Does making money make a SNS unpopular?
My gut feeling tells me that Social Network Services (SNS) do not exist because they are so great. They always provide for a basic need they fulfill, which for me has been to start a group in which I...
Aphoristic message (overload?) by a CMC world
Communication is as old as humans (or humanoids) itself, from a grunt, a shout to a simple gesture – we have always had the ability to convey messages to others around us – whether we’re correctly understood is a...
Twitter: Exposing the Idols
Twitter is a perfect tool for getting an insight in peoples daily lives. It encourages the following of public figures as well as “ordinary people”, who might be interesting to you. Besides the role of a follower, you also...
Esther Polak – New cartographies and storytelling of everyday life
Last Tuesday I had the chance to watch a lecture-performance by Esther Polak at the Netherlands Media Art Institute. Esther Polak is an artist born in Amsterdam in 1960 that is working in the field of New Media. Her...
The significance of Twitter
Since its start in 2006 people have speculated about the significance of Twitter. Twitter has often been criticized for it's lack of content, but is also praised for the empowering possibilities it offers us. I question both these...
Blogging, Twittering, SMS & Chat improving general writing skills
It is often heard that new media is killing our (especially teenager’s) writing skills. Writing on the Internet take bold forms, which are often assumed to influence the general use of language. Examples are acronyms (used in chat, sms,...
Twitter and the Vertical Stacking
In Politics of the Very Worst (1999) and Information Bomb (2000) Paul Virilio argues that ‘speed’ historically has been a source of power in all societies (from horsemanship, to railway transportation, naval power, flight and finally information technology). ‘Speed’...
Interesting Documentary on Virtuality…
Cyberkoelies…. About chinese modern slaves working for lazy gamers from the west that don’t want to do the first levels of World of Warcraft theirselves so they outsource the “labor”…
The Uses of Twitteracy
Why do I tweet?. Because I’m a narcissist?, because I want to start a revolution?, because I want to share my activities?, because I want my aphorism in the Twitter Wit book?, or simply because everyone’s doing it?. Honestly...
Twitter and the Rise of Impersonal Communication
Before the rise of twitter there already existed older -digital- communication devices that shared the same idea: short and fast communication between people. Those were mainly writing, faxing, emailing, chatting and later sms text messaging. In the case of...
Twitter: Public Space or Public Sphere?
Internet kills writing? According to Andrea Lunsford, researcher at the Stanford University, it is totally the other way around. There is an immense increase of people starting to write and digital writing is the biggest revolution in writing since...
Why are we using Twitter anyway?
The last couple of years online communities have been developing applications for users to share daily updates about their life, thoughts and whereabouts. Hyves provides a ‘WieWatWaar’ and Facebook has it’s own ‘Wall’ where users can update their friends....
Journalism, Meet Twitter (two paradoxes)
“Weird: I tweeted, Anderson Cooper’s person saw it, seconds later I’m phoning in to CNN on the Letterman affair(s). Talk about Twitter power” – Howard Kurtz’s Twitter feed, for the Washington Post. Traditional journalism is having to contend with...
Design your network. What has become of Twitter aesthetics?
“My nephew has HDADD: Hi-Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it’s unbelievably clear.” – Steven Wright Since Twitter came out it was pretty obvious it was something else. Its minimal, quasi-zen approach...
The Twitter Effect
For all those feeling nostalgic about the good old days in which search engines were not based on algorithms but actual people doing the work; your human side of the search engine is back. On Lazytweet you can ask...
@MOM, twitter #addmeaning or #losemeaning?
Last week we read Vannevar Bush’s essay “As we may think” and one aspect I truly found fascinating was the purpose for what he came up with the idea of the memex: an effort to arrange a mechanism to...
Foursquare: Are the benefits of locative social media limited to cities?
FourSquare has recently been described by bloggers as the next great micro-updating service – a geolocative platform that could compliment and even overcome Twitter. Some are even guessing that with its built-in impetus to visit local businesses, it may...
Twitter: The Inverse Panopticon?
There’s a lot to be said about Twitter and alike, even though few have done so from a humanities perspective. Today, I would like to pose some thoughts that might inspire more new media researchers to move forward in...
Does Twitter promote writing?
Over the years Twitter has gradually developed, meanwhile its practices have also changed drastically. The contemporary celebrities took their places, the early adopters started exploring the potentials while lobbying about it and ultimately the platform rapidly started to expand...
Txtng news in 140 characters
It is no news to us that text messaging is morphing our modern culture. In 2008, the British scholar David Crystal has observed how text messages in mobile phones and IMs can influence our live technologically, sociologically, psychologically, commercially, and...
The Habermasian implications of the Twittersphere
‘Blogosphere’, ‘Twittersphere’, ‘Afrosphere’. We’re gradually getting used to a new media terminology whereby we quickly refer to new communication spaces and specified fields as ‘spheres’. As the Twittersphere is still rapidly growing, we might want to look back at...