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

True Crime TikTok: Affording Criminal Investigation and Media Visibility in the Gabby Petito Case

By: Gabrielle Aguilar, Sofia Ompolasvili, Luisa Garcia Amaya, and Sophie Kerstens On July 2, 2021, micro-influencer Gabby Petito set out on a cross-country road trip across the United States with her fiancé Brian Laundrie. Along the way, Petito hoped...

By Gabrielle K. Aguilar on 10/29/21 Comments Off

Unfolding Twitch Vernaculars through Emotes

Twitch is the largest and most popular video game live streaming platform, owning up to 72.2% of total hours watched compared to YouTube, Facebook Gaming, and Mixer (Perez). Not only is Twitch a gaming based streaming platform, but it...

By Boy Singmanee on 10/24/19 Comments Off

Beyond-viral marketing, Nike just does it again

On September 3rd, 2018, Nike released their latest ad campaign to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their iconic ‘Just Do It’ brand. To the surprise of many, former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick was the face of the campaign. This...

By Molly Doell on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Twitch.tv: A Socially Valuable Platform, or Just Another Amazon Revenue Stream?

Instagram influencers and YouTube vloggers have long been seen as the leaders in monetizing one’s online self. New to this scene are an entirely different cohort of digital money makers: those who profit as professional video gamers on live...

By Emma Knight on 09/21/18 Comments Off

Giving MLM’s a Makeover: Are Beauty Gurus Legitimizing LipSense?

YouTube influencers have become increasingly important to businesses in the last few years. Viewers are turning to them to know what’s hot and what’s not. But, “with great power comes great responsibility” and online influencers should take this into...

By Nicole Leeflang on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Is Vidme the ‘NewTube’? Why video creators are changing sides and how they feel about it

A few weeks ago on September 9, video platform Vidme’s own channel uploaded their weekly episode of ‘This Week @ Vidme’ titled ‘German INVASION’. The video refers to a sudden and significant increase of German led channels on Vidme:...

By Frederike Lichtenstein on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Couchsurfing and Airbnb: Sleeping abroad in a sharing economy

Although I planned to get rid of all digital devices during my backpack experience in Thailand this summer, the mini computer in my pocket called iPhone turned out to be an absolute life saver in desperate moments. It for instance...

By Stef van den Broek on 09/08/14 Comments Off

The Digital Book: curating emails via the EPUB format

During the first block of the Spring semester, a group of MA New Media students took part in the elective The Digital Book. This course aims to contextualise the rise of digital publishing in theoretical terms, focussing on themes...

By Rose Rowson on 03/21/14 1

Genres for the Digital Hangover

As boundaries between the private and public sphere are beginning to blur. It is getting harder and harder to keep private content private. Most of the times nothing major happens when you send out a personal message into the...

By Bart Schoenmakers on 11/11/13 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

Citizen Journalism in Egypt: The Newsfeed of the Revolution

What does it need to launch a successful media outlet? Probably a good deal of start-up capital, a team of editors, a business plan and some advertising clients. Cairo’s Rassd News Network started with two things: a Facebook page...

By Mathias Schuh on 10/05/12 2

App Review: The Fancy

“Fancy is part store, blog, magazine and wishlist. It’s a place to discover great stuff, to curate a collection of things you love, to get updates on your favorite brands and stores and to share your discoveries. We built...

By Jeroen Rademakers on 10/03/12 Comments Off

Genes, Memes and Temes: Paradoxes in Meme-Theory and the Dangers of Memes

In March 2012 the animated sitcom South Park aired an episode featuring the potential dangers of memes. Its message: it is impossible to keep up with the latest memes and those who choose to imitate certain memes in public...

By Stijn Wonderen van on 09/11/12 Comments Off

Towards openness – A study about open design and its translation from theory into practice

For anyone interested in design, open source and open design, my recently finished (june 2012) MA Thesis is available for download here. Below is the thesis’ abstract: Following the course of web 2.0, user-generated content and open source software; design...

By Juliana Paiva on 07/12/12 72

Exit Through the Webshop

The following is an interview with the founder of dutchdamage, Matthijs van der Meulen, currently head of the digital media department at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Q: How did Dutchdamage come into being? A: In 1996 I started taking...

By Martijn Dorresteijn on 11/04/11 Comments Off

On the Nature and Culture of Photography

The praxis and technology of photography has seen dramatic transformations over the last century. The most obvious transformations taking place in the last decade of the 20th century, marking the shift from analog to digital photography. Yet another shift...

By Martijn Dorresteijn on 11/02/11 4

SNS research proposal; Flickr

Now that the use of social networking sites has become pervasive in our daily lives, the deluge of images floating around in the cloud is growing larger then ever. The Internet has moved from a mostly text-based medium to...

By Martijn Dorresteijn on 10/06/11 Comments Off

Free labor? An attempt to determine the value of user generated content – for the user

Writings on the value of user generated content tend to stress the (market) value users produce for companies such as Facebook by adding content, labeling these activities as "free labor". Assuming that there must also be something in it...

By Joep Hegger on 10/04/11 1

Know your meme, Wikipedia

Questioning whether one can sabotage Wikipedia is out of the question; there have been many cases throughout the last years. Some were humourous, others were insulting, many were vulgar. These cases were all to be found by Wikipedia editors...

By Yeun Au on 09/29/11 6

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Media So Different, So Appealing?

As any illustrator should be, I am obsessed by visual culture, art, design and media. The way contemporary creative conception and expression takes on new shapes and forms, catapulted through the fibre-optic network and available for all to consume,...

By Martijn Dorresteijn on 09/15/11 Comments Off

The revolutionary potential of Wikipedia’s equipotential paradigm.

This is part of the final paper I submitted for the course “Culture of Spectacle” As shown in the previous post, the “anyone can edit” philosophy of Wikipedia is often viewed with great skepticism in academic circles, while its...

By Ilektra Pavlaki on 06/19/11 Comments Off

Getting data, sharing data and raising political awareness.

Using vision to amplify cognition. According to the Light Switch Theory, vision appeared on Earth around 543 million years ago and triggered the Cambrian explosion (evolution’s Big Bang). Before that none of the living entities could see and relied to...

By olga paraskevopoulou on 05/07/11 Comments Off

Imogen Heap is crowdsourcing your sounds for new album

Imogen Heap, two-time grammy award winner and known for her innovative online practices...

By Janice Wong on 03/14/11 9

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