Masters of Media

A story about YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community

<p style=”text-align: justify;”>“From You to Tube: YouTube’s googlization and the hidden community” is a short video created by Lasse Timmermann and me for the Digital Methods Seminar. It follows the conceptual and methodological framework of “distilling the ‘textual grammar’...

By Simeona Petkova on 11/20/09 1

Lev Manovich: Studying Culture With Search Algorithms

New media theorist Lev Manovich summarized his latest contribution to the field of software studies: cultural analytics. Whereas traditional cultural analysis relies on real-world resources (human interpretation and physical storage), cultural analytics relies on the computer and search algorithms...

By Chris Castiglione on 11/20/09 3

Ingmar Weber: Free the Query Logs

With Google seeping into every nook of the Society of the Query conference – the subject, direct or indirect, of most presentations and discussions – you might ask why Google isn’t here to speak for itself. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly,...

By Morgan Currie on 11/17/09 Comments Off

Matteo Pasquinelli: Are We Renting our Collective Intelligence to Google?

Matteo Pasquinelli’s presentation this Friday at The Society of the Query conference organized by the Institute of Network Cultures lead by Geert Lovink, was based on his paper, Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier...

By Liliana Bounegru on 11/16/09 10

Matthew Fuller: Search Engine Alternatives

The search market is a multi-billion dollar industry, and given such potential to capitalize there is a large window of opportunity with a vast range of possibilities for the future of search. The mythology of the search engine is...

By Chris Castiglione on 11/15/09 1

Yann Moulier Boutang @ The Society of The Query asking, “Are we all just Google’s worker bees?”

Are we all just worker bees being exploited by Google for capitalistic means? What Google is selling is not an ordinary service, but a meta-service, one that depends on human contribution. Yann Moulier Boutang likens this human activity to...

By Chris Castiglione on 11/14/09 1

The Digital Revolution vs. the Cuban Revolution?

‘ since information wants to be free, then so do the people who have it - setting the stage for a titanic political struggle between the last Soviet-style dictatorship in the world and the first Internet insurgency. Call it...

By ellen sluis on 11/11/09 Comments Off

4 Minute Thesis Video on the TEDx Amsterdam Site

I posted a 4-minute video which summarizes some of the main points from my thesis on the music industr(ies), "Copy What Can't Be Sold; and Sell What Can't Be Copied".

By Chris Castiglione on 11/10/09 Comments Off

VideoSongs: a Cottage (Remix Culture) Industry

The YouTube account stats under my profile badge now boast over 13,000 videos watched, but besides the occasional surfing squirrel, dramatic chipmunk (technically a prairie dog) or Dawkins diatribe, I spend most of my time on YouTube listening to...

By Thomas Wielemaker on 11/05/09 Comments Off

The culture of speed

The “Accelerated Living conference” took place in Utrecht, last month, and it was part of the Impakt Festival 2009. As the name may unveil, the conference theme was about the way we experience and how we approach time, speed...

By Margarida Fonseca on 11/04/09 4

eComm conference 2009

Last week I participated in the eComm conference (The Emerging Communications (eComm) Conference & Awards) in Amsterdam. Impressions? I’m impressed. For two reasons. Firstly, I was impressed by the conference itself. Reason 1 The organization was excellent. Moderation by...

By Hania Piotrowska on 11/04/09 Comments Off

If it’s not on Wikipedia, it doesn’t exist

Florian Brody is an internationally acclaimed digital media specialist with more than twenty years experience in electronic publishing in Europe and the U.S. He is the President of Brody Inc., a publishing company based in Los Angeles and Vienna...

By Hania Piotrowska on 11/03/09 Comments Off

Democracy of the Algorithm

Working on the Society of the Query conference, I often find myself confronted with an unquestioned believe in what are believed to be the empowering or even emancipating qualities of universally accessible open and free information. Michael Stevenson once...

By Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff on 11/03/09 2

Food Blogs as a Surrogate for Action

Well-known champion of sustainable food and a commonsense approach to eating Michael Pollan recently ran a piece in the New York Times called Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. In this article, he argues that cooking shows, with...

By Allison Guy on 11/03/09 2

(Accelerated) World at Work

The Accelerated Living was a theme of the 20th edition of the Impakt Festival (Utrecht 2009) that was focused on changing notions of time. It explored the ways in which we experience time and speed, and the ways in...

By Jan Bajec on 11/02/09 2

Locative media: mapping movement trough the city

Locative media genre can evoke uneasy feelings due to its military origin and ties to corporate power trough funding. There is a significant difference between subversive appropriation of the locative media tools such as in art practices and their...

By Radmila Radojevic on 11/02/09 1

Digital Preservation and Online Journals

Paper documents can be neglected for long periods of time, digital documents on the other hand, cannot. Digital documents have to be transferred to new storage media or software environments in order to keep the document accessible. Storage media...

By Gwen Keupe on 11/02/09 2

BEACON and the use of datasets in media art

When I attended at the ‘Accelerated Living’ conference as a part of the Impakt Festival (Utrecht), it once more appeared there’s plenty of academic prospect on the subjects of time and space. As the works often build on theory...

By Sjoerd Tuinema on 11/01/09 Comments Off

Medium specificity: the difference between analogue literature and electronic literature

Medium specificity is a principle in aesthetics and art criticism. Clement Greenberg believed that “the unique and proper area of competence” for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are...

By Suzanne Schram on 11/01/09 5

“iWATCH my neighbor, because iTHINK he is up to no good.”

Last week I came across an internet posting about the new commercial for a new campaign by the Los Angeles Police Department. This commercial shows different kinds of American people all promising to do their best in order to...

By Thomas Fonville on 11/01/09 Comments Off

Ask The Readers: Hey YOU. Let’s talk!

Arguably the title of this post is a bit direct, but I thought it was a sure way to get your attention. And if you’re reading this, it means I’m right. The thing is this; there’s a lot of...

By Joery Bruijntjes on 11/01/09 3

Weerwoord.nl as a Digital Public Sphere

Weerwoord.nl is a Dutch website that functions as a political en social forum where people can deliberate. The subjects that people deliberate on are various and their viewpoints are often contradictory, making Weerwoord.nl a divers and interesting website to...

By Gwen Keupe on 11/01/09 Comments Off

Information Overload at eComm

The first day of the Emerging Communications (eComm) Conference & Awards was an excellent opportunity to make a first acquaintance with Google Wave, the new communication platform by Google. Participants of the conference were all provided with an invite and...

By Jelle Kamsma on 11/01/09 Comments Off

Git Virtue?: Github and Commons-based Peer Production

Github, online beginning in 2008, has quickly changed the face of source code hosting. Called “social coding” by participants and commentators alike, the site has propelled the adoption of distributed version control systems (DVCS) in general, and git in...

By John Haltiwanger on 11/01/09 6