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

Can you change the world with a homemade DeepFake?

Kenza Sabri (kenzasabri5@gmail.com) Zuzanna Kędzia (zuzanna.k0987@gmail.com) Daria Kochetkova (daria.kochetkova.08@gmail.com) “At the most basic level, deepfakes are lies disguised to look like truth. If we take them as truth or evidence, we can easily make false conclusions with potentially disastrous...

By Kenza Sabri on 10/21/20 Comments Off

No card, No Phone, No problem! Alipay: Pay with your face, A balance between convenience, security and privacy

Can you imagine that you are able to pay without mobile phones, bank cards, and cash? Alipay made it happen in 2017, and it provides the facial recognition payment that lets people make payments by scanning their faces. In...

By on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Neuralink – Are Brain-Computer Interfaces leading us into a technological utopia?

Elon Musk did it again. In July 2019, the Tesla and SpaceX founder held a detailed presentation about his newest project called “Neuralink”. This startup has been developing a system that allows linking human brains directly to computers with...

By Joana Stockmeyer on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Bluetooth and Its Mutation Into a Surveillance Tool

The almighty Facebook corporation has announced its entrance into the dating industry using bluetooth, facilitating the social network with yet another facet of user-generated data. In the past, this repurposing of the Bluetooth technology as an actor within the...

By on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Technology in the Workplace, Slack and Privacy Issues

(Figure 1, Screenshot of Slack website page. Source: Slack, 2018) 1)- Technology in the Workplace: “As innovations in technology continue to proliferate, employees working in the modern workplace have access to an ever-increasing number of new technologies” (Swaya...

By Meriam Telhig on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Weeping Angel: The latest surveillance tool, that can turn your smart TV into a bug TV

Earlier this year, a revelation by Wikileaks called Vault7 refueled the privacy debate concerning intrusive media (Hacker News; The Verge, 2017). The series released documents on CIA activity between 2013 and 2016, showing how the intelligence agency gained access...

By Nina Welt on 09/25/17 Comments Off

Your Bike Solution: An Exploration of Solutionism

Nowadays technological solutions are everywhere and many more solutions are offered to make our lives easier and more convenient. Many posts on this blog discuss certain technological developments and solutions. In this research we want to reflect on the...

By Manon vanHoek on 10/21/16 Comments Off

Manually Manipulated Modulation

In the year 2013, six hundred seventy-two million people used a mobile phone in Europe. And this number is on the rise. In the Netherlands alone, twenty million mobile phones were used by the end of 2013. Mobile phones...

By Oskar Strajn on 09/18/14 Comments Off

SCiO: the Star Trek tricorder in real life

One of the most emblematic and authentic motifs from the American sci-fi television series Star Trek involves the medical officer Leonard McCoy using a tricorder in order to scan and analyse living beings and environments. He records data with a small...

By Josip Batinic on 09/16/14 Comments Off

The Apple Watch: Fashionable and Tangible

Images of wearable computers range from 1940s detective Dick Tracy through to Michael Knight’s 80s wrist watch. The cartoon detective’s watch, in particular, has reached iconic status in the electronics community. As perhaps one of the strips most recognizable...

By Ivar Dusseljee on 09/15/14 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

The future of the web: HTML5 & CSS3, the place where dreams come true

I’ve built my first public website back in 1999. I was just getting to know my way around the internet and this was my first attempt in building a website. The first version of HTML – the code which...

By Alex Maat on 10/19/12 Comments Off

[Interview] Juul Spee of Zesbaans: Digital Media Designer

Zesbaans is a digital media and design collective that experiments with media and interactivity. Zesbaans (Dutch for a six-laned highway) has been based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, since its founding in 2007 where it has been involved with projects...

By Joe Mier on 10/17/12 Comments Off

Augmented Reality and Extending the virtual

The idea that the world is confined with boarders and barriers is slowly evolving to an open space during this globalizing age, without for example passport controls on the ground in the EU. The utopian idea of the world...

By Anne-Claire Verheul on 09/14/12 2

Mobile Tweeting – recognising usage frequency, tendencies and social interaction differences

The Question Academic research on Twitter has been rife since it hit off in 2006, with significant focus on two topics in particular- that of privacy and identity. Much that has been written by scholars of Twitter has generally...

By Christopher Mead on 10/05/11 Comments Off

Book Review: The Cultural Logic of Computation, by David Golumbia

How does new media influence the cultural development of the society and which influence do they have on the identity of a society? Which possibilities of knowledge to they open up and which risks are involved? The Cultural Logic...

By Jesse Oyegbesan on 09/20/11 Comments Off

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 on Sherry Turkle: Alone Together

Book Review on Sherry Turkle: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other Sherry Turkle is a MIT technology and society specialist who is interested in the influence of technology at human life and...

By Anne Laurine Stadermann on 09/18/11 1

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

‘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

Is the internet ruining our brains?

We shouldn’t be talking about the rise of the social media and new media any more. It’s here, in everyone’s lives on a daily basis. And it’s doing things to us. It’s changing the way we communicate, learn, socialise...

By Ave Tampere on 09/09/11 Comments Off

TOP: Climategate IPCC and the legitimacy of public concerns

In this session we focus on the contemporary connections between science, technology, and politics. The connections between these three domains are often neglected or unjust presented as complete seperated area’s. Bruno Latour speaks of matters that matter, by which...

By Elias van Hees on 03/20/11 1

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

Book review: Repair – Ready to pull the lifeline

Repair is an art and technology festival organized by ARS Electronica, an Austrian platform for digital art and media culture based in Linz. The festival was held this year from September 2 until September 11. The message of Repair...

By Cendy Calis on 09/20/10 1