Masters of Media

Game of Fakes: An Entertaining Approach to Analyzing How Awareness of Fake News Affects Trust in News Media

‘Fake news’: to Donald Trump, it’s a well-loved, catch-all phrase for the mainstream news media, but to scholars and politicians, it’s a trend of great concern. Fake news, and dis-, mis-, and mal-information is becoming harder for the average...

By Emma Knight on 10/20/18 Comments Off

Bubble Trouble – Venture Out of Your Filter Bubbles

The world we live in today has been bestowed with epithets such as fake news era, post-truth world and misinformation society in the press as well as academic literature. These discussions call attention to how the news we encounter...

By Darsana Vijay on 10/19/18 Comments Off

“Hidden Cost”: Social Commerce Practices and the Collaboration between Snapchat and Amazon

In an era when S-commerce (social commerce) is dominating digital environments, social media platforms use more and more tools to achieve this combination of commercial and social activities. Like Instagram and Pinterest, now Snapchat jumped onto this trend and...

By Aikaterini Mniestri on 10/19/18 Comments Off

Did you see Trump’s Tweet today: Consumption of Information on Twitter and birth of TweetCheck

With the constant evolution of new media, people are offered with more options on how to inform themselves on the current situation in the world. As Arkaitz Zubiaga et al. note, ‘while social media have become mainstream, as shown...

By Anna Teresova on 10/19/18 Comments Off

Data after Death: Shaping Our Human Identity and the Construction of the Self through Our Digital Footprint

If you could talk to someone you have lost one more time, would you? If you could, would you preserve your parent’s memories, so your future children could talk to them? Whatever reasons you might have for your answer,...

By Barbara Boeters on 10/18/18 Comments Off

Swiping Right vs. Finding Mr. Right: Facebook Attempts to Reinvent Online Dating

Online dating is becoming an integral part of how people meet each other. According to Pew Research Center, nearly all age groups show a higher percentage of usage of online dating in 2015 compared to 2013 (Smith and Anderson n.pag.)....

By Luisa Zap on 10/18/18 Comments Off

Matteo Salvini and the potentials of Facebook live-stream

Politicians are among the most affected by the breaking of live-stream services in social networks: this new communication has opened up uncharted ways to interact with supporters. Matteo Salvini, the most influential representative of European far-right populism, has developed...

By Giovanni Rossetti on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Wingman: a true matchmaker or another step away from a social society?

The typical love stories you mostly hear from your parents or their friends are getting distinct. Nowadays, a lot of the relationships between humans emerge via online dating, and amongst the younger generation, via dating apps such as Tinder,...

By Puck Stallinga on 09/24/18 Comments Off

The contradictory internet user

Abstract In this paper I want to state that the contemporary media user is acting in two distinct ways. In order to illustrate this I analyzed two different apps ExpressVPN and Cammeleon that both focuses on securing...

By Ruben Leenders on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Influencer marketing: #Transparency over #ad

In other parts of the world it is already a well-established marketing technique; celebrity’s being paid to tweet, or post on Facebook and Instagram. However in “down to earth” Netherlands, this trend has just recently began to emerge. Social...

By sarah berzel on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Qutoutiao: Make Digital Reading More “Valuable”

With 48.8 million “employees”，Qutoutiao Inc. (means “fun headlines”), a two-year old mobile-news company becomes one of the biggest news and video aggregator in China. Being available at application stores since Jun. 2016, the number of Qutoutiao’s users has witnessed...

By Jueling Hu on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Online to Offline, Customers Have Nowhere to Hide —A New Targeting Technology via Wifi on Mobile Devices

Have you ever received the promotion advertisements from some brands? The answer for most of us probably is: yes. Based on customers’ preferences, retailers offer the information of their upcoming products by the eye-catching advertisements. However, have you ever...

By Jing Shi on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Can we leave the social problems to algorithm?

Which kind of tech startups can value the most in the shortest time? Which kind of tech companies can take a share of the profits in the fiercely-competitive Chinese internet market? If you take reaching a valuation of about...

By Yao Chen on 09/24/18 Comments Off

There is Power in a Union!

Earlier this year, riders for food delivery services UberEats and Deliveroo went on strike, contesting the companies’ decision to move from contracts to subcontracting their employees (Van Unen). This would exempt the companies from paying taxes over their employees’...

By Joris van Breugel on 09/24/18 Comments Off

The case of Landr: will AI affect music production creativity?

As AI-based technology has already slowly entered in many sectors of our digitally reshaped world, correspondingly it is increasingly being employed also in different fields of music production. (Fiebrink and Caramiaux, 2) The most popular of its applications is...

By Daniel Leix Palumbo on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Looking behind the shiny, shiny lights – The tremendous rise of DOOH Advertising

Looking behind the shiny, shiny lights – The tremendous rise of DOOH Advertising Imagine walking around Amsterdam Centraal Station during the day. Feel the eyes of strangers coveting you, hear the sounds of the multiple vehicles whizzing by, see...

By Sushanth Shyamsundar on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Immortal Digital Existence

In our current information society and digital media culture, the stories, images, voices and traces we leave behind, construct the narrative of who we are. Our identity has become synonymous with our online data. Digital media empowers us. However,...

By Rima Baroud on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Googley Eyes

Microsoft is doing it (Hololens), Apple is doing it (Apple AR), Facebook is doing it (Facebook AR Studio) and last but not least, Google is doing it. Augmented Reality is the future of computing and all the big companies want to be the leader on this new market (The...

By Max Roest on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Curing your smartphone addiction: There’s an app for that

Two hours forty-five minutes is the average time per day I spent on my Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone for the past 30 days. The question here is, do you know exactly how long have you spent on your...

By Thienthai Sangkhaphanthanon on 09/24/18 Comments Off

The Death of the Meme: Article 13 and what this means for the internet

On the 12th of September 2018, the European Parliament voted on a version of an EU copyright directive, namely the The European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Two articles are currently stirring up controversy, one...

By Elise van der Linde on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Vote yay or vote nay, but you just can’t ignore micro-targeting.

“Numbers and democracy have always been linked.”John Durham Peters proclaims, giving examples from Greek political systems to modern opinion surveys. He focuses on majority – the social force through numbers, that democracy uses to establish legitimacy (434). And when...

By Ketaki Chand on 09/24/18 Comments Off