Masters of Media

According to an ONI report, within the last few years, Iran has ranked 1st among all Middle-eastern countries in terms of the growth in the number of Internet users. For many Iranians, who are citizens of a country with restricted rules, limited freedom of speech, and a lot of difficulties in the area of spreading information, Internet could be…

In the space of just over a decade, virtual game goods have gone from being a black market cottage industry to an extremely successful business model for gaming and social networking virtual goods industries. This evolution, caused by player driven demand for virtual goods lead to social media and game industries implementing virtual currency systems and sale of virtual goods as one of the main focuses of their business model.

Untrustworthy online identities in Web 2.0

The example of Facebook

As new media history is being written at present time, the discourse keeps revolving around the notion of online identity and “personal privacy” issues that are connected to the usage of social networking sites. It is a highly debated issue whether…

Facebook, as a tool to connect, communicate, share, link, network and socialize, has become omnipresent in the Internet landscape. Its history starts in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberglaunched the network at Harvard University. It has since reached over 500 million members. The fascination with facebook is equally pervasive. A quick search at google scholar results in a staggering…

The Internet has in recent years paved the way for the social web. This is a development to the so called Web 2.0. In this manifestation the web finally distanced itself from traditional websites in the old media tradition. One of the characteristics of the social web is social tagging, also called folksonomy. To investigate this phenomenon from a humanistic…

Last week, ‘surveillance and control’ was the theme the Masters of Media-students were debating about. Theorists as Michel Foucault, Deleuze, Galloway and Thacker and Chun passed the revue. With the articles of the last three theorist there was some pessimism going on during the discussions.

In their article ‘Protocol, Control and Networks’, Galloway and Thacker write about the network discourse…

Being present on a social network once was a way to escape parents’ attention. For many teens, home is a highly regulated space with rules and norms that are strictly controlled by adults. The internet is less regulated by social norms. Teenagers face a challenging dilemma on social networking…

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 filled by dull designer-developed profile pages or templates. “The online life of a today’s user [...]is disciplined and fomalized.…

Chun states that we, the users, perceive the new media, in particular the Internet, to be free, democratic and save. We think we are in control of our content, but just like with other technologies, we can never have total control. It is only then, when technology fails, that we are reminded of our vulnerability and this is exactly…

Swedish singers are often disregarded. They won’t make it out side the Swedish borders. What happened there? Did publicity fall short? Didn’t MTV pick it up? Or is there some other reason why Swedish musicians mostly don’t appear on the radar? If you talk about Eskobar most people won’t even know what you’re talking about. Wikipedia will ask: did…

In a recent post on the socialization of Wikipedia, I brought up the notion of Facebook as the ‘fabric of the Web’, which will also be the main topic of my Research Master thesis. This entry is both a short introduction to this concept and a small proposal warmly welcoming any feedback and suggestions you might have. I…

If you google “social media” or “social networksites” you will receive tons of links. Everybody seems to use social networksites and you need to be involved soon. Most of the links use a kind of paranoia, to make you aware of how you are left out if you are not using social media. Next to those kind of links, which are focused on private users, we find a lot of links for corporate institutions. Most of them are also based on a certain kind of paranoia. The basis is that if you as a business don’t do something with social media, you will lose customers to companies who do use it.

With 500 million active users spending over 700 billion minutes per month, Facebook is gaining more and more traffic each single day. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. With these numbers we can no longer ignore the social impact of social network sites. I shall focus in this blog on Facebook since it is the most controversial social network site and has provoked several debates concerning privacy, reality and commercialization.

Social networks come in a wide variety on the World Wide Web. There’s the generic social network focusing on sharing info and multimedia with your friends (like facebook), professional sites (LinkedIn), forums, collaborative blogs and so on. Most of these sites serve the purpose of staying in touch or getting in touch with people you met off-line and want to…

During PICNIC 2010 last week I attended the session Crowdfunding: The Financial Solution for the Creative Industry, it was an interesting presentation/discussion with crowdfunding experts who shared their best practices and visions of the future. Discussions emerged on how to create better (financial) solutions for the creative industry. Roy Cremers and Valentine van der Lande were…

Back in 2006 when Ze Frank was still running The Show, he asked his viewers to help him find the creator of a funny audio clip that had been floating around on the Web. Frank’s community, his Sportsracers as he likes to call them, had been playing around with the song for months already and had produced many remixes, videos and album covers based on the original clip. Frank’s plan was to present the mysterious singer known only as Ray with their finished works. But how do you find someone if all you know is a first name and the sound of their voice? Apparently, it’s not that hard. Frank’s community managed to find and identify Ray within two days, which, Frank admits, is kind of creepy. In this case, Frank’s mobilization of his community was based on good intentions and fun was had by all, including Ray. But what happens if things turn a little more serious?

Returning to the topic I wrote about two weeks ago, I’d like to have another look at the use of technology in education. It was easy to express my annoyances about the way platforms such as Blackboard are oftentimes used, but now for the more constructive part: what can we do about it? I’d like to broaden this subject to include not just electronic learning environments, but a wider range of digital social practices that could be used in educational settings, such as chat, wikis and blogs.

We have always thought that ‘less is more’ but according to Wired’ editor in chief  Chris Anderson ‘more is better’.  We have to move away from the idea of scarcity and exploit the power of waste on the web. He is a web 2.0 aficionado and someone who has always been a believer of the idea of free on…

A couple of months ago I went to Brazil to conduct my MA reseach in the North of Brazil. This ethnographic study offers insight in the usage and appropriation of ICTs and the several projects and initiatives aiming at digital inclusion in this relatively isolated region.

Since last Saturday our Royal is on twitter as well! And today on the news there was a new article about it. U can read the full article here. Although i am not very interested in our Royal, it reminds me too of her criticism of social media. Our Queen have said in her christmas speach: Social media makes us less social in our offline world, also called urban open spaces.