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

Quantum supremacy is coming: What does it have to offer in communication?

Quantum computing is the now the fever of the mind. Needless to say, there is a huge effort to make powerful quantum computers and this used to be the stuff of university’s physics department. But you can see the potential...

By on 09/23/19 Comments Off

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...

By robert baciu on 10/24/19 Comments Off

Musical Horizons: Spotify the Secret Nudger

We aim to investigate whether Spotify is impacting our musical horizons by comparing our perceived music taste to Spotify’s suggestions curated by their recommender engines over time. For these purposes, we used data from our four Discover Weekly, Yearly...

By Angélique Jutand on 10/24/19 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

Public Safety in the Year of Unprecedented Times: An Intervention on Government Sanctioned Covid-19 Data Visualization

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread globally, most governments have launched national ‘corona dashboards’ via public health organisations on which they keep track of the (rising) case numbers and attempt to visualize the spread of the virus in...

By on 10/21/20 Comments Off

How the Wall Street Journal made Facebook Inc. release an internal research

In the middle of September of 2021, the Wall Street Journal added an article to their ‘Facebook files’. This article surrounded Facebook’s internal research on Instagram and the negative effects it might be able to have on its users,...

By on 10/08/21 Comments Off

Moving Money: A Comparative Infrastructural Analysis and the Impact of Trust

Abtract By making infrastructure visible, we are able to see clearly how it shapes our environment and our experiences of it. This paper examines how policies and regulations, just as much as the technical backbone of payment applications, act...

By on 10/29/21 Comments Off

“Do fans also like…”? — in what ways do big artists profit from Spotify’s recommendation system

WG1 – 7 In recent years streaming services have exponentially grown in their popularity. Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify have amassed large numbers of users, making them some of the most well-known platforms to date. Especially for music,...

By on 10/29/21 Comments Off

YourTube: A Project to Detect the Bias Within the YouTube Algorithm

The YouTube recommender algorithm may be influencing your life more than you know. We might have a solution for that. A project by: Dilara Akdemir, Betsy Brossman, Gaurika Chaturvedi, and Noyan Er Introduction On YouTube, amateurs and professionals are...

By on 10/29/21 Comments Off

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.

By Tamar Hellinga on 10/24/19 Comments Off

CAN MUSIIO BURST THE SPOTIFYBUBBLE?

In the ever-changing music industry offering the best discovery tools is key. A small start-up from Singapore called Musiio could be a serious rival to big player Spotify.

By on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Technological Migration: New Media and the Protection of Migratory Species

Wildlife GPS tracking is becoming more common practice, helping our understanding of migratory routes. ICARUS is a key driver within these technological developments, with new media playing a vital role in their strategy to help prevent the extinction of...

By on 09/27/20 Comments Off

Deepfakes, Privacy Paradoxes and Black Boxes

“I do worry about my privacy,” Huang said. “Because no one cares about my data when I’m a nobody. But if people think they can make money from my information, it makes me worry about the security of my...

By on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Coding queer bias: An artist’s response to the lack of diversity in machine learning

Machine learning technology is known not only to reinforce but even deepen social bias, consequently fostering discrimination and oppressing diversity in multiple ways. Counterintuitively, in “Zizi – Queering the Dataset”, the artist Jake Elwes shows how machine learning can...

By on 12/04/20 Comments Off

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...

By Lukas Beckenbauer on 09/23/19 Comments Off

Android 10, privacy and digital wellbeing

Google released, on 3 September 2019, the new version of its mobile operating system, Android 10, for now only available for selected smartphones. This update, “powered by on-device machine learning”, includes new features, among which are the dark theme,...

By Vânia Ferreira on 09/23/19 Comments Off

Who controls your voice controlled world?

One of the latest trends in the tech world is the development of the smart digital voice assistant. It was first popularized by iPhone’s Siri, and now companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are developing software and hardware technology...

By Aleksandra Straczek on 10/24/17 Comments Off

Publicism: Breaking the chains of press censorship and surveillance

MEDIA FREEDOM IS INCREASINGLY FRAGILE The 2017 World Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters without Border (RSF), shows that media freedom is increasingly threatened not only in authoritarian regimes but also in democratic countries. For example, the Netherlands...

By Tu Quynh on 09/25/17 Comments Off

Launchmetrics: the fortune-teller Fashion Week has been waiting for

Has Fashion Week become irrelevant? The question hangs in the air this month as magazine editors are replaced with Instagram influencers and exclusivity is lost to live streams at the fashion shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris....

By on 09/23/19 Comments Off

The iPhone nudge and the choice to budge

Every time you reach into your pocket for your iPhone (sorry to exclude non-iPhone users) you’re prompted with a security code, unless this feature has been disabled. Your options are entering a 4 to 6 numerical code or...

By Phil Creamer on 09/25/17 Comments Off

Artificial Intelligence Defeats People’s Privacy

Last week a Tweet by The Guardians’s writer David Shariatmadari showed how Google Maps tried to take a bullock’s privacy serious by blurring its face. The bullock was thereby treated the same as humans when it comes to their...

By Elsemieke Vermijs on 09/22/16 Comments Off

The UvA Research Hub

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is a non-campus-based university embracing the motto: “the city is our campus”. The various UvA faculties are scattered across Amsterdam. Consequently, students and researchers from different disciplines rarely meet each other. A study by...

By Dominique Verschragen on 10/17/14 Comments Off

Datacoup: Selling Personal Data in the Age of Acxiom

Last thursday, Datacoup officially opened its personal data marketplace for every internet user. While it was in beta for two years, it is now possible for you to to sell the records of your online activities to the New...

By Stef van den Broek on 09/16/14 Comments Off

Google Maps and Fukushima: Collective Memory and Data Visualization

As major world events unfold before our eyes at accelerated speeds, via a host of different medias how can we process these vast quantities of information? In the digital age, we consume news round-the-clock, whether we use smart phone...

By Susan Clandillon on 09/10/13 1