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

G is for Google, F is for friendly and I is for innocent

The 11th of August this year Google announced a big change; Google from now on will be part of a new parent company Alphabet which will cover all of Google’s activities. For some this might be a surprising move as Google...

By Lieke Kersten on 09/15/15 Comments Off

The Companion: App which walks you home

Walking home at night can be a pretty terrifying experience. If you ever had to walk home through eerie suburban streets at 2 am., you know how it feels. That is why five college students in the US created an application...

By Radvile Dauksyte on 09/14/15 Comments Off

Give us your data and you will never walk alone

Last week, five students from the University of Michigan launched (Mashable, Tech Times, Business Insider) a smartphone application called Companion. This application enables users to be accompanied by their contacts to virtually walk them home at night. The so-called...

By Atossa Atabaki on 09/14/15 Comments Off

Hey Siri, do you spy on me?

Hey Siri, a feature which comes along with the new Iphone 6S has caused quite a stir when it became known that Siri (Apples Artificial Intelligence integration) could be activated on command by just calling “Hey Siri” to your device. This functionality...

By Rosa Boon on 09/14/15 Comments Off

A new enemy in our control society

From an army of sabotage to a slippery enemy Ouroboros, the famous snake virus, crawled into the digital systems of Ukraine in 2013 and until today it has attacked large parts of the country’s infrastructure. There are many allegations that Russia is responsible for...

By Wouter Klaase on 11/07/14 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

Cyborg Unplug – Counter-Surveillance Device or Product to profit of Fear?

For everyone being paranoid that strangers could spy on them using drones, cameras, microphones or even Google Glasses – finally, a solution has arrived, which is going on pre-order on September 30, 2014. Cyborg Unplug is a gadget no...

By Daniela Diewock on 09/15/14 Comments Off

Hacking the Digital: Fingerprint Secured Touch ID from Apple

The iPhone 5S is a revised version of its predecessor, the iPhone 5, and was unveiled to the general public last month on September 20th. Aside from various improvements and new available features, Apple’s new fingerprint-based identity sensor, Touch...

By Nicholas Vieira on 10/10/13 1

We Are Dread: A Review of the Dread Exhibition at De Hallen, Haarlem

By Lani Shadduck & Lucy Chinen “Dread trembles in my pocket. Dread chirps incessantly. Dread flashes and bounces. Dread summons me a hundred times a day to pay attention to my phone or my laptop, and stiffening...

By Lani Shadduck on 10/09/13 Comments Off

Global Internet Censorship – ACTA

The internet as we know is a place with limitless accessibility and constant access to all shareable online information within an open exchange where media exist and co-exist in the way of informing and entertaining. It also means to...

By Christoph Rauch on 09/13/13 1

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

The Internet is now built on mass surveillance

Brought to light in recent months, the Edward Snowden-powered NSA leaks have publicized the wholesale spying efforts by US and UK intelligence agencies that undermine the very fabric of the Internet – turning it into a vast surveillance program...

By Nicholas Vieira on 09/09/13 1

Captives of the Social: Facebook and Digital Pantopticism

As a network, the Web is usually connoted as an open-ended, anarchic and non-hierarchic environment. Compared to previous modes of organization, its distributed nature is considered an improvement over centralized and decentralized one-to-many communications and productions. (( Alexander R....

By Stijn Wonderen van on 10/19/12 Comments Off

[Research] Trade Your Location Information For Security?

A Liberty-Security Tradeoff in Public Policy for the Location Information Technology in South Korea This afternoon, you might tag where you have been for lunch on facebook, or even a few minutes ago, your smartphone might update you with new...

By Seah Kim on 09/07/12 Comments Off

Is your boyfriend cheating on you? There’s an app for that too

With new smart phones and GPS tracking, it’s possible to find and locate the position of other smart phones and the human body that goes with it. But is this legal? Does privacy still exist? Japanese women apparently don’t...

By Wouter Timmermans on 11/03/11 62

App Review: PhoneGuard. Keeping Parents and Beliebers Happy

Designed with the noble purpose of preventing deadly traffic accidents caused by the distraction of texting while driving, the Phone Guard – Drive Safe application is in fact one new media watchtower for parents and employers to servile teenagers...

By Andrei Florian on 10/11/11 1

The Switch: from Matthew Fuller to mobile apps

Erupting Irruption Ask Elk Grove, launched ten days ago for the city of Elk Grove, California, numbers among the newest localized smartphone applications for reporting civic repairs. Most follow agendas similar to GRCity311, an app developed for Grand Rapids,...

By Kendall Grady on 10/10/11 2

You ‘like’, you pay! – Do Social Network Services Users Consciously and Willingly Give Up Their Right for Privacy?

Facebook faces more and more scrutiny over its user privacy issues, but do people willingly trade privacy as a commodity for using Social Network Services (SNSs)? Would they prefer to pay a certain fee in order to prevent surveillance...

By Andrei Florian on 10/08/11 Comments Off

Book Review: opaque presence: manual of latent invisibilities ed. Andreas Broeckmann and knowbotic research

opaque presence instructs toward a mythology of suspended origin. Such a creation myth is necessarily one of destruction. Fully actualized, opaque presence could deposit the naked and the clothed in the Garden of Eden as a garden, an unbroken...

By Kendall Grady on 09/25/11 Comments Off

Book Review : Vu a la web-cam (essai sur la web-intimité) by Nicolas Thély

Nicolas Thély published in 2002 his PhD thesis on web intimacy. As he started doing research on webcams, Nicolas Thély was surprised to find so few (if any) specialized literature on the subject of webcams. The book presents and...

By Clément Adam on 09/18/11 1

‘Headdesking’ and Beyond: The British Uprisings

‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not...

By Jamie Franklin on 09/12/11 2

The Internet Is Taking My Pictures

Unlike Google Maps, Russia’s Yandex Карты is much more tourist friendly in that it does not blur your face away when you have been caught on camera! Yandex does not seem to uphold an evenly strict privacy policy as...

By Pim van Bree on 06/06/11 1

The Invention of the Century: Privacy

Privacy is considered to be an important issue for it is not just a social structure within a community, which can be regulated by social control anymore. It has developed to a dialectic notion of widespread surveillance activities within...

By Fenneke Mink on 10/27/10 2

Twart: Twitter and art

Twitter offers many interesting opportunities for interactive artists. While in many projects and installations participation by interacters needs to be requested, Twitter acts as an enormous database of the human psyche that artists can rely on for their work....

By Cendy Calis on 10/11/10 Comments Off