Masters of Media

For Syrian dissidents, social networking sites are essential for bypassing traditional media and communication channels. But in doing so, online activists might all too easily fall prey to the government’s digital surveillance. Social networking services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are widely credited for their role in the Arab Spring uprisings. They facilitated communication, provided [...]

Not everyone on this earth gets the respect or at least tolerance that they deserve. In this world discrimination is such a big problem that it seems almost unsolvable. People get discriminated against for all sorts of reasons. LGBT people (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) get discriminated against for their sexual preferences and differing genders. Discrimination [...]

Breaching Experiments Two recent events on my Facebook newsfeed made me think of breaching experiments, and what their possible value would be within the context of research on (relatively) new online social environments. The breaching experiment is a research method in the social sciences developed by Harold Garfinkel in the 1960s and 70s. Breaching experiments [...]

I’ve built my first public website back in 1999. I was just getting to know my way around the internet and this was my first attempt in building a website. The first version of HTML – the code which provides the markup for most websites – was invented in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, one of [...]

“Had I said anything at the time, it would have come out as a disorganized mix of the different things going through my mind. So, opting for ‘better to be thought of a fool than to open one’s mouth and erase all doubt,’ I let the opportunity escape.” -Anonymous 42-year-old Craigslist Author: Missed Connection at [...]

For the Wildcard Symposium 2012 (WCS12) our group; Lisa Bergenfelz, Vicentiu Dinga, Paula Gulian, Matthew Elworthy and Joseph Jackson chose to interpret and present the theories of Jean Baudrillard brought forward in the book Passwords through a short film Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French philosopher, theorist and sociologist. During the late 1900 and early [...]

If you’re reading this post, on this blog, your interests clearly relate to the wonderful realm of new media. Your notifications icon on Facebook is probably blinking to indicate that you have some messages pending and there’s a cue of at least ten tabs opened in your browser, waiting for your attention. A huge wave [...]

— Alex Maat, Joey de Jong, Lauressa Ford and Robert Silvis   For the Wildcard Symposium 2012 (also referred to as WCS12), our group was in charge of presenting Patrick Crogan’s book “Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture“. To ensure we could establish a solid representation of Crogan’s book, we decided to present the content (and [...]

This post functions as an introduction to a project by Charlotte van Dalfsen, Egle Mykolaityte, Mihaela Naftanaila, Lydia van der Spek and Laura Zimmermann. Our project is an interpretation of Henri Lefebvre’s seminal book “Rhythmanalysis” (1992). In doing so, we created a blog that functions as a window to Lefebvre’s book and its ideas. The [...]

At the Wildcard Symposium 2012, I presented an RSA Animate-styled video rendition of Tony D. Sampson’s new book Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. The project was carried out by me and three of my New Media colleagues at the University of Amsterdam – Geoff Kim, Ferdy Looijen and Jaimy Quadekker. The content of the [...]

— Alain Otjens, Daan Smith, Richard Zimmerman and Seah Kim   For the Wild Card Symposium of 2012 New Media Theories, we created the interactive timeline website, The Control Revolution. To create exposure for this hidden classic of Beniger, we also created wiki pages for the book ‘The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society’ [...]

International M.A. in New Media ­at the University of Amsterdam Call for Applications for­ Fall 2013, rolling admissions open on 1 November 2012 and close on 1 April 2013 One-year and two-year New Media M.A. Programs available. For the two-year “Research Master’s Program: New Media Track,” see below. New Media M.A. – One-year Program The [...]

This article is an exploration of the themes addressed in the book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations by Bernard Stiegler and it is part of a video project produced by Ana Crisostomo, Daria Koreniushkina, Maya Livio and Mathias Schuh. Originally published in French in 2008 and translated to English two years later [1], Taking Care of [...]

Up until a mere two decades ago, the possibility of receiving e-mail and checking status-updates on Facebook while being on the train, bus or even on the street might have seemed like a science fiction scenario. The Wireless-Fidelity makes its presence felt: cellphones capable of being used as modems while on the go, wireless headphones, [...]

As part of our New Media Theories Master’s symposium we chose to look at the recent MIT press publication from Media Theory scholars Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey – namely ‘Evil Media’. The expectations that we had of the book, (drawn mostly from the title itself, along with the introductory blurb and a few short [...]

- By Katía Truijen, Eva Valkhoff, Serena Westra and Sasha Wood What happens when you transform a book into a new media object? Can you visualize a book in a new media way? And what happens to the narrative when you look at a book as a database? We sought for an answer to these [...]

By: Larissa Hildebrandt & Thomas Groen Our task for the 2012 Wild Card Symposium was to bring theory to life, by explaining a book in a new, digital way. In a merging of old and new media, we produced a short YouTube video to help explain the concepts of Harold Innis’ book The Bias of Communication. [...]

For the Wild Cards Symposium 2012 we chose the topic of Carnal Resonance because research into online pornography continues to be a grey area that is not published as much as for instance research on Facebook and the social online. We all know that the internet is for porn, clearly, and yet we sweep the [...]

The past few years have seen an enormous growth of the use of smartphones and tablets. Mobile devices have taken such a dominant role in our lives that it’s very hard to imagine a life without them. We have come to rely on these devices for a lot of our everyday activities. Do we want [...]

At the beginning of the twentieth century, photography was considered to be the most neutral expression of optical data (Lupston 1986). This changed the perception and according to the Austrian philosopher, economist and sociologist Otto Neurath this development demanded for a system to organize all of the new observations (Lupston 1986). In his view, 1920 [...]