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

Book Review: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

As a follow up of his first book, Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky now present to us the concept of Cognitive Surplus. In previous years of this so called “new world”, criticizing the Television became a common thing. The...

By Juliana Paiva on 09/17/11 1

Review of Nancy Baym’s Personal Connections in the Digital Age

It is often the narcissistic tendencies of academics which alienates a much wider potential readership of their work. A use of language and content that predicates a certain level of cultural capital renders many articles inaccessible to a number...

By Jamie Franklin on 09/16/11 Comments Off

‘Headdesking’ and Beyond: The British Uprisings

‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not...

By Jamie Franklin on 09/12/11 2

Not About Media!

The Impossibility of Media Theory Where previous generations of Serious Men saw in the concept of Medium but marginal or esoteric wordplay, we in our times seem to attribute to it almost magical qualities, such as the 19th century...

By Daniel de Zeeuw on 09/11/11 Comments Off

Is the internet ruining our brains?

We shouldn’t be talking about the rise of the social media and new media any more. It’s here, in everyone’s lives on a daily basis. And it’s doing things to us. It’s changing the way we communicate, learn, socialise...

By Ave Tampere on 09/09/11 Comments Off

Augmented reality: the first steps to a society of control?

Layla van Daalen, Chris Hoogeveen, Hanneke Mertens Every aspect of the world has an extra layer of information. It may not always be obvious, but these extra layers are most certainly present. Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis describe these...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 03/13/11 2

A short essay on how Remediation can ruin Your gameplay

Being disappointed by certain facts of various remakes of games is an extremely common feeling for a nowadays gamer. Especially while living in times where technological evolution outruns the concepts of game-makers. As smaller companies struggle to come up...

By Bart Brodzki on 10/15/10 2

E = Media Combinations2: The survival of the fittest

Every old medium was once new. And when something gets old we’ve got to search for a way to give it its old glance back. The printed book was once a new medium. It was revolutionary, groundbreaking. But today...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 10/13/10 3

Twitter Research Supported by Info Visualisation

Everyday users of Twitter users provide the world with us with of tweets on topics differing from what they ate, how they feel to what music they listen to. This is a great source for researchers who want to...

By Jidi Guo on 10/07/10 1

MIN(D)ING Your Data

Last week, ‘surveillance and control’ was the theme the Masters of Media-students were debating about. Theorists as Michel Foucault, Deleuze, Galloway and Thacker and Chun passed the revue. With the articles of the last three theorist there was some...

By Xander Stolwijk on 09/27/10 Comments Off

Book Review: ‘The World as Flatland – Report 1: Designing Universal Knowledge’ – by Gerlinde Schuller

Designing Universal Knowledge is one of those books you often come back to, not only because of its innovative and universal content, but also because of its original structure and visual attractiveness. Gerlinde Schuller, the author of this piece,...

By Bart Brodzki on 09/19/10 Comments Off

Did Internet Make Me Stupid?

Working in a coffee bar gives me the advantage of having access to many different newspapers. In quiet hours I try to read several articles from at least three newspapers in order to get a more balanced view of...

By Fei An Tjan on 09/13/10 1

Galloway: The Medium is an Interface

... Interface and media may be two names for the same thing. From the viewpoint of McLuhan and the concept of re-mediation, media are merely containers that encapsulate other pieces of media. This can be seen as an “onion”...

By John Haltiwanger on 05/11/10 1

Master of Media spin-off selected for EU blogging competition TH!NK3

www.ICT4Accountability.wordpress.com , one of the blogs started by a former New Media student of the UvA, is officially selected to compete in the internationally renowned blogging competition’ TH!NK3’. This blogging competition, set up by the European Journalism Centre, will...

By Wouter Dijkstra on 03/17/10 1

Andrew Keen – video snippets of the lecture he gave at the “me, you and everyone we know is a curator” conference

Although video is crappy and not all was recorded, I managed to save some stuff of the lecture by Andrew Keen. Following his words, I should not be doing this, because archiving something digitally is not archiving something at...

By Tjerk Timan on 12/22/09 1

Lev Manovich: Studying Culture With Search Algorithms

New media theorist Lev Manovich summarized his latest contribution to the field of software studies: cultural analytics. Whereas traditional cultural analysis relies on real-world resources (human interpretation and physical storage), cultural analytics relies on the computer and search algorithms...

By Chris Castiglione on 11/20/09 3

Augmented Reality: From Interactive Music Videos to a New World Perspective

In this post I would like to continue on the subject of augmented reality implemented in our daily lives that is brought up bij Kesh. John Mayer is the first artist that has made an augmented reality videoclip. To...

By Charlotte van Brakel on 10/27/09 1

New Media Protocols and the Artist (Rasing his Voice?)

In my research paper – which I will be writing the next two months, I want to deepen the discussion around new media art and its relation to political and social engagement. While net.art has always taken a very...

By Marta Colpani on 10/24/09 Comments Off

Diagrams of the false

Personas is a student’s project developed in the MIT Media Lab that shows people how Internet sees them. Using a language processing, computer creates a data profile of your online identity, when entering your name. The program attempts to...

By Susana Zaragoza on 10/13/09 Comments Off

Baidu Tieba: A Reflection of Manuel Castell’s Theories

Manuel Castells is a sociologist, he was born in Spain and now is a professor in t the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and also a have taught in University of California, Berkeley. He especially researches into information society...

By Siying Yang on 10/13/09 Comments Off

From Tweet to Hypertextual Consciousness?

One might claim that Twitter is just another boring conversational platform not very different from any other kind of social network site, where you can share your cuts-ups of personal information instantly with your friends. But in a social-humanistic...

By Susana Zaragoza on 10/04/09 2

Planet Google – Book Review

From the perspective of a professor of Business one can expect the focus on Google as a commercial company. With this book Randal Stross proves to have a deep insight in many facts, that mostly evolve around the ideology...

By Ramses Petronia on 09/17/09 Comments Off

Chasing Away Ghosts: a Review of Brian Rotman’s Becoming Beside Ourselves

Q: “In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. New Land is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears there?” A: “I don’t know; I’ve seen a...

By Morgan Currie on 09/14/09 1

The (Dis)Appearance of Purpose

"The (Dis)appearance of Purpose” is dedicated to the significance of teleology in the study of human-computer behaviour by tracing the disappearance of the concept purpose. To demonstrate how we can think of purpose in order to understand our contemporary...

By Inge Ploum on 09/06/09 1