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

The Game of Life: A case study of video games as social platforms

Introduction Human connection, the feeling of being accepted or even loved. What does human connection look like in our digital day and age? Dating apps like Tinder are obviously a very modern tool of people reaching each other, but...

By Martijn van Schip on 10/24/19 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

Facebook in the Spotlight of the Dark Web

“Facebook is blocking logins with Tor browser. This is crazy. Please help us to share!“ (Facebook, 2013) published Tor Project on Facebook on June 18th 2013. This is not the case anymore. Facebook opened a service for all users...

By Oskar Strajn on 11/07/14 Comments Off

Cloud Based Web

Overhyped or overmarketed? Cloud based applications involve a number of computers being connected through a real-time connection provided by the networks of the internet. It coins the common goal of enabling customers to outsource specific computer...

By Christoph Rauch on 11/04/13 Comments Off

Academia.edu: Social Networking Meets Open Access Publishing

Scholars are the driving force behind the scientific and social progress of humanity. Even though this statement sounds very grandiose, it is not untrue.The “makers of knowledge” have been throughout the centuries the most revered, respected social castе. They...

By Bozhan Chipev on 03/11/13 Comments Off

Design your own reality with Stiktu

Recently, Dutch software-firm Layar introduced Stiktu, an application that lets users be creative with augmented reality. The app runs on iPhone and Android platforms and aims to be the next best thing in social media, blurring the boundaries between...

By Robert Silvis on 10/05/12 2

WikiLeaks or We Keep Leaks?

On the 17th of June in 1972, 5 men got caught while attempting to infiltrate the democratic headquarters located at the Watergate hotel in Washington. Their objective was the placement of electronic listening devices to monitor the meeting hosted...

By Robert Silvis on 09/08/12 1

Occupy Realism: Or How I Learned to Stop Protesting and Love Protocol.

As you may have realised, the title of this blog post is a parody of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb. If you’ve seen the film, you know...

By Liam Voice on 10/30/11 Comments Off

For the Love of Material!

Posthumanism, Protocol and Techno-Craft at Mediamatic’s Ignite Amsterdam 10 If androids dream of electric sheep, we posthumous dream of the Jetson family’s flying car. “Posthuman” because, as foreseen by early prostheses now as natural as eyeglass, human identity consciousness...

By Kendall Grady on 09/29/11 Comments Off

The Invention of the Century: Privacy

Privacy is considered to be an important issue for it is not just a social structure within a community, which can be regulated by social control anymore. It has developed to a dialectic notion of widespread surveillance activities within...

By Fenneke Mink on 10/27/10 2

Web 2.0+ User=♥? An ANT approach to User-Web relationships.

In reviewing the Digital Folklore Reader last week, I came across Olia Lialina’s essay Vernacular Web 2, in which she argues that the void caused by the demise of the playful, cheeky and, most importantly, personal homepage has been...

By Stefania Bercu on 09/27/10 2

Book Review: Network Power – David Singh Grewal

Globalization is reintroduced to society in David Singh Grewal’s “Network Power”. A volume that contains so much information, it can easily be viewed as a contemporary globalization handbook. Grewal’s perspective is fresh and bold, albeit not empirically substantiated....

By Ronen Shay on 09/20/10 1

Book Review: “Netze und Netzwerke” – by Sebastian Gießmann

In Netze und Netzwerke, Sebastian Gießmann makes a quiet daring attempt to historically map the rise of grids and networks between 1740 and 1840. He views such as not only rising technologies and methods of scientific research, but also...

By Agathe Wiedemair on 09/19/10 Comments Off

LivingLabs recap – what exactly is a creative city?

With every major city in Europe calling itself ‘creative capitol’ these days, the question raises how creative these cities really are and in what way they distinct themselves from others. In a ‘creative race’ between Asia, the US and...

By Tjerk Timan on 10/07/07 Comments Off

www.visualcomplexity.com

“VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as...

By Paulien Dresscher on 09/23/07 Comments Off

24/7 Time and Temporality in the Network Society

Real time, cyber time, machine time, clock time, chronos time, frankentime, mythic time, objective time, natural time, subjective time, present time, timeless time, being time, bullet time, internet time, chronoscopic time, global standard time, local time…are you still there?...

By Paulien Dresscher on 09/17/07 Comments Off

New Network Theory- Parallel Sessions- ‘Network and Subjectivities’ – Ulises A. Mejias

Ulises A. Mejias offers us a network critique in the final talk of the parallel session ‘Network and Subjectivities.’ In his talk about ‘Hyperlocality and the tyranny of nodes’ he argues that we can see a shift in the...

By Anne Helmond on 07/05/07 1

What is your network called? Or: a religious wireless network war?

I recently worked at a friend’s house and I was trying to connect to their wireless networked called “GORGONZOLA.” I thought that was a pretty funny name until I noticed the names some neighbors had given their networks. One...

By Anne Helmond on 06/15/07 7

Review of Information politics on the Web (review by Adrienne Massanari)

Richard Rogers is head of the new media department from the University of Amsterdam. Adrienne Massanari wrote a review on Rogers book “information politics on the Web”. Information Politics on the Web Author: Richard Rogers Publisher: Cambridge, MA: MIT...

By Heleen on 02/02/07 1

The networked book: GAM3R 7H30RY & Code Version 2.0

Writing a book online and facilitating a discussion around it seems to be very popular these days. McKenzie Wark is working on GAM3R 7H30RY which will be published by Harvard University Press in April 2007, and it will contain...

By Anne Helmond on 12/11/06 4