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

‘Users of the World, Unite!’; a step in the right direction?

The increasingly widespread use of social media has given rise to new interactional conditions and the creation of new discursive spaces. These developments also provide firms and organizations with new communicative opportunities and new ways of generating profit. Given...

By Jakko Kemper on 10/11/13 Comments Off

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...

By Cristel Kolopaking on 10/09/13 1

User feedback and the automated News Feed

User feedback and the automated News Feed Recently, Facebook announced a change, or in other words a ‘tweak’, in its News Feed ads algorithm. The goal of this update, which is going to be effective in the coming weeks,...

By M. van Helvert on 10/09/13 Comments Off

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...

By Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez on 10/09/13 Comments Off

We Are Dread: A Review of the Dread Exhibition at De Hallen, Haarlem

By Lani Shadduck & Lucy Chinen “Dread trembles in my pocket. Dread chirps incessantly. Dread flashes and bounces. Dread summons me a hundred times a day to pay attention to my phone or my laptop, and stiffening...

By Lani Shadduck on 10/09/13 Comments Off

Are You Ready To Get Tinderized?*

How Are You Looking Online Today? Looking for a date but too shy to approach anyone face-to-face? Lucky for you, the market for smartphone apps that connects people from a distance is rapidly extending. One of those apps is...

By Ihab Khiri on 10/07/13 Comments Off

#VemPraRua

How the use of Social Media platforms can mobilize a whole nation and transform the history of a country “Vem pra rua, porque a rua é a maior arquibancada do Brasil” The sentence above was extracted from the song...

By Gustavo López on 09/12/13 3

Reputation Economy: Digital behavior and data as a benchmark for e-trust

As Alison Hearn argues in her article, many different user activities such as Blogging, ‘Facebooking’, posting videos on YouTube, writing (informational) reviews and rating services or products are considered as a contribution to the development of the digital public...

By Serkan Yildizeli on 09/11/13 1

Social media – the new watchdog?

September 5th the former leader of the Norwegian far right party (Progress Party), Carl I. Hagen, wrote a status update on his Facebook-profile. Here he blamed the current government for the murder of a 21-year old girl, Anja Weløy...

By May Andersen on 09/11/13 Comments Off

Twitternovels – More Twitter than novel

“Paradoxically, it is this very immutability of paper which is now increasingly proving to be an advantage rather than a weakness, particularly in the context of an ever-changing (thus ephemeral) digital publishing world.” (Ludovico 10, 2012) Though this by...

By Stella Rieck on 09/11/13 Comments Off

Apps evolution

I’m referring to the mobile applications specifically, because people tend to use them all the time in everyday life. We use the terms apps and app phones to describe applications and smartphones. Applications are designed to work...

By Alexandra Kontou on 09/10/13 Comments Off

Learning via WhatsApp is what’s up!

WhatsApp is a free smartphone application that is available on iPhone, Nokia, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows smartphones and gives users the possibility to send text messages, voice clips, photos, videos, locations and contacts. This all can be done in...

By Jonne-Marie Bouman on 09/10/13 202

How Do You Like Your Phone, Sir?

Technology is factually making our lives easier and more efficient, even though this notion comes with the critique that we get more lazy and rely too much on something we know too little about. Smartphones carry much more tools than...

By Ihab Khiri on 09/09/13 Comments Off

Facebook enhances the brand image in consumer minds

Facebook is becoming a marketing tool involved in the 2.0. strategy, itself involved in the global brand’s strategy. The 2.0. strategy draws on social networks, as a marketing medium, and has a bidirectional communication that calls for creativity, rigor and...

By V Weydert 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

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

[Event] Unlike Us #3 | Social Media: Design or Decline

This March, the Unlike Us conference is taking place in Amsterdam for a second consecutive year. Hosted by Amsterdam’s Institute of Network Cultures, the event gathers academics, artists and activists to discuss ‘social media monopolies and their alternatives’. Unlike...

By Larissa Hildebrandt on 02/28/13 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

Fake Identities in Social Media

The popularity of social media networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, has resulted in new forms of user performance and identity. Each new online account creates a new identity in which users must negotiate issues of disclosure, security, and...

By Joe Mier on 11/14/12 4

Second Chance Serendipity: Missed Connections on Craigslist

“Had I said anything at the time, it would have come out as a disorganized mix of the different things going through my mind. So, opting for ‘better to be thought of a fool than to open one’s mouth...

By Maya Livio on 10/20/12 Comments Off

Captives of the Social: Facebook and Digital Pantopticism

As a network, the Web is usually connoted as an open-ended, anarchic and non-hierarchic environment. Compared to previous modes of organization, its distributed nature is considered an improvement over centralized and decentralized one-to-many communications and productions. (( Alexander R....

By Stijn Wonderen van on 10/19/12 Comments Off