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

From art to ethical design; Studio Roosegaarde’s quest for a sustainable and aesthetic future

The clock is ticking: sea levels and temperatures are rising, plastic is building up, and animals face extinction. What if art can be the activator for change?

By Victor Loye on 10/20/20 Comments Off

Mission Control: The changing boundaries of control and ownership in the world’s biggest crowd funding success.

The latest controversy surrounding the in development game Star Citizen, struck me as illustrative of the pitfalls and complexities of new forms of financing, and how they manifest the sunk cost fallacy in new, unexpected ways. It isn’t just...

By Tim Groot on 09/24/18 Comments Off

You Snooze, You Lose? Temporary Time-Out from Friends on Facebook

Brace yourselves! Facebook is testing out a ‘snooze’ button that reportedly mutes people on your feed for up to 30 days. With the help of the emerging feature, you could (and hopefully will very soon) walk away from...

By Hanna Yerega on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Can a new App save Democracy?

According to recent opinion polls, most Europeans do not trust their politicians. Nor do they believe that their voice actually counts (European Commission 14-19). In the last years, citizens expressed their dissatisfaction at the ballot box, as the frightening...

By Taylan Engin on 09/19/16 Comments Off

Don’t be afraid of robots – be afraid that you become one!

Our fantasies about becoming cyborgs are getting ever closer to reality. We have been creating robots and software to do work for us. And now we are on the best way to become robots ourselves. A new achievement in...

By Leonie Herma on 09/15/15 Comments Off

Training Wheels

As one of the cultural capitals of Europe, thousands of international students (2,000 at the University of Amsterdam alone), new residents and tourists convene in Amsterdam every year. Unfortunately, not everyone who comes to Amsterdam has the typical Dutch...

By Auke Akkerman on 10/17/14 Comments Off

The posthuman cyborg: Technological telepathy

Researches have recently published an article where they have done an experiment with some kind of technological telepathy. A man in India wearing a BCI (Brain-Computer Interface), has successfully transmitted different kind of words through thoughts to a man’s...

By Chaïm Wijnberg on 09/18/14 Comments Off

One Word May Become Revolutionary in Media

Media as a form of communication has become ubiquitous within modern society. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are often considered a part of daily-life and allow users express their own thoughts and opinions to readers, friends, followers...

By Sage Stargrove on 09/11/14 Comments Off

Tangible Data Visualizations

We live in a world of three dimensions (alright 4, and a spattering of more depending on which school of quantum theory you adhere to). However, when it comes to visualizing data, the results are surprisingly 2-dimensional, and mostly...

By Philip Anderson on 04/22/14 1

The Building Blocks of Mobile Innovation

“Mobile innovation is over” – Marcus Wohlsen (Wired Magazine) A lot has happened since the first call from a mobile phone has been made by Martin Cooper 1973 from a Motorola phone. Since then the market has been ruled...

By Inte Gloerich on 10/09/13 Comments Off

O’Reilly at PICNIC 2012: Give-and-Take on the Internet

SHARING CULTURE VERSUS CAPITALISM Since its beginning the internet has been designed as a sharing platform for information exchange without the regular borders of time and space. Free from all the constraints of the offline world information could...

By Richard Zimerman on 10/05/12 1

Video art-a different view of new media

Most of you will be probably familiar with the term of video art, the new emerging movement of art that fascinates people of different background, age and interests worldwide. However, a brief-though concise definition,as given in Wikipedia is...

By Eva Anagnostaki on 09/08/12 2

Thanks For Sharing; Gratitude to Social Recommendation and Cool Friends

“Knowledge sharing and creation is at the heart of innovation in all fields – science, art and business – and innovation is the driving force for wealth creation... Information can be transferred in great torrents, without any understanding or...

By Autumn Hand on 11/01/11 Comments Off

App review: Repudo

Repudo, the fysical location bound message service, explained and reviewed. The app proves to be easy to use, original and playful, but still comes with some minor issues...

By Joep Hegger on 10/08/11 1

Book review: ‘Designing Culture: the technological imagination at work’ by Anne Balsamo

In this book, ‘Designing culture: the technological imagination at work’, Anne Balsamo, Professor of interactive media at the University of Southern California, calls for a new approach to technological innovation arguing that culture must be taken into account when...

By Philip Breek on 09/19/11 Comments Off

Book Review: What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

“Space: the final frontier – to boldly go where no man has gone before.” This may be the answer Kelly was looking for when he set out to answer his own question, the title of his book and thesis. ...

By Christopher Mead on 09/18/11 3

AR CV OTW!?

The Augmented Reality Curriculum Vitae, in short AR CV, has been developed in a business collaboration between CWJobs.co.uk and Symbian co-founder David Wood.

By Agathe Wiedemair on 10/28/10 Comments Off

The Era Of The Digital – a lineage

The Daily We ‘The principal threat to the Richmond Daily News, and indeed to all newspapers small and large, was not competition from other newspapers but radical changes in the overall ecosystem of information.’ As Clay Shirky explains the...

By Fenneke Mink on 10/18/10 2

The Future of Hacking

Data theft, child pornography, spying on governments and spreading destructive computer viruses. When thinking of the term 'hacking', we usually think of internet crime, computer breakdowns and some geeks sitting in front of their laptop looking for a fresh...

By Caroline Goralczyk on 10/15/10 Comments Off

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

How do you like them Apples?

Apple is back from the dead. How does Apple try to get on top of Microsoft? How do they take this advertising war and how are they promoting...

By Frank Molenaar on 09/12/10 5

A Rise of a Polish Silicon Valley?

The project, titled “Multimedia City,” began operations in the Nowy Sącz national center of innovation and focused on multimedia and information systems. The Multimedia City's strategic goal is to become one of the tenth most innovative centers in the...

By Michal Kielbasa on 09/11/10 Comments Off

Creating documentaries to engage the viewer: Prison Valley- a webdoc.

In November, 2009, Philippe Brault and David Dufresne, journalists for Arte.tv were onstage at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam to present the online platform and the first 30 minutes of edited footage of their upcoming project: Prison...

By Stefania Bercu on 09/11/10 5

MapTheGap 3rd place!

The Masters of Media blog would like to congratulate Laura van der Vlies and Edial Dekker for their 3rd place at the PICNIC’08 Vodafone Mobile Clicks competition and the 10.000 euros in price money. After a hard selection process...

By Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff on 09/29/08 1