New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Amazon: Bigger data are not always better data?

Most new media studies focus on the giants of the web, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter. They are specialized in search engines and social media and have accumulated tremendous data assets among their business. Boyd & Crawford (2012)...

By Shiyi Zhou on 10/04/21 Comments Off

We have Fans at Home: Artists x Twitch Streaming

Thanks to the pandemic, Artists on Twitch is an emerging subculture that utilises the platforms affordances to provide a candid intimated experience for fans, while being able to receive support simultaneously. As always, while individuals are creating content for...

By Samuel Vitikainen on 09/28/20 Comments Off

Amazon Prime Air – convenience, surveillance and more from your “friendly” ecosystem

“The pleasure of consumerism is so widespread that it is has reached the status of a universal human right” (Lovink 4). But for a right like that to exist, others had to fall – such as individual and collective...

By Varvara Boboc on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Life in the Amazon(e)

Introduction In 1995, the then thirty-year-old Jeff Bezos founded Amazon and by using the emerging World Wide Web, he was able to sell books globally, from his garage. Although he could probably not imagine that he would one day...

By Lieve Keizer on 10/24/18 Comments Off

“Hidden Cost”: Social Commerce Practices and the Collaboration between Snapchat and Amazon

In an era when S-commerce (social commerce) is dominating digital environments, social media platforms use more and more tools to achieve this combination of commercial and social activities. Like Instagram and Pinterest, now Snapchat jumped onto this trend and...

By Aikaterini Mniestri on 10/19/18 Comments Off

Autonomous Cars Are The Future – But For Whom Are They The Future For?

Autonomous cars have been hailed as the next leap for mankind in automotive transportation and infrastructure, offering not only advancements in private and public transport, but addressing difficulties in health infrastructure, emissions, road collisions, and government overheads on...

By Anna Mc Namara Taylor on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Twitch.tv: A Socially Valuable Platform, or Just Another Amazon Revenue Stream?

Instagram influencers and YouTube vloggers have long been seen as the leaders in monetizing one’s online self. New to this scene are an entirely different cohort of digital money makers: those who profit as professional video gamers on live...

By Emma Knight on 09/21/18 Comments Off

Who controls your voice controlled world?

One of the latest trends in the tech world is the development of the smart digital voice assistant. It was first popularized by iPhone’s Siri, and now companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are developing software and hardware technology...

By Aleksandra Straczek on 10/24/17 Comments Off

A click away from giving up our autonomy? – A critical view on Amazon’s new Dash button

The alarm clock rings, you slowly make your way to the coffee machine since there is no other way of functioning at a time like that, but then realize you ran out of coffee yesterday. What a disaster! But...

By Mariessa Radermacher on 09/24/17 Comments Off

AI Algorithm as Personal Style Tracker

Design specifically with a GAN, to overcome fast-fashion and overconsumption What will happen when designers can exactly produce what consumers want and need? The generative adversarial network (GAN) founded by online shopping company Amazon can actually do this by...

By Vera Seegers on 09/24/17 Comments Off

Amazon Underground – the app store insurgent

Recently Amazon launched a new app store Amazon Underground for Android users, which replaced the Free App a Day program. It features not only items from the Amazon shopping app and the whole catalog from its app store, but...

By Radina Teodosieva on 09/17/15 Comments Off

UHD Format is Coming

The Seven Kingdoms Seven of the biggest IT companies are collaborating to createa new format for Ultra High Definition (UHD) video.This collaboration is called Alliance for Open Media and includes companies such as Google, Netflix and Microsoft. There’s also...

By Pepijn Bierhuizen on 09/14/15 Comments Off

The Issues of Winning The Ecosystem War

“WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A COLD WAR BETWEEN THE LARGEST TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES IN THE INDUSTRY*”, boldly states tech journalist Dieter Bohn in his overview of Apple’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s battling ecosystems . This “war” won’t be won...

By Bozhan Chipev on 03/27/13 Comments Off

Im .mobi lize: Addressing Amazon’s Platform Fragmentation

Coinciding with the release of Amazon’s Kindle Fire in 2011-12 (depending on your location), The global corporation also announced their ‘next generation’ ebook format, KF8, and their first attempt to step away from their now dated Mobi format. Pitched...

By Matthew Elworthy on 03/07/13 Comments Off

EPUB – A Book Pirate’s Go-To Format

EPUB, short for “electronic publication”, is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It was initially developed in 2007 as a way to streamline digital publishing. What the IDPF didn’t consider back then, is the...

By Bozhan Chipev on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Really that Bad? A case study on the fifth best-selling album of all time

The Atlantic recently published a stimulating critique in which music journalist John Murph questions the real legacy of Michael Jackson’s seventh and hailed studio album Bad.

By Steven Boegborn on 10/17/12 Comments Off

What makes a good review online?

Some observations from the paper "Being Heard in Review Communities: Communication Tactics and Review Prominence".

By Andrian Georgiev on 10/30/11 Comments Off

The shopping revolution

Twenty-plus kilograms suitcase in hand, tackling what seemed to be the longest staircase that had ever been placed in a train station that featured four platforms and no elevators, I started thinking: when did I but all this stuff?...

By Laura Burlacu on 09/14/11 Comments Off

Why the iPad will change the e-reader

E-readers are on the market for a while but the digital version of the book never got really popular. Readers were slow, dull, and not sexy at all. The image of the e-reader changed a couple of months ago...

By Mathijs Voordenberg on 10/21/10 3

Is Google Going To Ruin The E-reader’s Party?

“Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis.” The above quote is from Joseph Licklider stated in his famous article ‘Man-Computer Symbiosis’...

By Philip Man on 10/19/10 1

The Pirates of the Amazon project and the online discourse

In December 2008, two students of the de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam launched a Firefox extension called Pirates of the Amazon that enabled users to download movies, games, TV shows, and MP3s free of charge by cross referencing Amazon’s...

By olga paraskevopoulou on 10/18/10 4