Masters of Media

The Social Status Race: Battle for the Followers.

Have you ever had that moment were you where looking at someone else’s social network site profile and wondered about the amount of friends this person had? A person with more than 10.000 friends for example? And that you...

By Harro Heijboer on 10/08/09 Comments Off

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...

By Ramses Petronia on 10/08/09 Comments Off

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...

By Sander Leegwater on 10/08/09 Comments Off

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...

By Rutger van den Berg on 10/08/09 Comments Off

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...

By Margarida Fonseca on 10/08/09 Comments Off

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...

By Kimberley Spreeuwenberg on 10/08/09 Comments Off

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,...

By Maarten Hoogvliet on 10/07/09 Comments Off

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’...

By Simeona Petkova on 10/07/09 Comments Off

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”…

By Rakesh Kanhai on 10/07/09 1

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...

By Rakesh Kanhai on 10/07/09 Comments Off

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...

By Charlotte van Brakel on 10/07/09 2

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...

By ellen sluis on 10/06/09 3

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....

By Denise Pires on 10/06/09 5

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...

By Morgan Currie on 10/05/09 5

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...

By Nicola Bozzi on 10/05/09 Comments Off

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...

By Ramses Petronia on 10/05/09 3

In search for universal language

Umberto Eco, a cultural critic, semiotician, and a writer said that we live in an age where the “diminutive, the brief and the simple are highly prized in communication” (Thurlow & Brown). New communication technologies can empower young people...

By Jan Bajec on 10/05/09 Comments Off

@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...

By Margarida Fonseca on 10/05/09 Comments Off

“ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc”

According to the recent statistic from ITU (International Telecommunication Union), in conjunction with UN, more than half of the globe population is subscribed to mobile telephony systems. And this number competes with that of the Internet subscribers. While mobiles...

By Radmila Radojevic on 10/05/09 Comments Off

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...

By Allison Guy on 10/05/09 1

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...

By Joery Bruijntjes on 10/05/09 8

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...

By Sjoerd Tuinema on 10/05/09 2

The Paradox of Choice on Twitter

Even though I have spent a large portion of my life connected to the internet, I have noticed my attention span waning in the past few years. The first year I went to University in 2003, I walked into...

By Sarah Moore on 10/05/09 1

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...

By Yu-Fen Chen on 10/05/09 Comments Off