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

Like, swipe, match… “you vaxxed?”

How Hinge and Tinder have adapted their affordances to the COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in dating app usage while simultaneously altering the standard dating practices. To analyze how dating apps have responded to this change,...

By Simran Tamber on 10/27/21 Comments Off

The Big Problem with Uber’s Big Data: Ethics and Regulation of Data Ownership

“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral”. That is why it is key to understand how we, as users and moderators, give additional meaning to technological features and participate in the complex chain of interactions they...

By on 10/20/21 Comments Off

“Stop licking the boots and start marching them” – An exploratory research proposal into peer-to-peer political discussion on TikTok

by: Samuel Vitikainen, Max Buzzell, Loulou de Regt, Lotte Timmermans For people over 24, and some people under 24 too, TikTok constitutes a phenomenon as alien as Narnia: a strange world where the rules are difficult to understand. To...

By Max Buzzell on 10/21/20 Comments Off

Censorship creates discourse: the implications of banning political advertising

Ayushi Arora (13237748, arora.ayushi@gmail.com) Thomas Ba (13286544, thomas.ba.7@outlook.it) Maurice Dharampal (10439250, maurice.dharampal@student.uva.nl) Alex Soete (13208918, alex.soete@gmail.com) Introduction Is free-speech under attack? Founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has recently joined the head of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, in the...

By on 10/20/20 Comments Off

Vote yay or vote nay, but you just can’t ignore micro-targeting.

“Numbers and democracy have always been linked.”John Durham Peters proclaims, giving examples from Greek political systems to modern opinion surveys. He focuses on majority – the social force through numbers, that democracy uses to establish legitimacy (434). And when...

By Ketaki Chand on 09/24/18 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

Weeping Angel: The latest surveillance tool, that can turn your smart TV into a bug TV

Earlier this year, a revelation by Wikileaks called Vault7 refueled the privacy debate concerning intrusive media (Hacker News; The Verge, 2017). The series released documents on CIA activity between 2013 and 2016, showing how the intelligence agency gained access...

By Nina Welt on 09/25/17 Comments Off

From Fake to Fact: How the Blockchain May Rewire Our News Consumption

Breaking news. No, literally: the news is broken. Fake over fact; clickbait over quality. Increasingly influential social platforms privilege content that ‘works’: content that captures our attention and drives up profits. Consequently, news organizations create such content. A new...

By David Schogt on 09/25/17 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

From Leiden to Livoberezhna:  How Memes of a Dutch Statue are Supporting Digital Activism in Ukraine

Introduction: Meeting the Awaiter As the old adage goes: “love makes you do strange things.” On August 18, love compelled me to cycle for over two hours in the sweltering and sweaty summer heat, from Amsterdam to Leiden University....

By Hayden Lutek on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Goalpost in the Ozone: The Deceptively Good Intentions of #Climate

As far as scientific consensus goes, it’s tempting to label the ‘debate’ around climate change as being over. However, to do so invites complacency, a willingness to delegate responsibility to a far-off unknown authority. News organisations, politicians and activists...

By David Molloy on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Throwing a Life Vest at Humanity

Alan Kurdi’s Photo. A photo of a boy, lying facedown on a Turkish beach, sporting a little red shirt and velcro shoes. This was the image that circulated the world wide web last week, becoming the latest example of...

By Ysabel Camus Favis on 09/14/15 Comments Off

GOOGLE SYNDROME: A Psychological Perspective

Usually Google needs no introduction. But what it stands for is quite relative and as all things in life, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Thus, for my mum Google is the whole internet (!), for some tech...

By Nikos Roumeliotis on 09/10/14 Comments Off

Is Social Media an alternative platform for the voiceless in a conflict Zone?

In the time of war, every party of the conflict has a narrative that is definitely opposite to the other, and is being used as propaganda in its favor. So what are the most effective mediums to convey accurate...

By Benaz Batrawi on 09/08/14 1

Invading Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear

Sonic Warfare: Sound. Affect and the Ecology of Fear is a book written by Dr. Steve Goodman, who has a PhD in Philosophy, but to a whole group of people he might be better known under his alias: Kode9,...

By Vincent Sloof on 10/31/13 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

Memeification of the News

Internet memes (specifically image memes) have taken the role of a media format for civic journalism, ever evolving and reproducing cultural/political concerns which reflect our social condition. As an amalgamated entity, memes are constantly integrating themselves within social platforms...

By Joseph Jackson on 10/17/12 Comments Off

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...

By Massiel Sánchez on 09/10/12 1

The Cyber Cafe Is Dead. Long Live The Cyber Cafe!

In the Western world, cyber cafes are nearing the point of total extinction, but less protected as say, pandas. However, many seem to find a new lease on life in the various developing – soon to take over Total...

By Daniel de Zeeuw on 10/31/11 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

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...

By Kendall Grady on 09/29/11 Comments Off

Book Review: Managing Media Work by Mark Deuze

Mark Deuze starts, in the introduction of his book, to argue that most students that follow studies like; journalism, advertising, games, film and television have lack of knowledge on managing their media work and industry. They know, for instance,...

By Daan Fliervoet on 09/22/11 1

Book Review: The new rules of the game

Note: this is a review on a Dutch book called De nieuwe regels van het spel. This book is not available in English. Visit the RMO website for more information. In this advisory report, the Dutch Counsil for Social...

By Leonie Nijenmanting on 09/19/11 1

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