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

Ethically Researching Marginalized Groups: Applying Margins-as-Methods to Anti-Vaccination Groups

This is a commentary on “Margins as Methods, Margins as Ethics: A Feminist Framework for Studying Online Alterity” (Clark-Parsons and Lingel 2020), which examines the possibility of their suggested margins-as-methods approach to anti-vaccination groups online. This study’s aim is...

By on 10/03/21 Comments Off

Running for Research

Contextualizing Research Based on Strava Metro Data In December 2020, the exercise tracking service Strava released their annual data report, confirming in numbers that the COVID-19 pandemic had changed people’s workout habits. Forced to spend more time at home,...

By on 10/03/21 Comments Off

“U can’t touch this!” – Does sense of touch is needed in online shopping experience?

In the last decade, consumer purchases behaviour has changed. The explosive growth of e-commerce generates the tendency to design immersive shopping environment. The most advanced interactive technology focuses on the visual improvement of cybershopping, such as creating a 3D...

By Anna Maria Biernat on 09/28/20 Comments Off

Visualizing Our Global Mood 140 Characters at a Time

“We need a new way to convey information, a method which is simple to teach and to learn, and at the same time comprehensive and exact. What I might call ‘consistent visualization’ is such a way.“ These are the...

By Robert Silvis on 03/13/13 1

What do the web search engines “think” of the Pussy Riot case?

The Pussy Riot sentence has become the unprecendented event concerning the global resonance, compared to other news from Russia in the recent years. 86% of the world mass media have covered the Pussy Riot case, media monitor NewsEffector reports....

By Daria Koreniushkina on 10/19/12 Comments Off

MSDOS and floppy disks are alive and well (in Canadian curriculum)

In the short six years since I left high school, a lot has changed. Facebook and smartphones are now transforming the lives of younger generations . In light of the upcoming Media Literacy Week in Canada (November 5-9), I...

By Larissa Hildebrandt on 10/18/12 Comments Off

Social media “recruitment 2.0”: questions

According to McLuhan’s ‘medium in the message’ concept, the medium influences how the message is perceived. Besides of light bulbs, this idea functions also in social media that happen to extend relations between not only people, but companies and...

By Natalia Miszczak on 10/04/11 Comments Off

“What are your religious beliefs?” – a question of if religion becomes public again in social networking

Events of April 2011 sparked much controversy as the French government declared the public wearing of niqabs and burqas illegal for the first time. The response to this was defiance by many in France who define themselves as Muslim...

By Jamie Franklin on 09/29/11 4

Visualizing Scientific Research Collaboration: A Review of the Beauchesne-Map

Introduction In recent years there has been an increase in interest for international scientific collaboration (Luukkonen, 1993, Ponds, 2008), but the phenomenon is anything but recent: the first signs of it where seen in the nineteenth century (Luukkonen, 1993:...

By Sander Jansma on 04/14/11 2

Twitter: what are you feeling?

What if our words had no hidden meaning? What if we didn’t play the mind games that we play in deconstructing and (over-)analyzing every sentence or word or gesture and we would have to look no further than the...

By Stefania Bercu on 10/11/10 1

Web 2.0+ User=♥? An ANT approach to User-Web relationships.

In reviewing the Digital Folklore Reader last week, I came across Olia Lialina’s essay Vernacular Web 2, in which she argues that the void caused by the demise of the playful, cheeky and, most importantly, personal homepage has been...

By Stefania Bercu on 09/27/10 2

The Customer is Always Right (or at least able to convince the Internet masses they are)

With the dominance of social networking, user generated content, and the ability to comment on just about anything, web 2.0 has changed the way consumers interact with corporations, especially when they are pissed off. Many corporations are performing the...

By Ronen Shay on 09/26/10 2

Ask The Readers: Hey YOU. Let’s talk!

Arguably the title of this post is a bit direct, but I thought it was a sure way to get your attention. And if you’re reading this, it means I’m right. The thing is this; there’s a lot of...

By Joery Bruijntjes on 11/01/09 3

How much do I know about you?

This is the sequel of an experiment I started last week. I was curious how can you use Facebook quizzes for research and marketing purposes. My self made Facebook Quiz has not become very successful. After about a week...

By Marta Colpani on 09/29/09 Comments Off

Astroturfing on Wikipedia

As Wikipedia is currently the number 7 most visited website in the world according to Alexa, and a major source of information for all layers of society, it makes sense to engage in a critical review of its benefits,...

By Niels de Hoog on 09/22/09 Comments Off

Wikipedia changes our perception of knowledge

Wikipedia differs greatly with the traditional encyclopedia. Examples of aspects of differentiation: · Broader public: knowledge is for everyone. · Authority: everyone can write for Wikipedia. · Broader range of subjects: everyone can decide what is important to be...

By Suzanne Schram on 09/21/09 Comments Off

Wikipedia, we want the truth?

I am a student of the new millennium. That means that I rarely go to a library building, I hardly use books made out of paper and the reference lists on the bottom of my school papers look very...

By Marta Colpani on 09/21/09 Comments Off

The New Vision Resource Centre and ICT

Godfrey Malime is the chief librarian at the New Vision. He joined the organization in 1992 as a trainee librarian. He went through the ranks to get to his current position. He graduated with a Bachelors degree in librarianship...

By Ali Balunywa on 04/29/09 Comments Off

Ekimeeza, the Peoples Parliament of Uganda on Radio One

I arrived around 2.30 at club Obligato, where the massively popular radio talkshow ‘Ekimeeza’ was about to start. I was welcomed by a series of middle aged men, who...

By Wouter Dijkstra on 04/21/09 Comments Off

Mobile Everywhere in Kampala

Kampala – April 6th, 2009 First impressions – I have just arrived in Uganda and can tell you that the presence of the mobile phone is felt and seen everywhere! Just some notes from my trip from the airport....

By Ben White on 04/06/09 Comments Off

Research Project: ICT 4 Uganda

New media is coming to Africa. With the fastest growth rate of mobile telephony on the planet and huge investments in fiber optic cables competing with satellite technologies, investors are bringing broadband connections to the continent. Africa is on...

By Ben White on 02/25/09 3