Masters of Media

The last couple of years online communities have been developing applications for users to share daily updates about their life, thoughts and whereabouts. Hyves provides a ‘WieWatWaar’ and Facebook has it’s own ‘Wall’ where users can update their friends. Twitter does it the light-weight way. Twitter is a microblogging website that allows an easy and light-weight form of communication. It enables users to…

Internet kills writing? According to Andrea Lunsford, researcher at the Stanford University, it is totally the other way around. There is an immense increase of people starting to write and digital writing is the biggest revolution in writing since the Greek era; bigger than the shift from the oral- to the writing era. Internet improves our writing skills!

Before the rise of twitter there already existed older -digital- communication devices that shared the same idea: short and fast communication between people. Those were mainly writing, faxing, emailing, chatting and later sms text messaging. In the case of chatting these messages formed whole conversations while short text messages (sms) were at the beginning mostly sent to let someone know…

‘Problems are not a monopoly of the South and solutions are not a monopoly of the North’[1]. Particularly the latter part of this quote struck me, since within many studies on developmental aid and ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development) prevails the idea that the solutions will come from the north, that is, from the developed countries.

Amsterdam is picking up the new Google Buzz social networking tool that was announced last week. Google has linked Buzz to Latitude as well (depending on the privacy settings). This means that people can see where their friends and what they’re doing. It’s interesting that not only your friends are visible, but all Buzz users nearby. This opens a lot…

LG Digital has announced that a full A3 sized e-paper that will be introduced in April. The novelty in LG’s latest marvel, is that it makes the physical distribution and the every day hustle of printing millions of newspapers obsolete. The Gutenberg era of mechanical reproduction is changing into digital reproduction. The smell of ink and the touch of fresh paper…

A glitch is an unintended break of (one of) the many flows within a technological system. It is a wonderful and frightening interruption that shifts a technology away from its ordinary form and discourse. For a moment I am shocked, lost, in awe, asking myself what this other utterance is, how was it created. Is it perhaps …a glitch? But…

“Dan was apparent fifty plus, a little paunchy and stubbled. He had raccoon-mask bags under his eyes and he slumped listlessly. As I approached, I pinged his Whuffie and was startled to see that it had dropped to nearly zero. “Jesus,” I said, as I sat down next to him. “You look like hell, Dan.” […] Lil was waiting on the sofa, a…

Today I have the pleasure of presenting you with a short interview with Bruce Sterling. Bruce was kind enough to say "we'll give it a shot" to an e-mail interview when I cornered him at the bar after the 'You, Me, and Everyone We Know is a Curator' symposium where he gave his recent speech. I've taken this opportunity to ask him a few questions about, among other things, commons-based peer production, the Internet of Things, the bifurcation of psyches across actual and virtual space, and the extent to which there is hope left for the Internet.

In doing research for my master thesis on smart houses as technologies of government ‘at a distance’ last year (which you can read here), I found it very difficult to find materials which treated this topic from a media and cultural studies perspective, as well as historically, which is what determined me to share this list with you. Most of…

One of my favorite websites is the semi-obscure digital library known as AAAARG (don’t even try googling. You just get pirate-themed sites). The site is a sundry collection of critical documents – many of them highly treasured theoretical classics, others obscure anarchic tomes and legal texts – presented in a simple, sleek alphabetized index of .pdfs.

The idea from the beginning was…

Who doesn’t like to listen to Andrew Keen talk? Perhaps his most famous appearance was made on the Colbert Report, where he had an interesting exchange of opinions with Colbert about whether or not the Internet is worse than the Nazis. Keen is known for his “elitist” approach to the Internet and claims that the democratization of means of expression is…

Last Saturday,  19th of December,  the venue of Paradiso was dedicated to the symposium of  “Me you and everyone we know is a curator.” This symposium addresses questions about quality in an age of visual overload. With an impressive line up of speakers, this symposium set their aim high. In one day time the focus was upon the problematics of web…

The International M.A. in New Media & Digital Culture (NMMA) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is accepting applications for 2010-2011 academic year.  Applications are due 1 April.  Please help spread the word by sharing the Call for Applications .pdf with friends and colleagues.

The NMMA is a one-year residence program undertaken in English at UvA in the heart of Amsterdam.…

Projeto Alavanca is one of the many NGOs in Brazil that aim at social and digital inclusion of underprivileged people. What distinguishes them from other organizations is their current project; the development of a set of web-based applications that enables NGOs to administer, distribute and share information and knowledge with each other.

Charles M. Blow was the opening presenter at the Infographics 2010 Conference in Zeist last Friday (March 5th) and in my opinion, one of the best presentations of the day along with the always inspiring work of Catalog Tree.

Mr. Blow started his presentation by telling an anecdote about a reporter from a big city interviewing a farmer about his three legged pig,…

An essay for New Media Theories which discusses some ideas considering the War Video game and its specific attributes along theories of militarization, ludification of culture and the megaspactacle.

How many books can a person to read in a lifetime? In her keynote address at Swansea University’s Computational Turn workshop, Katherine Hayles surmised that if we read a book a day till we’re 85, it would amount to something like 25,000 books, though realistically the average bibliophile consumes only around 1000-2000 in her life. And so the capacities of…

www.ICT4Accountability.wordpress.com , one of the blogs started by a former New Media student of the UvA, is officially selected to compete in the internationally renowned blogging competition’ TH!NK3’. This blogging competition, set up by the European Youth Press, will bring together some 100 bloggers, journalists, issue experts and students from the 27 EU member states, as well as neighborhood countries and beyond, to exchange ideas and debate sustainable development and global cooperation topics. Winners of the competition will be awarded with opportunities to travel and report from Asia and Africa. The big prize is a trip to the UN headquarters in New York in September 2010, at the time of the Millennium Development Goals summit.

This video, created for ‘Hungry Beast‘, a news program that airs in Australia on the ABC1, depicts Google as a dangerous, pretentious, ubiquitous and ever growing advertising giant: ‘building an empire on your street, in your phone, in your DNA, trying very hard not to be evil’.

The animation features most of Google’s services and portrays them as means to “own” every bit…