot of websites and blogs linked George’s Bush page with the key words...

By Mihaela Naftanaila on 10/15/12 3

Forgotten Realms: Revisiting the Classics

The revisiting of favourite films and novels is a common practice, in fact for many, the notion of ‘re-reading the classics’ can be even more enjoyable and enlightening than their initial interpretation. Yet for gaming, which has always and...

By Joseph Jackson on 10/03/12 1

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

Thank You, Louis!

Instead of writing about my Wikipedia entry, which was quickly accepted, as it was about such a marginal and unimportant topic that it could not be ‘biased,’ i.e. nobody cared, I would rather ventilate my frustrations caused by a...

By Daniel de Zeeuw on 09/30/11 2

Master New Media; a logical choice.

The first week at the Master New Media was interesting and it gave a good view of what we will do in the upcoming year. It is nice to see that the classes consist of so many students from...

By Daan Fliervoet on 09/15/11 Comments Off

Notes from the underground torrent scene – or on the distributed emergence of taxonomical conventions.

There is an uncertainty aura around the act of downloading illegally distributed content: no matter how versed one is in the matter, one can’t always be completely sure of its precedence, which directly impacts its expected quality, relevancy, and...

By Daniel Luiz dos Santos on 09/14/11 Comments Off

Re-evaluating the cultural industries

With the rise of the Internet, ‘creative content’ has become an increasingly debated concept with regard to its nature, availability and legality. Within each of these respects severe changes have been seen which altogether have dealt a significant blow...

By Philip Breek on 09/12/11 1

Why artists (should) support piracy

Considering the severely limiting effects of current copyright and the culture industries, artists are better off supporting piracy - financially, artistically and morally.

By Joep Hegger on 09/11/11 1

Hacking the Bogota Book Fair

I knew that especially Camilo was up to something, though I wasn’t quite sure what it was yet; something with tiles and hacking the Bogota book fair, but the how or what remained in the dark. So driven by...

By Fei An Tjan on 05/12/11 8

Michael Edson on the Smithsonian Commons

This is a blogpost originally posted on the Economy of the Commons Blog. Michael Edson, director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution and Smithsonian Commons talks about how the Institute will make all Smithsonian resources...

By Emina Sendijarevic on 11/15/10 1