Filter posts by:
Digital Audio Workstations—The Infrastructure of Music Production

Digital Audio Workstations—The Infrastructure of Music Production

Digital Audio Workstations, or DAWs, have become ubiquitous in the landscape of contemporary music production. The development of DAWs has not only revolutionized studio production workflows, but also put the tools to create sophisticated music and sound projects into...
What Does a Feminist Approach to  Deepfake Pornography Look Like?

What Does a Feminist Approach to Deepfake Pornography Look Like?

Ida Raffaghello (11903341), Laura Kastalio (12768537), Sanne Kalf (11290196) and Erinne Paisley (12516325)Word count: 2749 Introduction This project focuses on the research question: What does a feminist approach to deepfake pornography look like? Deepfake’s have their historical roots in...

The Game of Life: A case study of video games as social platforms

Introduction Human connection, the feeling of being accepted or even loved. What does human connection look like in our digital day and age? Dating apps like Tinder are obviously a very modern tool of people reaching each other, but...
You Cannot Weigh Beauty (but Your Body can be Commercialized)

You Cannot Weigh Beauty (but Your Body can be Commercialized)

Introduction In the media women bodies are often portrayed by the preference of thin body types characterized as ideal body types (Martin et al 609). For instance, when looking at the United States, women shown on television tend to...
#SavetheAmazon? – A Case Study of Misinformation across Social Media Reactions to the Amazon Rainforest Fires.

#SavetheAmazon? – A Case Study of Misinformation across Social Media Reactions to the Amazon Rainforest Fires.

By logging online in August 2019, one is immediately exposed to blazing fires both in the Amazon and across social media. Fires across the Amazon rainforest caused uproar online with many unknowingly re-sharing images that did not depict current...
Unfolding Twitch Vernaculars through Emotes

Unfolding Twitch Vernaculars through Emotes

Twitch is the largest and most popular video game live streaming platform, owning up to 72.2% of total hours watched compared to YouTube, Facebook Gaming, and Mixer (Perez). Not only is Twitch a gaming based streaming platform, but it...
Dirty Greenwashing: How two apps cash in on the conscious consumer trend

Dirty Greenwashing: How two apps cash in on the conscious consumer trend

Hashtags like #cleanbeauty, #nontoxicskincare and #greenbeautyproducts are circling popular social media platforms, displaying a recent development of the beauty industry towards cleaner, more ethical products. Rooted in consumers’ “frustration over regulatory oversight of cosmetics and personal care products” (Wanner...
Show Me How You Fail – Promoting Authenticity and Genuine Connection through Instagram

Show Me How You Fail – Promoting Authenticity and Genuine Connection through Instagram

By: Deirdre Murphy, Nicola Schmitt, Adriana Munteanu, Brenda Scalco What is wrong with me? Why do I not have abs like that influencer? Why did my last post not get as many likes as the one my classmate posted?...
“Blue Tick Brigade”: A critique of Twitter’s verification system as a shaper of online self-presentation

“Blue Tick Brigade”: A critique of Twitter’s verification system as a shaper of online self-presentation

By Agustín Ferrari Braun, Eleni Maragkou, Marie-Liesse H, Shivaani Gore Over the course of the past years, politics in Europe and the United States have become increasingly concerned with the nature of online personhood. Only last month, the far-right...
Chinese Communist Youth League: Your Next Influencer

Chinese Communist Youth League: Your Next Influencer

Social media  platforms are easy to access, to use and could be seamlessly integrated within different cultures and social structures. They are an integral part of how new content is propagated online, hence making them important in political lives...
Search Engine Comparison for Three Controversial People: Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson

Search Engine Comparison for Three Controversial People: Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson

Alicja Zak, Elise Olthof, Vânia Ferreira and Zdzisław Heydel Introduction This project, for which we have taken the perspective that “raw data is an oxymoron”, conveyed by Lisa Gitelman, examines the different query results between three search engines: Google,...
MOM Over Time: A meta-analysis

