Masters of Media

Make voting safe again? A selection and as-sessment of contemporary technologies in relation to their integration with i-Voting

By conducting an academic literature review along with an empirical analysis of the Estonian i-Voting system, our aim was to identify weaknesses in the i-Voting infrastructure, and assess whether biometric technologies can be implemented to help alleviate issues and...

By Mandy Theel on 10/25/17 0

Mediating Veganism: A look at vegan self-presentation on Instagram

Veganism is an alternative food diet and lifestyle that aims to exclude, as far as possible any exploitation and cruelty to animals for food, clothing, or other by-products (The Vegan Society). A cursory search on Google Trends reveals that...

By Derrek Xavier on 10/25/17 0

Snapchat Fams as a Subculture: How Influencers Use Emojis for Commodifying Cross-Platform Engagement

Introduction Communities on social media are an emerging phenomenon in today’s society. Within the framework of networks, people come together virtually, satisfying their needs of communication and belonging, usually by creating communities based on mutual interests. Often, these communities...

By Nefeli Gkoni on 10/25/17 0

Face the Bubble: Revealing How Facebook Selects Users’ News Stories

Introduction The media content we are exposed to is becoming increasingly personalised (Borgesius 2). Personalisation in this sense can be explained as online media content tailored to an individual for it to have a more personal appeal to the...

By Anna Lezard on 10/25/17 0

Blind Spots: The value of information about cloud services for user empowerment.

“Cloud” – a word that suggests the promise and experience of accessing files from anywhere you choose, much like pulling it down from the sky. However, when we think of the verb “to cloud”, it means ‘to make less...

By Renate Brulleman on 10/25/17 0

The Data-Ing Game: The Value Placed On Our Own Data; How Socio-Economics Play A Part And How Our App Will Help Educate Users On The Current Worth Of Data In The Market

Our project aimed to design an app called ‘The Data-ing Game’ that would educate people on the value of their data. Not many realised the valuable commodity that their own personal data has become*. We aimed to distinguish whether...

By Aisling Crabbe on 10/25/17 0

Being Friends With Yourself: How Friendship Is Programmed Within The AI-Based Socialbot Replika.

The new social-bot application Replika allows you to become friends with a 100% artificial intelligence replica of yourself. In doing so, it offers a whole new social media experience in which the notion of friendship is configured by an...

By Neb Nima on 10/25/17 0

Dissecting Facebook’s Censorship

Since September 2016, Facebook’s banning of the “Napalm Girl” photograph, one of the most powerful images that represented the atrocities of the Vietnam War, has sparked a debate on Facebook’s censorship power and policies. In the 1972 photograph, Kim...

By Tu Quynh on 10/24/17 0

MirrorMirror: Illuminating the black box for the everyday internet user

MirrorMirror is a web extension that tracks a user’s search engine queries ultimately compiling a digital profile that characterizes the user. The goal of the non-profit tool is to encourage awareness and potentially behavioural change surrounding user’s interaction with...

By David Schogt on 10/24/17 0

iClarify: About The Control and Understanding of Our Privacy.

iClarify: About The Control and Understanding of Our Privacy. “I HAVE READ AND UNDERSTAND THIS AGREEMENT, AND I ACCEPT AND AGREE TO ALL OF ITS TERMS AND CONDITIONS” This might be one of the biggest lies on...

By Ilja van de Rhoer on 10/24/17 0

You cannot log out from the grave: The implications of Facebook suggesting immortality within its death policy.

People are barely aware that all their online profiles, pictures, and status updates will remain available online after they decease. When uploading those memories onto Facebook, we create our “digital self”. But when signing up for Facebook, users are...

By Drea Rodriguez Cervantes on 10/24/17 0

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 0

The role of anonymity in discussing social anxiety online: A comparative platform analysis of Facebook and Reddit

We usually use social media to share photos or events, to see what our friends are up to, or to wish our colleagues a happy birthday. It is less common to use these platforms to share your insecurities, fears...

By Anne van Meerveld on 10/24/17 0

Growing up on YouTube – How family vloggers are establishing their children’s digital footprints for them

The internet knows what you shared on Facebook last week. It sees what video you posted on YouTube. It even knows you’re reading this blog post right now. Every action you make online creates a trail of data or...

By Frederike Lichtenstein on 10/23/17 0

“ToScan”: Media Literacy and Understanding of Terms of Service

We are posing the question “how can we operationalise a form of privacy literacy in order to better understand social media terms of service?” In this research we engage in an academic debate and as an end result propose...

By Gergana Ivanova on 10/21/17 0

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 0

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 0

Instagram bots in the debate of free labor

In the recent years there has been a growing trend of Instagram bots creating accounts, liking content and posting comments on Instagram. For a cheap price, these bots are offered as a service, by sites such as Gramista to...

By Edo Druiventak on 09/25/17 0

Dust in the wind: On air pollution and objectivity

Abstract By comparing Robert Boyle’s measuring device to subtract data about corporal particles and air pollution visualization app the Breezometer I try to show that how and which data is being subtracted depends on a socio-cultural matrix in which...

By Ilja van de Rhoer on 09/25/17 0

There is no such thing as Privacy Policy: Tracking users’ online behaviour through Waze

When referring to navigation apps that are frequently used on our smartphones, the Waze app may sound familiar to many users. Founded in 2006, this app has been used by over 50 million users worldwide. Waze acts as a...

By Stefy Stefany Winona Santosa on 09/25/17 0

Voice assistants – speak or die?

The Tech’s Big 5 feels honour-bound to win the race for the best voice assistant. Since Siri’s introduction for iPhone 4s in 2011 and Alexa’s official debut at smart speaker Echo in 2015 the appetite for more natural ways...

By Aleksandra Straczek on 09/25/17 0

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 0

Camarilla: New Concept of Social Media or Not?

Is it not cool to have so many friends on social media anymore? Do social media undermine the definition of friendship? Are we ever more concerned about our privacy? These questions are provoked by the emergence of a social...

By Mari Fujiwara on 09/25/17 0

Digital Gerrymandering, Computational Propaganda and the Electronic Electoral Advantage: Towards a Case for Reform

Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law at Harvard University, coined the term ‘digital gerrymandering’ in 2014. Traditionally, gerrymandering was the political practice of manipulating constituency boundaries to cultivate a party-political advantage. Although the etymology derives from Elbridge Gerry’s governorship...

By Ryan Tristram-Walmsley on 09/25/17 0