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

“Hey Siri, are you sharing my private data”: A commentary on the impact virtual personal assistants have on surveillance capitalism and user information consumption

For a digitally immersed society driven by technological developments and innovations, personal voice-controlled virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri have become a crucial component to task completion, user interaction, and information consumption. Virtual personal...

By on 10/03/21 Comments Off

Book Review: The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan

I’m a so-called Google poweruser. Not only do I use the world’s biggest search engine for my daily queries like millions of ‘normal’ mortals do, I also use Google for my pictures (Picasa), my agenda (Google Agenda), video’s (YouTube),...

By Floris Spronk on 09/22/11 Comments Off

Be afraid of Google?

A week ago I went to a lecture about The Googlization of the Global street by Siva Vaidhyanathan. The lecture was at “de Balie” and organized by Open. With Googlization Siva mean the process of being processed rendered and...

By Mathijs Voordenberg on 10/31/10 Comments Off

The Beast File: Google

This video, created for ‘Hungry Beast‘, a news program that airs in Australia on the ABC1, depicts Google as a dangerous, pretentious, ubiquitous and ever growing advertising giant: ‘building an empire on your street, in your phone, in your...

By Marc Stumpel on 03/17/10 4

Rethinking Googlization

In current search engine research the importance of Google as object of study seems to be inevitable. Google seems to be indexing parts of the physical and digital world, which we first thought to be unsearchable. Googlization, the term...

By Harro Heijboer on 12/21/09 2

Siva Vaidhyanathan on Googlization, “Only the elite and proficient get to opt out”

The term Googlization, according to Siva Vaidhyanathan, is the process of being processed, rendered, and represented by Google. His upcoming book The Googlization of Everything investigates the actions and intentions behind Google. At The Society of the Query Vaidhyanathan...

By Chris Castiglione on 11/30/09 3

A story about YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community

<p style=”text-align: justify;”>“From You to Tube: YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community” is a short video created by Lasse Timmermann and me for the Digital Methods Seminar. It follows the conceptual and methodological framework of “distilling the ‘textual grammar’...

By Simeona Petkova on 11/20/09 1

The Anti-Googlization: How Alternative Search Engines Find Their Way on the Web

On the website googlizationofeverything.com, theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan states that the current web is dominated in several ways by search engine Google. Google related sites and ‘Googleware’ like Google Books and Google Earth and the video channel YouTube. In a...

By Desiree de Jong on 10/21/09 2

The Mighty Morphing Short Shorts

Literature has been shrinking. No, I'm not referring to the decrease in readership demographics, but about “new” literary forms that sprang up in the 1990s. What will be referred to here collectively as short shorts are narrative works characterized...

By John Haltiwanger on 10/10/09 1

The great power of a Wikipedia sysop

A sysop (as a system operator) is a controversial actor in Wikipedia. The term sysop means an administrator of a multi-user computer system, such as a bulletin board system (BBS) or an online virtual community. In the Wikipedia world,...

By Yu-Fen Chen on 09/20/09 3