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

“Encrypt your face”: protestors Signal digital data privacy fears with new face-blurring feature

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, protestors flocked to encrypted messaging application (“app”) Signal to plan events and share content. In response, a new tool was quickly released that allows faces to be blurred in photos. These events...

By Paul Bugeja on 09/28/20 Comments Off

SteamOS: Openness & the Future of Gaming

Valve Corporation recently announced their own operating system streamlined for games called SteamOS. With SteamOS Valve wants to bring their popular online gaming platform Steam (with 50 millions accounts) into the living room. Valve already had developed an interface,...

By Michael Kerssens on 10/07/13 Comments Off

Watch Me If You Can (1 of 3): Anonymous and Secure Browsing

This is the first post in a short series on how to remain secure and anonymous online. Part one will cover internet browsing, part two will cover communicating online, and part three will cover file transferring and downloading. Parts...

By Philip Anderson on 09/13/13 Comments Off

MOOCs: nothing more than the latest craze… or are they?

“Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” – Thomas L. Friedman (May 15, 2012) 2012 was a year of many events and breakthroughs. The global economic crisis continued to be pervasive, the release...

By Rebecca Cachia on 09/10/13 Comments Off

Locked-out

By Jolien Siemerink on 06/11/13 1

Google and the Principles of the Semantic Web

One of the first goals of the Internet was to expand the knowledge of the users by connecting different data. However, the contemporary web is by no means comparable to this initially academic network. The web expanded unprecedentedly and...

By Lauressa Ford on 09/10/12 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

Book Review: Crowdsourcing, How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe.

What do YouTube, Wikipedia, IMDB, Tripadvisor, Linux, iStockphoto and Firefox all have in common? They exist through the collective efforts of millions of ordinary users like you and me. The strategy behind the success of these websites is crowdsourcing:...

By Leander Roet on 09/18/11 1

LabSurLab Report, Medellín 07-04

LabSurLab is a gathering of different worldwide Labs taking place in Medellín first time this year. From the 6th of April to the 12th of April different projects will present their work and exchange ideas on subjects such as...

By Fei An Tjan on 04/09/11 3

Holmes Wilson on Universal Subtitles: Collaborative, Volunteer Subtitling for any Video on the Web Using Free Software

(A blogpost on Holmes Wilson’s presentation, originally published @ Video Vortex #6 website. The original text can be found here) The importance of subtitles is an undeniable fact for Holmes Wilson, co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Through the foundation’s latest open source, software-based project Universal Subtitles,...

By Ourania on 03/13/11 Comments Off

Online Video Aesthetics: Florian Schneider Talks about the Open Source Documentary

Originally published on the Video Vortex #6 conference blog German filmmaker, media artist and activist Florian Schneider ambitiously set out to present a mission statement for a novel type of documentary, the open source mode, and launched into a...

By Catalina Iorga on 03/11/11 1

Economies of the Commons 2: Death Knell for Open Politics

Open source, open government, open culture - as Nate Tkacz, PhD at the University of Melbourne points out in his talk at the Economies of the Commons Conference, the ubiquity of 'openness' as a master category of politics in...

By Caroline Goralczyk on 11/14/10 1

I heart Illustrator

My first experience with Inkscape Ever since I started Art Academy in 2000 I use Adobe’s vector graphics software program Illustrator to create logo’s, cards, brochures, posters and other kinds of hard-copy. But although I find it a great...

By Lotte Woerde on 10/24/10 Comments Off

Book Review Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

O’Reilly published this year a new updated edition of the book Hackers: Heroes of the Digital Revolution from Stevy Levin. The book tells the history of a subculture that arose in the late fifties. The book starts in Building...

By Marije Rooze on 10/18/10 5

Digital Comics: Not as Invincible as They Could Be

As a Toronto born comic book fan, I’ve probably visited my local comic book shop, Cyber City Comix, once a week for the last fifteen years. Every Wednesday I would go by and pick up the latest issues of...

By Ronen Shay on 10/18/10 Comments Off

Inkscape adventure continued…

If you have been reading my recent post about my Inkscape adventure you know that this adventure didn’t go quite as well as I expected it to go. I must admit that this was mainly because of the fact...

By Laila Koubia on 10/17/10 3

I heart Photoshop

In a weak moment, I again volunteered to take up another task for Kriterion and design the flyer for one of the upcoming events. I thought this would be a good way to pressure myself to make something nice...

By Fei An Tjan on 10/11/10 1

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

The Politics of Social Media. Facebook: Control and Resistance

Hereby I post my MA thesis ‘The Politics of Social Media. Facebook: Control and Resistance’ for anyone who is interested in the political dimension of social media. A link to the full PDF can be found below. Abstract This...

By Marc Stumpel on 09/04/10 2

(Re)organizing NGOs: An Open Information System

Projeto Alavanca is one of the many NGOs in Brazil that aim at social and digital inclusion of underprivileged people. What distinguishes them from other organizations is their current project; the development of a set of web-based applications that...

By ellen sluis on 03/07/10 2