Masters of Media

Empire forces in contemporary videogames, hyperbole or justified concern?

In a discussion between the Paris-based culture theorist Paul Virilio and Jérôme Sans titled ‘The game of love and chance’, Virilio questions what kind of form virtuality has currently taken on nowadays: The imminent home installation of domestic simulators...

By Sjoerd Tuinema on 10/19/09 2

Political Framing on the Web?

USC professor Manuel Castells’ new book Communication Power theorized how the media is the place where power is decided at large (especially in democratic countries). According to Castells political framing is one of the major weapons in the political...

By Han Rusman on 10/19/09 Comments Off

Google Wave: A new way of creating dialogue

Google Wave is an online communication tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more ....

By Denise Pires on 10/18/09 6

Gender trouble in a virtual criminal world

The video game Grand Theft Auto IV (1) breathes violence. Not only does the title, which is the police term for motor vehicle theft, indicate this matter of unlawfully conduct. Also the story line and goals that need to...

By Thomas Fonville on 10/18/09 Comments Off

Stelarc’s Ideas Brought to Life in the Movie “Gamer”

“Gamer is a high-concept action thriller set in a near future when gaming and entertainment have evolved into a terrifying new hybrid. Humans control other humans in mass-scale, multi-player online games: people play people.. for keeps. Mind-control technology is...

By Charlotte van Brakel on 10/18/09 Comments Off

WAR GAMES

In the movie War Games (1983) Matthew Broderick wanted to hack a new computer game, in the process he accidently hacked the actual American defensive system. He engaged in global thermonuclear war in the process. While he’s playing a game the...

By Rakesh Kanhai on 10/18/09 Comments Off

(Re-)Constructing Social Networking Sites: Examining Software Relations and its Influence on Users

It's a little overdue, but I hereby officially want to post my MA thesis for everyone to read (and/or use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license). This thesis was written in a total period of about...

By Annewil Neervens on 10/18/09 Comments Off

The vigilance of the Wikipedians

In the last couple of weeks I got some responses to my post concerning the revisitation of my Wikipedia article about Richard A. Rogers – in which I told that I was stupefied by the speed with which I...

By Sander Leegwater on 10/17/09 1

The use of locative media in post-catastrophe response

I wonder, therefore, is there any other way we can look into the function of locative media, other than retrieving geo information, playing GPS treasure hunting game (geocaching), or babbling where we have been to? Can we (as...

By Yu-Fen Chen on 10/17/09 Comments Off

Happy Bookmarking

Happiness is effective. Emotional states can be transferred directly from one to another among people in social life, while few people realize the same phenomenon applies to social networks. Out of this James H. Fowler from Department of Political...

By Sisi Yu on 10/17/09 1

The Rise of the Network Library

Times change, and, as it seems, our time has changed a lot. The Internet can be blamed for many a change, since the constant information stream that is generated through the Internet influences a major part of our everyday...

By Charlotte Hendriks on 10/17/09 Comments Off

Cell Phone Apps and Scaling the Local

Cell phones applications for development might be what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls countergeographies – they piggy back on mainstream infrastructure produced by a global corporate economy, but for their own aims, including political struggles (or crime). It helps to...

By Morgan Currie on 10/17/09 Comments Off

Twitter as a marketing tool

For marketers using new media strategies is becoming popular. Direct mailing is a popular tool which is already used for many years. Social networks have taken over email in terms of popularity. Twitter is a very popular one. Businesses...

By Suzanne Schram on 10/16/09 Comments Off

The universal library of enhanced e-books

Kevin Kelly explains in his article Scan this book! a future in which it is possible to create a universal library. In this library all the existing books should be present in a digital form. For a long time...

By Suzanne Schram on 10/16/09 Comments Off

The Geospatial Dimension of News

In one of his blogposts Chris Anderson came up with rather expressive metaphor for a phenomena we all experience in relation to news: ‘That our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or...

By Jelle Kamsma on 10/16/09 Comments Off

Interpassivity on Facebook

Social networks give online opportunities to construct social connections, stay in touch with our friends and create/share user-generated content. They are characterized by interactivity; users are capable to react to each others’ actions. However, as our connections grow, our...

By Marc Stumpel on 10/16/09 2

Intellipedia: Intelligence of the 21st Century

One of my main interests, besides new media, is the world of intelligence. Spies, long leather jackets, newspaper with spy holes, espionage, cold war, totally my cup of tea. Since the United States Intelligence Community (IC) came up in...

By Tim van Essen on 10/16/09 Comments Off

The Cybraphon, the Baroque, the Embodiment of the Digital

Wunderkammers, literally a ‘cabinet of wonders,’ are generally viewed as the precursor to the natural history museum, although such collections also spanned the breadth of human endeavor from art to anthropological artifacts to religious relics. Wunderkammer embody an approach...

By Allison Guy on 10/16/09 Comments Off

Manuel Castells: Who has the networking power?

I have placed Web 2.0 and social networking platforms as ‘media objects’ within a framework of Manuel Castells in the context of the network society. What interests me in particular is the tension Castells described, between mass communication and...

By Radmila Radojevic on 10/16/09 Comments Off

The notion of ‘disorientation’ and the proxy server

Few days ago, I was editing my assignment-entry on Wikipedia (logged in) when I received a warning (generated by bot or editor) that the IP I am currently using might belong to a proxy server. Although the administrator of...

By Simeona Petkova on 10/15/09 Comments Off

Clouded Software or Software in the Clouds

The Cloud is all in one; storage of data, software as a service, Web 2.0, and so much more. It is the network of computers that distribute processing power, applications, and large systems among many machines (we already use...

By Jan Bajec on 10/15/09 Comments Off

Classification, culture & the Flickr.com tag

Web 2.0 tagging systems like Flickr’s categorize the website’s content bottom-up. The classification is powered by users applying their common sense and intuition; wisdom-of-the-crowd, resulting in a folk taxonomy of everything that is to be found in the Flickr...

By Maarten Hoogvliet on 10/15/09 1

Discourse network 2000 Does technology influence what we write?

How do the tools that you use for writing influence what you write? Alan Liu researches this relation between technology and writing. He argues that our reading and writing is part of “discourse network 2000”. We structure our knowledge...

By Kimberley Spreeuwenberg on 10/15/09 2

Gaming: The interpassive interplay between user and environment

The interplay between the user and the game is tended to be thought as of being an active and interactive one. But how accurate is this conception? Through the work of Slavoj Žižek I will argue that there are deeper...

By Denise Pires on 10/15/09 Comments Off