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

Help the food delivery couriers out: would you like to wait 5 more minutes ?

The food delivery frenzy China has the largest food delivery services market in the world, which is expected to exceed 300 billion Yuan in 2020. The market is a duopoly, dominated by two platforms – Ele.me and Meituan, respectively owned...

By on 09/28/20 Comments Off

The Worrisome Biometrics: Deepfakes, ZAO and Privacy Issue

In early September, a face-swapping app called ZAO attracted universal attention in China. Using the technology of “Deepfakes”, it allows users to swap their faces into famous characters’ in the film and TV show clips. ZAO prevailed like the...

By on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Deepfakes, Privacy Paradoxes and Black Boxes

“I do worry about my privacy,” Huang said. “Because no one cares about my data when I’m a nobody. But if people think they can make money from my information, it makes me worry about the security of my...

By on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Qutoutiao: Make Digital Reading More “Valuable”

With 48.8 million “employees”，Qutoutiao Inc. (means “fun headlines”), a two-year old mobile-news company becomes one of the biggest news and video aggregator in China. Being available at application stores since Jun. 2016, the number of Qutoutiao’s users has witnessed...

By Jueling Hu on 09/24/18 Comments Off

When Fiction Becomes Reality: From Black Mirror to China’s Social Credit Score

Since 2014, the Chinese government is working on implementing a new behavioral scoring system: the social credit score. Presented as an assessment of the ‘reliability’ of citizens, it combines a whole set of criteria such as consumption habits, records...

By Sarah Bels on 09/23/18 Comments Off

Made in China: The Rise of the SuperBanking App

Historically, the Western world has made the majority of its biggest and most innovative discoveries through travel and the colonisation of other areas and continents that took our fancy. From tobacco to chocolate, the Silk Road has long since...

By Aisling Crabbe on 09/24/17 Comments Off

YY Inc.- China’s trending live-streaming app

Live- streaming has been many tech- enthusiasts’ dreams, and it was once a struggle to make this peer-to-peer, one-to- many online interactions come true. However, YY, starting as a live- gaming application, has recently reached a billion registered users...

By Joanne Lin on 09/20/16 Comments Off

Internet Imperialized

In 2010, Google.cn redirected users to Google.com.hk. Google released an official blog post announcing that it would no longer censor search results for Chinese users. The decision proceeded an allegation that U.S. companies (Google included) had been attacked by...

By Samantha Carter on 09/12/13 1

Backdrop of Economic Gameplay in World of Warcraft: The Effect of Goldfarmers

The first computer game which could be played by multiple users at the same time and used a virtual world as environment was created in 1978 and was called Multi-User Dungeon. This game represented the first of its kind...

By Alex Maat on 09/09/12 Comments Off

How Chinese Weibo has Changed China

Weibo is the chinese name for “Micro blog”, which was born two years ago, but now has already reached millions of users. Because of the strict censorship in China, the birth of weibo is the same as the birth of...

By Siying Yang on 11/21/11 1

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: an interview on Chinese internet usage

How do we find happiness? I cannot answer that question for you, but it is relevant to everybody. The state of happiness was deemed so important by the Founding Fathers of the United States that they added it to...

By Yeun Au on 10/30/11 Comments Off

Weibo Revolution

As China is famous for their copied and rip-off products there is no difference in the digital sphere. Services and platforms that we have learned to love, resent or can’t go without also exist within the borders of China...

By Jidi Guo on 06/02/11 4

Shanzhai Factory Life

One of the things that I really wanted to do in Shenzhen aside from sightseeing was to visit a factory where they produce electronics. Quickly I found out that factories in general are not too eager on letting in...

By Jidi Guo on 05/09/11 3

Ai Weiwei: How a Chinese Artist Uses the Internet To Protest

Reading an interview with the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in the weekend magazine of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, I was instantly drawn to his faith in the democratizing power of the Internet. More than once Weiwei, who...

By Erik van Bemmelen on 10/31/10 2

And the nominees are…

The Nobel Peace Prize is handed out every year to a person or an organization that has acted according to the standards written by Alfred Nobel in his final will; “The whole of my remaining realisable estate shall be...

By Marte Lindstrom on 10/21/10 Comments Off

Wokipedia

After long thinking about what subject to write a Wikipedia page on I decided to keep it close to home, well not literally, but if you read my last name you’ll know what I mean. Since the Wikipedia entry...

By Jidi Guo on 10/04/10 2

Chinese Cyber World: A World in Itself

Let’s start with an interesting conversation between a Chinese (C) and a westerner (W): W: Oh, it is so nice to meet you! Do you have facebook? C: no. I am sorry. W: Do you have MSN? C: yea,...

By Siying Yang on 09/26/09 2

How to Pave a Digital Silk Road

If somebody would have told me 1 year ago that as a result of my New Media Master’s thesis research on the Internet industry in China I would be moving to Beijing, I would have reacted: ‘Right, and I...

By Pieter-Paul Walraven on 03/31/09 2

Patterns in China’s Economic Development

For my Masters thesis I am doing research on the global emergence of Chinese Internet companies. The theoretical part of my thesis consists of several studies on successfull development of other Asian countries in the past. The current emergence...

By Pieter-Paul Walraven on 06/20/08 Comments Off

POLITICS: WEB 2.0 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Written for the Institute of Network Cultures Crossposted at Institute of Network Cultures Weblog Download PDF (full text including pictures) On April 17th and 18th 2008 the department of Politics and International Relations at the Royal Holloway University of...

By Roman Tol on 05/13/08 1