Masters of Media

The popularity of social media networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, has resulted in new forms of user performance and identity. Each new online account creates a new identity in which users must negotiate issues of disclosure, security, and representation. While social network studies is becoming a field of study in its own right, for [...]

Facebook is now more than nine years old and it is very interesting to see what changes Facebook is going through. It started out with Facemash in 2003, developed into thefacebook.com and now we all know it as Facebook. In the beginning it was mainly used to watch each other’s profile page and show some [...]

Samantha Jones: [after her condoms fall out of her purse in the market in front of a bunch of angry men] Yes! Condoms! I have SEX!   *** A false movie portrait of United Arabic Emirates- women and feminist thinking. Ever since in 1998 the first episode of Sex and the City aired on HBO [...]

“Just as video killed the radio star three decades ago, the Internet has killed music television in the new millennium.” - Greg Quill The Role of Music on MuchMusic.com from 1996 to 2012 Before MTV’s arrival in Canada, the niche for music videos was filled by national television channel MuchMusic. Much, as it is often [...]

By: Basri Hoogstrate, Jeroen Rademakers, Jules Mataly and Juliana Marques The Wild Card Symposium, part of our Master Degree at the University of Amsterdam gave us the occasion to read a book as a group, discuss it and came up with a different way to introduce and present a piece of writing. As a group, [...]

The current ubiquity of data populating every aspect of an individual’s digitally connected existence, alongside the computational possibilities of harnessing the same to convert it into distilled information, has introduced the theme of data as one of the most debated in recent years in a variety of fields ranging from academia to business, from science [...]

What do you do when you are one of the biggest online department stores and the review system that once seemed like an effective tool for customers to share experiences turns out to be used for fake reviews, through sock-puppet accounts, malicious one star reviews and self-serving fake five star reviews of books (and probably [...]

This March, the Unlike Us conference is taking place in Amsterdam for a second consecutive year. Hosted by Amsterdam’s Institute of Network Cultures, the event gathers academics, artists and activists to discuss ‘social media monopolies and their alternatives’. Unlike Us #3 | Social Media: Design or Decline March 22-24, 2013 Conference, workshops and hackathon Venue: TrouwAmsterdam [...]

Being able to buy your Ikea sofa online and going to a retail store to get your Google products. It may seem odd when stated like this, but we are seeing more trends of companies making a turn in their linear strategy of focusing on solely online or offline business. In June 2013, Ikea will [...]

Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the most well known computer formats in the world. It can be used to read electronic books. PDF is also very interesting because it’s developed into the standard document file. I will compare this with the establishment of VHS as the standard to play video’s. It might give [...]

Our lives are filled with the use of standards, as Alexander Galloway (2006) explained already quite some time ago. The old-fashioned VHS was a standard that has been replaced with a new one, the DVD, and there are a lot of standards on the Internet and in Internet protocols that we all accept as the [...]

Digital books are touted for their new possibilities: portability, searchability, durability and ubiquitous notes and bookmarks, to name a few. But while readers benefit from this, so do third parties. The thought of someone reading over your shoulder feels invasive, but it’s exactly what’s happening in the realm of “tethered” books.[1] The term “tethered appliance” [...]

It’s a disquieting idea: everything you do on the web, on your smartphone and on your tablet is tracked, and all that data is gathered somewhere in the void of the internet. Thankfully, most of that data is relatively anonymous, lost in a vast cloud that is hard to fathom. However, the idea of tethered [...]

As you may have noticed, we live in quite an interesting time regarding publishing. As the digital revolution evolves, new publishing forms are coming up. At this point we can not yet say which format we will be using for publishing over ten or twenty years. New publishing formats are rising as well: in search [...]

For a long time, I felt an aversion towards e-readers and electronic reading. How could reading from a screen ever top reading from paper? How could one simple, small device triumph over bookshelves crammed with beautiful books? Of course, I could see the advantages, like being able to carry all of your books with you [...]

The e-book, threat or treasure, is definately a hot topic within the book industry [1]. As we all know, there is still quite some room for improvement and innovation. But how to approach the e-book? That remains the central question to which no one seems to have the answer. There are still too many obstacles [...]

“I’m an e-book nitwit and frankly I don’t care”. About a year ago I still could not believe e-books could be anything but miserable. I was sure that I would never feel the same way about reading from a screen compared to paper books. After all, I am the girl who buys three different newspapers [...]

Privacy. According to The Oxford English Dictionary it is a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. When we were young, we were taught that it is not polite to read over someone else’s shoulder. One might even be perceived as an intruder since reading is a very private matter, [...]

In his article ‘The abuses of literacy: Amazon Kindle and it’s right to read’ Ted Striphas talks about the e-reader gadget Kindle, one of the many devices that allows readers all over the world (in Kindle’s case, Amazon customers) to buy and read books online instead of a buying a printed and bounded book. Striphas’ [...]

EPUB, short for “electronic publication”, is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It was initially developed in 2007 as a way to streamline digital publishing. What the IDPF didn’t consider back then, is the fact that “free” and “open” file formats are not particularly useful for creating profitable products. All [...]