Masters of Media

Because of the declining amount of people acctually reading newspapers or watching the news on TV and instead spending a lot of time sharing information through social media, I wonder If Twitter can be seen as a News Medium in today’s society. The whole concept of newsworhtiness gets cloudier. Dueze argues that due to the Internet, the way in…

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker recently: “…This is what drives me crazy about the digerati. They refuse to accept the fact that there is a class of social problems for which there is no technological solution. Look. Technology is going to solve the energy problem. I’m convinced of it. Technology is going to give me a computer in 10 years time that will fly me to the moon. But technology does not and cannot change the underlying dynamics of ‘human’ problems: it doesn’t make it easier to love or motivate or dream or convince.”

I always thought of myself as a person open to change and eager for new impulses and opportunities. However I don’t think this applies to my computer surroundings. It started all with my beloved Macbook Pro’s screen turning pitch black; everything was working except for the screen, it just decided to die right there at that moment. After a short…

One of the latest trends on the World Wide Web is micro-blogging. A micro-blog is a platform for short text updates, usually not more than a sentence or two in length. The most famous micro-blog service is Twitter where the user can update a text containing no more than 140 characters. And there is no doubt that…

Surely Twitter had it’s impact on journalism, politics and advertising. If you’re a journalist, getting information fast and keeping in touch with sources is easy. Politicians have found a tool to directly talk and discuss political issues with voters. Fetishist as well as revolutionist have found a activation- and gathering tool in Twitter.

What…

Microblogging, everyone is doing it, ‘normal’ people like us and ‘very important’ people like politicians, the Dutch Queen and celebrities. We share with the world what we are doing at the moment, or what is on our minds. According to Akshay Java, Tim Finin, Xiaodan Song, & Belle Tseng in their article on why…

It’s a bit difficult to study Twitter when you’re not on it. Hence I log in with the user account I’ve created a while ago, 18 months ago to be exact. Again, I don’t really get the excitement. Despite the airy web 2.0 graphics interface, the service feels rather claustrophobic, enclosed. Twitter seems at first nothing more than a…

If there’s one element of the Web 1.0 era that seems to have survived the age of social networking of today, it must be forums. But for how long? In the world of music, professional musicians seem to have been hesitant of participating on forums due to the lack of user standards. The abundance of swearing, low level of profession,…

When working on a Wikipedia entry just last week, I was confronted once again with the helplessness one might experience when the computer does not work properly or when the internet is down. Upon typing in the Wikipedia url, nothing happend. I found myself staring at the blank page before me. What is one to do? I refreshed the page,…

Sander Jansma already discussed the phenomenon of ‘word-of-mouth’, the so-called WoM. The idea of passing information from person to person has been around since humankind could communicate orally and has evolved with the rise of different means of communication. WoM is no longer all about speaking but also found his way in face-to-face, texting, telephone, email and nowadays ofcourse…

My Twitter inquiry had as a starting point the question, whether we may deploy the notion of the virtual to enhance the “real”, or that is, the actual. So I was interested in researching whether it is possible to think of Twitter’s tweets as a new force that will give rise to an interdisciplinary, synergetic, and real-time dialogue and a…

... or isn't it a bit too hasty to talk about Twitter effects?My activated Twitter account could not be more passive. Two tweets in about two years’ time is my contribution to the broadening of horizons of eleven people that decided to follow me, as an extra confirmation of our Facebook friendship. Both of the tweets were sent “out there” in my effort to understand how this medium works. Or to be more accurate, to examine what I was missing: the value of following and being followed.

"...A way to get a glimpse of the collective human consciousness as an extension of my own. Something that I don't have to continually check or poll, but instead, like a part of my body, it will tell me when it's feeling pain or generally in need of my attention ...leaving me time to get on with other things. And so, I present: The World Mood in a Box!"

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A couple of day ago I as watching a dutch television show, ‘de wereld draait door’ (DWDD). I got distracted by a woman in the audience. She had a lowbrow presence and was talking all the time. I was not the only was who was distracted. On twitter a lot of tweets mentioned the woman, the ways…

Only 506 tweets resulted in the most popular page on microblog Twitter when it comes to the number of 'followers'. Lady Gaga claimed two months ago that she is the queen of Twitter and since that day her amount increased with over a million new followers.Exept describing Twitter as the the medium of the movement (according to the protests in Iran), Twitter can also be seen as a source for fandom. And fandom results in social change, most of the time on micro level and sometimes even bigger.

Email has been great within the workplace. That is, until you start to receive hundreds of irrelevant emails a day. Then, you take one day off, and the next morning your inbox is a dog’s breakfast. So, instant messaging was introduced to larger companies ca. 2003 with a lot of

A few weeks ago, during the practical class of John Haltiwanger, he asked us what we wanted to learn on the computer. There were several people who wanted to learn how to Photoshop. Since John didn’t know how to Photoshop, he purposed to us another comparable program, Inkscape. Was it ok for…

In a weak moment, I again volunteered to take up another task for Kriterion and design the flyer for one of the upcoming events. I thought this would be a good way to pressure myself to make something nice of the assignment, instead, I was frustrated all over.

What if our words had no hidden meaning? What if we didn’t play the mind games that we play in deconstructing and (over-)analyzing every sentence or word or gesture and we would have to look no further than the dictionary to know the exact meaning of a word? Can you imagine there not being any metaphors, euphemisms or sarcasm involved…