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

From Disabilities to New Abilities

Have you ever thought about how visually impaired or hearing-impaired follow TV shows? Since television is taken for granted a long time ago, we usually ignore the fact that, for some, watching television can be indeed hard. Following TV...

By Gizem Ezgi Akdag on 09/08/13 Comments Off

Social network is aging. What’s next?

We’re hopelessly addicted to social platforms as if it would be still revolutionary in our lives but is anyone thinking about it to be aging? People start getting bored with social networks because it does change in the way...

By Indre Lauciute on 09/08/13 Comments Off

Focusing on the future: Visualise the ‘tsunami of data’

If journalism is to die, at least it dies in a better shape. By help of interactive visualizations, journalists have new means to tell stories and build context around them. It is already a few years since data journalism...

By Mihaela Naftanaila on 03/20/13 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

Spam books: How Amazon is selling you 35 Shades of Gray

Amazon’s Kindle has become somewhat of an industry leader for digital books or e-book consumption. With millions of digital books selling through the single platform reader as well as garnering a general mainstream acceptance, there is a growing concern...

By Geoff Kim on 03/04/13 Comments Off

Web Aesthetics ‘book adaption’ on Facebook

By: Basri Hoogstrate, Jeroen Rademakers, Jules Mataly and Juliana Marques The Wild Card Symposium, part of our Master Degree at the University of Amsterdam gave us the occasion to read a book as a group, discuss it and came...

By Juliana Marques on 11/20/12 1

Rhythmanalysis – Henri Lefebvre

This post functions as an introduction to a project by Charlotte van Dalfsen, Egle Mykolaityte, Mihaela Naftanaila, Lydia van der Spek and Laura Zimmermann. Our project is an interpretation of Henri Lefebvre’s seminal book “Rhythmanalysis” (1992). In doing so,...

By Lydia van der Spek on 11/02/12 Comments Off

When the audience becomes the hero…

Annette Mees on theater and transmedia Annette Mees is director and co-artistic director of Coney in England. By using various media she creates special plays in which the audience is the hero: “The experience starts when you first hear...

By Katía Truijen on 10/17/12 Comments Off

Photoshop facilitates a new generation of image-makers and why it matters

There within most personal computers are applications that resolve the divide between creative thought and creative application. Today, there are hundreds of such applications but few have embedded themselves so deep in the digital era of creative production such...

By Geoff Kim on 10/17/12 Comments Off

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...

By Juliana Marques on 10/14/12 Comments Off

Book Review: Media Life by Mark Deuze

“media are to us as water is to fish.” By Seah KIM and Mihaela Naftanaila This is the way Mark Deuze starts his new book Media Life, which he presented last Thursday evening at...

By Seah Kim on 10/01/12 Comments Off

Ptch: Infinitely mashable with limited possibilities

Second author Daan Smith The application Ptch can be used as an application for your smartphone (at this time only available for iPhone) and it is integrated with a lot of remix-capabilities. The application gives you the chance to...

By Charly Landman on 10/01/12 Comments Off

Peas and carrots, Bonnie and Clyde, database and narrative

Okay, first of all sorry for the title. If you are hoping to get some randy Bonnie and Clyde details or some smashing peas and carrots recipes, I am afraid I will have to disappoint you. But, if you...

By Charly Landman on 09/20/12 1

Mash-up trailers and YouTube: “birth” of a new media object

You have probably already seen them and maybe you have not even noticed them. Some people describe them as ‘trash’, as ‘gosh awful bad’, as ‘YouTube spam’, and others might describe them as ‘(amateur) art’. A more neutral way...

By Charly Landman on 09/13/12 2

The effect of new media in teaching music

A thirteen-year-old child walks into the music classroom and recommends the guitar teacher a song of an independent, French punk band. The teacher listens to the song on YouTube and concludes that it is a bit too fast. The...

By Jeroen Rademakers on 09/13/12 Comments Off

Google and the Principles of the Semantic Web

One of the first goals of the Internet was to expand the knowledge of the users by connecting different data. However, the contemporary web is by no means comparable to this initially academic network. The web expanded unprecedentedly and...

By Lauressa Ford on 09/10/12 Comments Off

Image Hunting: Travel Photography in the Digital Age

It won’t be a shocking discovery if I write that that digital technology dramatically changed the art of photography. Travel photography gained (or lost?) the most, since digital equipment freed this art form from being a domain of experts. Now...

By Sonia Kolasinska on 09/10/12 3

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

[Thesis] A Critical Theory of Web Culture in 4chan’s /b/ Mediascape

This post contains the abstract and download link to a thesis project which examines the infamous online forum 4chan and its most notorious image board, known as /b/.

By Liam Voice on 07/20/12 4

When objects talk with each other – the new turn in locative media

This article is a co-creation by Laura Burlacu and Daan Fliervoet In 2003 a workshop hosted by the Latvian RIXC electronic media center first introduced the locative media, a term which has since been used to describe a new...

By Daan Fliervoet on 03/20/12 Comments Off

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

Twitter vs. Established Media: Gatewatching, Information Dissemination and #OccupyLSX

A summary of paper presented at the DMI Winter School Mini-Conference, Amsterdam (January 2012) Abstract: Twitter is a social media platform where users’ messages can take flight, gain elevation (RT function), achieve direction (@ function), and be grouped together...

By Liam Voice on 02/24/12 Comments Off

Paola Antonelli – “Talk to Me” at “I don’t know where I’m going but I want to be there”

Last Saturday was the third edition of the symposium ‘I don’t know where I’m going but I want to be there’ initiated by MOTI. The topic of this year symposium was about visual culture and how these effect us....

By Marije Rooze on 12/21/11 Comments Off

Blackberry: How my smartphone became a ‘dumbphone’

I remember when I had my first mobile phone, a bulky Nokia with no color or internet or any of the fancy features today’s smart phones have. This phone always worked, the battery lasted an incredible amount of time...

By Philip Breek on 10/31/11 Comments Off