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

Twart: Twitter and art

Twitter offers many interesting opportunities for interactive artists. While in many projects and installations participation by interacters needs to be requested, Twitter acts as an enormous database of the human psyche that artists can rely on for their work....

By Cendy Calis on 10/11/10 Comments Off

World of Tweetcraft?

The emergence of MMO gaming and virtual reality, especially the largest artificial worlds such as Azeroth in World of Warcraft, gave us a new way of socializing with people from around the globe. Twitter is one of the...

By Bart Brodzki on 10/07/10 3

Facebook Launches Three Key Features To Protect Privacy

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg has listened to all the nagging about how Facebook is violating the privacy of their users. On the live press-conference of Facebook yesterday, Zuckerberg announced a few features that the social networking site will...

By Philip Man on 10/07/10 Comments Off

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

Is micro blogging the future for writers?

Micro blogging gained a lot of success over the past few years. With the arrival of web 2.0 there was a need for a new form of writing. Long articles and ongoing features were not what people wanted anymore....

By Chris Hoogeveen on 10/06/10 3

Wikipedia – an Impression About the First Entry

On Saturday, 2nd october, I become an official member of Wikipedia community. Namely, I posted my first entry. The article is about the Multimedia City, a project I wrote about in my first blog post on Masters of Media...

By Michal Kielbasa on 10/03/10 Comments Off

Adopted Teen Traced on Social Network

A great example of how the privacy issues we face on social networks are not just limited to our data being sold to marketers. This BBC interview tells how a British girl was traced by her natural sister on...

By Natalie Dixon on 09/29/10 Comments Off

Not to get too emotional… but what happened to emotion?

She' ll smile to you if you move to the left. No, try a different angle. I don't know... Is she smiling at all? For over 500 years, viewers and researchers have been trying to interpret Mona Lisa's...

By Ilektra Pavlaki on 09/28/10 Comments Off

Will Wikipedia end the disregarding of Swedish artist?

Swedish singers are often disregarded. They won’t make it out side the Swedish borders. What happened there? Did publicity fall short? Didn’t MTV pick it up? Or is there some other reason why Swedish musicians mostly don’t appear on...

By Chris Hoogeveen on 09/27/10 2

Yeey I’m on Facebook! :s

With 500 million active users spending over 700 billion minutes per month, Facebook is gaining more and more traffic each single day. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. With these...

By Laila Koubia on 09/27/10 Comments Off

Surfing the Web of Trust: Couchsurfing

Social networks come in a wide variety on the World Wide Web. There’s the generic social network focusing on sharing info and multimedia with your friends (like facebook), professional sites (LinkedIn), forums, collaborative blogs and so on. Most of...

By Frank Molenaar on 09/27/10 Comments Off

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

Be free. Don’t adjust your Facebook privacy settings

Chun states that we, the users, perceive new media, in particular the Internet, to be free, democratic and save. We think we are in control of our content, but just like with other technologies, we can never have total...

By Emina Sendijarevic on 09/27/10 1

Virtually Yours! The Meteoric Rise of Virtual Game Goods

In the space of just over a decade, virtual game goods have gone from being a black market cottage industry to an extremely successful business model for gaming and social networking virtual goods industries. This evolution, caused by player...

By Isobel Gorman on 09/27/10 1

Thou shall not lie (on your online profile)

(Untrustworthy) Online Identities in Web 2.0 The example of Facebook As new media history is being written at present time, the discourse keeps revolving around the notion of online identity and “personal privacy” issues that are connected to the...

By Ourania on 09/27/10 1

Campaigning and advocacy via social network sites, are social movements on the right path?

I do believe the Web 2.0 is shaping our societies, and much more the way users relate to each other. Social movements are adopting very fast social media technologies in their communication strategy. They use social network sites mostly...

By Cristina Reyna on 09/26/10 Comments Off

Does Facebook Rule? Ideas For The Future.

Facebook is everywhere. It connects 500 millions of people around the world. No doubts, it is an effect of purposeful endeavours of those who stay behind the success of the platform. It is becoming more and more interconnected into...

By Michal Kielbasa on 09/26/10 Comments Off

False Predictions of the Future of Social Media

Perhaps it’s my dissatisfaction with social media hypes, and especially the ones that are ignited by marketing guru’s, but I can’t resist the feeling of pseudo science when I read about analyses and predictions about social media on blogs....

By Bob Nefkens on 09/26/10 3

Advantages of having a ‘Second Life’ – a short essay on how MMO Games may change the World

What are MMO games? Massively Multiplayer Online games are a fresh genre to the gaming industry, as all of them require a strong and stable Internet connection. This particular branch of gaming is becoming more and more popular due...

By Bart Brodzki on 09/26/10 2

Y this Generation?

To start understanding social networks and their ceaseless popularity it’s important to understand the people who use them most. Although it’s a mistake to generalize about an entire generation there are unquestionably some central themes that apply to Generation...

By Natalie Dixon on 09/26/10 Comments Off