Masters of Media

By: Maya Livio & Audrika Rakshit Brooklyn-based programmer David Kraftsow, best known for projects that re-contextualize and reinterpret user-generated Youtube content on his Don’t Save website, creates projects–borne of and presented on the Internet–to provide his own commentary on popular culture. When speaking about his YooouuuTuuube project, Kraftsow says, “I had wanted to create a [...]

Medium is a newly announced publishing platform initiated by the Obvious Corporation. With Medium, the founders of Twitter and Blogger are “rethinking publishing … from the scratch”. The site is to be launched in early 2013, and is now open for publishing only for a select few. Publishing on Medium is organized around topics. Topics [...]

Every good idea is a solution to a problem. In the case of San Francisco based start-up Nextdoor the problem is that neighbors no longer get to know each other and truly communicate. The small-scale social network is trying to solve this by introducing a digital medium for neighbors to exchange messages, ask for help [...]

  For those who might not yet be familiar with Kickstarter, this is a U.S. based funding platform for creative projects launched on April 2009 and working on the principle of crowdfunding [1]: people (“backers”) can pledge to fund a project from a minimum of $1 up to $10.000 or even more. During three years [...]

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 the social, the real, and the virtual. Although the app has only been launched worldwide since [...]

Have you ever asked a question on the Internet? Probably, yes. What platform did you use for this purpose? There are many options: Google, social networking sites or special Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers. But can we always trust the answers that come up there? Probably not. However, if you ask a question at Stack [...]

What does it need to launch a successful media outlet? Probably a good deal of start-up capital, a team of editors, a business plan and some advertising clients. Cairo’s Rassd News Network started with two things: a Facebook page and a revolution. (Text: Jules Mataly, Mathias Schuh) It takes a lot of scrolling to find [...]

  SHARING CULTURE VERSUS CAPITALISM Since its beginning the internet has been designed as a sharing platform for information exchange without the regular borders of time and space. Free from all the constraints of the offline world information could – with he help of digital technology – be reproduced almost without additional costs. This marked [...]

When you are using public transportation and you take a good look around you, you are bound to notice that most people around you are busy using their smartphone. The rise of the smartphone provides many ways of mobile entertainment nowadays. Playing games on your smartphone is one of them. It is mostly about interactive [...]

By: Larissa Hildebrandt and Vincentiu Dinga Placeling is a free iPhone app and  WordPress plugin. It is a location-based social network where you can share your favourite places. Users are encouraged to “be the guide” in their city by bookmarking locations with details and photos. These show up as pins (called “placemarks”) on a map that users [...]

The New Media and Digital Culture MA at the UvA attracts a significant number of international students to Amsterdam every year since its initial academic year in 2006. Assuming that some of these students would like to pursue a professional career in The Netherlands, what kind of challenges should they be prepared to face in [...]

The Pussy Riot sentence has become the unprecendented event concerning the global resonance, compared to other news from Russia in the recent years. 86% of the world mass media have covered the Pussy Riot case, media monitor NewsEffector reports. Most of them are US or UK-based, followed by European broadcasters in Germany, France, Spain and [...]

Who or what is Mendo!? On an ordinary Thursday I’m walking in the well-known Amsterdam neighbourhood ‘de negen straatjes’ for an appointment with Joost Albronda, who is one of the owners of the [graphic] design agency and bookshop Mendo. Entering the shop I can’t stop looking at the beautiful interior, the shop can be described [...]

New media has been offering many possibilities for non-profit and social enterprises to find volunteers online, but an initiative called Catchafire is taking the center of attentions within the web. The purpose of the website is simple: provide a media platform where high-skill professionals are matched with enterprises. The professional gains experience and the organization [...]

Reports from the Unknown – The ground-breaking documentaries of Vice.com The documentary format has undergone vast changes since the dawn of the digital age. What was once the domain of only national television companies with huge budgets is now open to any group of individuals with the most basic of equipment who have a genuine [...]

Many people still think they can manipulate search engines in order to get top rankings, for instance, teams of Romanian newspapers and magazines websites. Thus, their major concern is how to get traffic instead of how to create traffic by valuable content. When I noticed this issue, I became interested in SEO. The first example [...]

‘Facebook Collections’ With a user base that has crossed the magical border of one billion users; 1 out of 7 people on this planet use Facebook. Liking, sharing, commenting, tagging etc., we are all familiar with these terms or at least we have heard of it. Since Facebook is compatible on your computer, smart phone [...]

Pinterest provides many fascinating points for discussion and research. By being active on Pinterest we engage in a process of shortcut identity formation through pre-existing images. It is not merely about collecting images that relate to our perfect life and aspirations, but also having an absolute control over them. The way we neatly arrange image boards contrasts [...]

Capitalism in Cyberspace In February 1996 the American political activist John Perry Barlow  published his political web manifest ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. This declaration of independence was directed at all the governments of the industrial world and according tot Barlow these are the governments of the United States, China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore [...]

PROGRESS, HOPE, CHANGE and Obama. These words got intertwined during the 2008 presidential campaign of Barrack Obama. The correlation factor: OBEY and the reproducibility of art in the age of digital reproduction.  The following is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s 1930’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility. This will be [...]