MOM Over Time: A meta-analysis

Introduction MOM, a weblog belonging to the students and professors of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, has been online for about fifteen years now. Master of Media blog (MOM), is about new media phenomena and digital culture...
Data Visualization: A Case Study of Information is Beautiful Awards

Data Visualization: A Case Study of Information is Beautiful Awards

By Qianyu Feng, Dania Awin, Marta Espuny, Kirsten Hartman Intro & conceptualization. Living in a data-driven world, data visualization is becoming more and more relevant. Developed from scientific visualization, information visualization gained its popularity in the 2000s with the...
Mapping Shelter

Mapping Shelter

Mapping Shelter proposes a critical new media intervention in the way we think of public space in regards to homeless people. The currently prevalent hostile architecture produces a virulent, toxic environment for marginalized communities. Our concept aims to break...
Old Town Road to Success: How Music Becomes Popular on Spotify

Old Town Road to Success: How Music Becomes Popular on Spotify

Spotify has become an established phenomenon in our daily routines. How do songs become successful on the platform? Follow us as we explore the (Old Town) road to success.
Have You Gone Green? INFRAWARE as a Digital Intervention for Environmental Awareness

Have You Gone Green? INFRAWARE as a Digital Intervention for Environmental Awareness

INFRAWARE (composed of the words infrastructure, awareness and hard/software) is a browser plug-in that displays how your personal use of technology is deeply entangled with the planet’s resources and the environmental crisis we are currently experiencing. Go green. Paperless...
The Personalization – Privacy Paradox of the Meditation App Balance 

The Personalization – Privacy Paradox of the Meditation App Balance 

Meditation has been practiced for more than 5000 years, but the last decade people have started meditating with the help of their smartphones. With the arrival of the internet people progressively are sharing and seeking help for their mental...
Resonoo and the Music Industry: could this be a gateway to standardized music?

Resonoo and the Music Industry: could this be a gateway to standardized music?

It is no secret that behind any successful artist is not only a team of production professionals but also a flock of editors, publicists, marketers and sound engineers along with others. The new AI-driven start-up Resonoo has understood that...
How Disney brings a lightsaber into the arena of streaming wars

How Disney brings a lightsaber into the arena of streaming wars

We are all too familiar with the ‘endless scroll’, the phenomena that comes into play whenever we decide to entertain ourselves by watching a film or series. If you are not watching by yourself and you have a companion...
Raving to Algorithmic Beats:  The Hacker Class in Search of Novelty

Raving to Algorithmic Beats: The Hacker Class in Search of Novelty

The interest of the hacker class lies first and foremost in the free expansion of the vectors of communication, culture and knowledge around the globe…Only when free to express itself through the exploration and combination of any and every...
Can we trust apps to solve our problems? SuperBetter – promises to improve overall conditions of health

Can we trust apps to solve our problems? SuperBetter – promises to improve overall conditions of health

Are you suffering from stress and anxiety, are you feeling a little down or did you just have a bad day? Among the vast amount of apps available, there is an app that can “unleash your heroic potential” and...
App Store Killer? The Storm of WeChat Mini Programs Swept Over The Mobile App Ecosystem

App Store Killer? The Storm of WeChat Mini Programs Swept Over The Mobile App Ecosystem

Are you a “app for everything” type of guy? How many apps you have installed on your phone? For me, there are 85! Have you ever imagined accessing to all of these apps just through one single entry point?...
On platform aesthetics: TikTok as the next level of the gamification of social exchange online

On platform aesthetics: TikTok as the next level of the gamification of social exchange online

TikTok has taken the place of being among the most recent cases in social media success history. In just two years since its global launch in 2017, the app has reached the number of 1 billion downloads in 75...
Framing AlphaZero: An infrastructural approach to A.I.

Framing AlphaZero: An infrastructural approach to A.I.

Man V.S. Machine It was in May 1997 when world champion chess player Garri Kasparov lost the now infamous chess match to IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. Deep Blue was considered the first artificial intelligence program to win a chess...