Masters of Media

Online Conversations & Social Networks

When Facebook bought FriendFeed to take on Twitter, there was a lot of discussion whether or not Facebook could provide the end users with enough added value to ‘make the switch.’ Personally I found that question to be irrelevant....

By Joery Bruijntjes on 09/30/09 Comments Off

Facebook vs Ning – what is “social”?

A social network is, according to Wikipedia, a social structure made of individuals or organizations, which are connected by one or more specific types of interdependency (friendship, kinship, financial exchange, sexual relationships, and relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige)....

By Jan Bajec on 09/29/09 Comments Off

Pecking in the Picnic #2

There were a lot of interactive experiences during the PICNIC, the virtual sightseeing scenic viewer by Ydreams was one of them. Even though this unit at a first look resembles like a kiosk, when you start swinging its screen...

By Margarida Fonseca on 09/29/09 Comments Off

How to permanently erase your Facebook account

As one of unique experiences of cyberspace and virtual environments is this feeling that you have been transported “from an ordinary into a pure imaginary space”. Real time interaction enforces this feeling by making irrelevant notions such as distance....

By Radmila Radojevic on 09/29/09 Comments Off

How much do I know about you?

This is the sequel of an experiment I started last week. I was curious how can you use Facebook quizzes for research and marketing purposes. My self made Facebook Quiz has not become very successful. After about a week...

By Marta Colpani on 09/29/09 Comments Off

Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?

Early in 2007, something strange happened: Wikipedia's growth line flattened. People suddenly became reluctant to create new articles or fix errors or add their kernels of wisdom to existing pages...

By Sisi Yu on 09/28/09 Comments Off

PICNIC Interior Design

I know many blog posts about the PICNIC conference from this weekend have been floating around the web the past few days. Most of them discussing the topics covered by the speakers and the future of new media. I...

By Sarah Moore on 09/28/09 Comments Off

Social Networking Sites: Safety First

The rise of social networking sites makes people put a lot of personal information on the internet. The idea behind this is simple. How more complete and updated your profile is, the more easier you are to find on...

By Charlotte van Brakel on 09/28/09 Comments Off

My Wikipedia-page revisited…

Last week all of the Master students where assigned to start a ‘new’ Wikipedia article, which we all did but with which most of us had a lot of troubles. Most articles where deleted within minutes after creation, others...

By Sander Leegwater on 09/28/09 7

Facebook, Connecting and Controlling People

Facebook connects people. Not a very new phenomenon, but the amount of people using the social network increases every day and so does the amount of information people show and share with (too many?) others.

By ellen sluis on 09/28/09 Comments Off

From Metaphysics to Metadata
Jorge Luis Borges, tagging, and social networks

In his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius the argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges imagined a place with a completely different perception of reality than ours. In Tlön "the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic...

By Nicola Bozzi on 09/28/09 Comments Off

The Construction of an Online (Facebook) Identity

The web has become something other than the illusive place where we can get as much information as we want at all times. More than a knowledge database, the Internet has transformed into a place where we can not...

By Charlotte Hendriks on 09/28/09 Comments Off

How Can Artists Use Social Networks?

Artists and the Ontological Web “As an artist I find that social networking technology is ontological.” -Andres Manniste on Nettime, March 2008. As we use the web we construct a portrait of ourselves over time: what sites we return to,...

By Morgan Currie on 09/28/09 3

Does the Flickr ‘style’ manifest a longing for a non-technological authenticity?

Photography on Flickr is clearly tied into the overall tradition of vernacular or amateur photography. Where the introduction of the Kodak-Eastman camera in 1888 brought the means to create photographs to a huge segment of the population, the internet...

By Allison Guy on 09/28/09 Comments Off

From social networking sites to social experiences

While thinking about what the future of social networking sites might be, I became curious about what Wired or Forrester think on the topic, what’s the trend? In this article, Wired acknowledges what has become common sense: people are...

By Margarida Fonseca on 09/28/09 1

Time to get social online, but why?

Why do we socialize online? Because “human beings are social animals,” Aristotle would say so.

By Yu-Fen Chen on 09/28/09 Comments Off

Social Networking Sites (SNS); are we helping in the shrinking of our own privacy?

Social Networking Sites (SNS) are commonly known to just about everyone nowadays or so it seems, who doesn’t at least own a FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Hyves, Ning account or combinations of these and many, many others! But do you...

By Sander Leegwater on 09/28/09 Comments Off

Twitter and its networking (in)capabilities

Nowadays, many of the popular social network sites are advanced platforms that more or less evolved from simple community platforms or fora. Where Myspace, Friendster and The WELL (later the Dutch De Digitale Stad popped up as a similar...

By Sjoerd Tuinema on 09/27/09 Comments Off

Social Network Sites – friend/Friend/defriend

Social Network Sites (SNSs), like Facebook and Hyves, are focused on ‘Friendship’. As SNSs get more mainstream and infiltrate in our everyday lives the use of the term ‘Friendship’ becomes more problematic within the SNSs discourse. Using the labels...

By Kimberley Spreeuwenberg on 09/27/09 2