Masters of Media

5G Network Rollout Expected to Stir Things Up

Three point three billions. This is the amount of smartphone users around the world for the year 2019 (Statistica). For the following two years, the expected amount of users is to reach 3.5 and 3.8 billions (Statistica). Among what makes...

By Romane Donadini on 09/20/19 0

Cybernetic Subjectivity and Information

The image above attempts to illustrate some of the core elements of what we could call ‘cybernetic subjectivity,’ that is, how the process of ‘subjectification’ might occur within a cybernetic framework. Here, we refer to Michel Foucault’s idea of...

By Hailey Beaman on 05/08/19 0

Could a Digital Expiry Date Policy Limit Extractive Platform Capitalism Business Models?

Since 2016, numerous digital data leaks, data-sharing revelations, and scandals have been brought to light — from Cambridge Analytica to Google+ to several others. The data breaches compromised the personal information of millions of users and showed that not...

By Mahmoud Badry on 04/16/19 0

The post capitalist ad manager: solution to user’s data exploitation

Data and free labour Without knowing it, you have been working and creating valuable content for many third parties that rely their life on your creations. While scrolling down, watching a video that just passed by on your...

By Jérémie Bottollier Lemallaz on 04/15/19 0

Neoliberal subjectivity in the age of platform capitalism

Foucault states that the liberal art of government is founded on the very rationality of the governed themselves. This concept of governmentality is not just a tool for thinking about government and governing but also incorporates how and what...

By Jérémie Bottollier Lemallaz on 04/15/19 0

Can we deter tech monopolies and combat income inequality through a reformed open source software development?

The imbalance world of software development The foundation of the modern internet is built upon open source software. According to Nadia Eghbal’s report about the unseen labour of open source software development, more than 95% of the internet software...

By Thienthai Sangkhaphanthanon on 03/26/19 0

Extraction and accumulation in times of platform capitalism

The above visualization represents some of the core developments in what has been referred to as ‘platform capitalism’. It draws upon the small volume by Nick Srniceck with the same title. In ‘Platform Capitalism’, Srnicek explains how capitalism is...

By Sanne Stevens on 03/26/19 0

A Call for Collectivization: Addressing the atomization and exploitation of ‘lean platform’ workers

Sketching the Problem: Lean Platforms and ‘Precarity by Design’ The platform labor economy, epitomized by platforms such as Uber and TaskRabbit, is actively reshaping the relationship between workers and the labor that they perform. Sometimes referred to as the...

By Hailey Beaman on 03/25/19 0

A Capitalist Does Not Always Pay His Debts: On Debt, Rentism, and Inequality

Debt, governance, and inequality are three of the main building blocks of capitalist economies. These economies have features that allow great wealth to essentially reproduce itself in the absence of strong governance regulation, which in turn typically leads to...

By Mahmoud Badry on 02/17/19 0

China’s Dystopian Social Credit System Within Western Borders

Imagine a world where your every move, online and offline, gets monitored and scored by big companies and the government. This idea gets even more chilling when your online activities, behaviour, relationships and financial data ultimately determine whether you...

By Oana Patrichi on 10/24/18 0

How are gender norms reconstructed through app store ecologies and visual interfaces?

A look at popular medical, health & fitness apps in the Google Play store (NL) Figure 1: Google Play Store search results for “period” mobile applications Introduction This research project interests itself in the gender dynamics at play in...

By Holly Foxton on 10/24/18 0

Am I—Reflections on the search recommendations, algorithmic identity and the datafied subject

“The endless, continuously updated streams of information online are selected, processed and made available through recommendations calculated by complex algorithms. Am I explores how these algorithmic recommendations shape our everyday existence – and both reflect as shape our sense...

By Jing Shi on 10/24/18 0

VR as a Tool to Prevent Sexual Offenses

According to an article by Refinery29, 81 percent of women and 43 percent of men report having experienced some form of sexual assault or harassment in their lifetimes (Ohikuare). With 2017 being the year of trailblazing campaigns such as...

By Mahmoud Badry on 10/24/18 0

Monetization on Twitch: Investigating the Relationship Between Audience, Creator and Content

The social and interactive nature of web 2.0 (O’Reilly) and new media platforms provide a sense of freedom for users to produce or consume content according to their preferences. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have, over the...

By Rama Adityadarma on 10/24/18 0

Life in the Amazon(e)

Introduction In 1995, the then thirty-year-old Jeff Bezos founded Amazon and by using the emerging World Wide Web, he was able to sell books globally, from his garage. Although he could probably not imagine that he would one day...

By Lieve Keizer on 10/24/18 0

Swipe you left out of my life!

How the features of tinder encourage both connectedness and social indifference As the world is becoming more digitally connected and people are becoming more reliant on the Internet and digital technologies for various aspects of their lives, it comes...

By Camille Godineau on 10/24/18 0

You Won’t Believe What These Young Liberal Students Did Their Project On

Fake news When Pheidippides burst into the Greek assembly to exclaim ‘nenikēkamen’, after running from the battle of Marathon to Athens where the Greeks had just conquered the Persians, his death gave birth to the concept of the marathon...

By Elise van der Linde on 10/24/18 0

Smart Home Technologies and the Transformation Of Domestic Space

Since Gordon Moore’s prophetic law in 1965, in which he claimed that microchips would develop so that the speed would double while size would decrease every year, has allowed for the evolution of ubiquitous computing and its introduction into...

By Erika Grimes on 10/24/18 0

Cookie Monster: building awareness around free labour and data-exploitation

Introduction Users that roam the European Internet on a daily basis will have come across them countless of times. Each time a new website is visited it pops up in the middle of the screen or it rests...

By Aranka Kooi on 10/24/18 0

Join the HIVE: The AR future of social networks

The Age of AR Augmented Reality (AR) is set to be the next big step in computing, and experts are predicting a big growth of the AR sector, estimating it at around 140 billion Euros worth by 2024. Many of...

By Max Rogall on 10/23/18 0

Free as in ‘labor’, not as in ‘movement’: Google’s Local Guides and Gamifying Digital Maps

In the past few years, tourism has hit an all-time high across the globe. With decreasing costs of transportation and travel, more and more countries are seeing unprecedented numbers of visitors. By May 2018, Turkey had received 11.8 million tourists,...

By Eliza Connolly on 10/23/18 0

Do the Robot: A critical alternative to gendered humanistic virtual assistants

“Alexa, how deep is the ocean?”, “Alexa play some music!”, “Alexa, call the plumber!” Mundane tasks such as making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, and searching for weather, traffic, sports, and other real-time information are all outsourceable in...

By Katarzyna Wiercioch on 10/23/18 0

Culture, Art & Digitisation

Being art lovers, we’re always looking for what’s new in the world of art. This led us to an article about L’Atelier des Lumieres in Paris which is exhibiting the works of Gustav Klimt in a digitally immersive manner....

By Kanchana Varghese on 10/23/18 0

“Grassroots Maptivism”: Mapping Feminist Movements Around the World

The virtual space has become the preferred place to demand for change. There are several examples of such movements from all over the world – Occupy Wall Street, The Arab Spring, #BlackLivesMatter, #NiUnaMenos #15-M Movement. With over 4 billion...

By Tommaso Campagna on 10/23/18 0