Masters of Media

Book review:’Tracking back communities’ by Annalisa Pelizza

In her Phd thesis “Tracking back communities”, Annalisa Pelizza reconsiders the notion of online communities. It is impossible to give a comprehensive outline of this extensive thesis in such a brief review and I will try to tackle some...

By Radmila Radojevic on 09/15/09 Comments Off

How to ‘Blog’!?

For my first post here I did a little research on the ‘MofM way to blog’. And my general opinion is that a lot of posts are of interesting academic value, but at the same time often relatively dull....

By Ramses Petronia on 09/15/09 Comments Off

Book Review of: Search Engine Society – Alexander Halavais

In his 2009 published book “Search Engine Society”, Alexander Halavais looks at the impact of the phenomenon of search engines in the everyday online lives of Internet-using citizens around the world. Search engines have become a widely used component...

By Charlotte Hendriks on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Book Report: Virtualpolitik by Elizabeth Losh

Elizabeth Losh is the Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at U.C. Irvine where she teaches courses on digital rhetoric and public communication. Her research specialty is digital rhetoric and the discourses of information culture, especially the...

By Jan Bajec on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Book Report of ‘Ourspace – Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture’ by Christine Harold

This book really hit an personal snare with me, because I have been trying to avoid most commercial expressions by any medium for years now. I really regard it as an invasion of my privacy – I didn’t ask...

By Sander Leegwater on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Chasing Away Ghosts: a Review of Brian Rotman’s Becoming Beside Ourselves

Q: “In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. New Land is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears there?” A: “I don’t know; I’ve seen a...

By Morgan Currie on 09/14/09 1

The Multilingual Internet, or Where the Green Ants Dream

In one of the last scenes of Werner Herzog‘s Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) an Aborigine stands up in a court room to speak up against some mineral excavations happening in a sacred tribal ground. The judge asks...

By Nicola Bozzi on 09/14/09 Comments Off

A Review of: Taken Out of Context

She’s being called the rockstar of social network sites and has done some extensive research on the subject. The American academic Danah Boyd has now completed her PhD dissertation, “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics”,...

By Jelle Kamsma on 09/14/09 1

Book review of The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader

Art comes in a lot of different divisions. Mostly related to a culture, often a critique of an era. The fact that this reader focuses on culture is immediately noticeable from the title. Carrying “Aotearoa” in the title, which...

By Thomas Fonville on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Book review of: Animal Spirits

In Animal Spirits, Matteo Pasquinelli takes on a burdensome task of elaborating on modern digital culture (or capitalism) from the viewpoint of complicated philisophical sociology. This goes alongside John Keynes’ definition of the animal spirits as a dynamic endogenious...

By Sjoerd Tuinema on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Review of: When Code Meets Place: Collaboration and Innovation at WiFi Hotspots

Someone wakes up from a night’s sleep. After having breakfast he or she kisses the kids goodbye and takes the long stairs down to the street. The Coffee Company is only a two minute walk, so a freshly made...

By Albert Cornelissen on 09/14/09 Comments Off

Book review of: Online a lot of the time

A slightly contradictory book title due to medium in which it was written and the issues it addresses, but a rich volume in theory and striking examples about the virtual phenomena of avatars, webcam personas, rituals, fetish and signs....

By Denise Pires on 09/13/09 Comments Off

Review of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright – Lucas Hilderbrand

In his latest book: Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape (2009) Lucas Hilderbrand explores the analog past of video nostalgically, and shows its importance and relevance to (new) media studies. Hilderbrand mainly focuses on the aesthetic, cultural and legal...

By Marc Stumpel on 09/13/09 Comments Off

Book Review of: (In)visible – Learning to Act in the Metaverse

In his book: (In)visible: Learning to Act in the Metaverse, the author, Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, deals with the challenges and difficulties of the global data culture. By exploring the constituents of today’s network culture, he tries to map out new...

By Niels de Hoog on 09/13/09 Comments Off

A Review of: Self-Organisation/Counter Economic Strategies – Superflex

This book is an initiative by the Danish artists group: Superflex. Superflex has been working on a series of projects related to economic forces, democratic production conditions and Self-organisation since 1993. Most of their initiatives seem to question the...

By Rutger van den Berg on 09/13/09 Comments Off

Review of “The Blogging Revolution” by Antony Loewenstein

This book, named “The Blogging Revolution” is written by Antony Loewenstein, an Jewish-Australian free-lance journalist, author and blogger. During the year of 2007, he travelled to Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and China for interviewing bloggers in order...

By Siying Yang on 09/13/09 1

Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society. (Study Review)

Christian Fuchs was born in Austria in 1976 and is currently an associate professor at the University of Salzburg. He is mainly interested in Media and in Information society research and he's the author of many scholar papers and of...

By Margarida Fonseca on 09/13/09 3

FLIP SIDES OF PARTICIPATORY CULTURE (Book Review)

Has celebrating users’ generated content become a dominant ‘grand’ narrative of web entrepreneurs, scholars and online businesses? What is hidden behind the participatory buzz of Web 2.0? In Bastard Culture! User Participation and the extension of cultural industries Mirko...

By Simeona Petkova on 09/13/09 2

Tatiana Bazzichelli, Networking Art – The Net as Artwork

Tatiana Bazzichelli wrote the book Networking, The Net as Artwork in Italian in 2006. The book has also been translated in English, and that’s how I got in touch with it. During classes at the University of Amsterdam our...

By Marta Colpani on 09/12/09 Comments Off

Twitter used to be my Boyfriend

There is so much going on, on Twitter that it is hard to cover it all after using it for a year. Really, nobody knows the future of Twitter. Even the people who created it have no idea where...

By Hannah Biemold on 09/12/09 1

Book Review of Cyber Racism – Jessie Daniels, 2009

I realize the commonly held view that abortion is murder and that white women should be having children instead of aborting them. However, black women are much more likely to have abortions than white women. (...) Those fetuses that...

By ellen sluis on 09/12/09 Comments Off

The Impact of ICT on the Print Media Journalist in Uganda

On 22 September 2009, I shall graduate from the University of Amsterdam, having fulfilled all the requirements necessary to attain a Masters of Art in New Media and Digital culture which I have been pursuing in last one year....

By Ali Balunywa on 09/11/09 Comments Off

Musicians and the Upside of Downloading

The recording industry has indeed suffered from declining sales over the past ten years and it may be tempting to point the blame at file sharing, yet a mistake that is commonly made is to claim that the recording...

By Chris Castiglione on 09/11/09 Comments Off

Infographics for the Great Good (or Who is Otto Neurath?)

Thanks to something called Petabyte computing (one quadrillion bytes of computer information), we’re encountering a number landslide. AT&T has about 16 petabytes of information switching through its network every day. Facebook has 1.5 petabytes worth of user photos alone....

By Morgan Currie on 09/11/09 4