Masters of Media

If you like police stories with persecution, infiltration and investigation KINGPIN may be just the right book for you. Written by Kevin Poulsen, it is an exciting story of the rise of  one hacker to the control of the biggest crime forum on the internet.

Kevin Poulsen is a former black hat hacker (a hacker that acts as a…

Cultural revolution has already taken place. What has changed is not only participation in culture, but cultural environment itself, characterized by such slogans as “culture 2.0” or “culture of participation”. Changes in forms of participation in culture (following the development of new communication technologies) and the changes of civilization cause that in the near future, almost everyone will provide themselves…

Richard A. Clarke has worked for the U.S. government for 30 years. In the White House he served Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W.H. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Under Clinton and W. Bush, he worked as National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism. He ended his career at the government as the Special Advisor to George W.…

What are the parallels and relations between Islamic art and New Media art? That is the main question Laura U. Marks poses in her book ‘Enfoldment and Infinity. An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art’. The title of her book is just as alluring and bold as her topic. During the first two chapters her motivation of the…

In his book ‘The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World’ Belarusian-born writer Evgeny Morozov finely describes and critiques a delusion he calls cyber-utopianism: the believe that online communication technologies have the power to liberate, democratize. Many people today believe that social network sites can reinvent social activism. Instead Morozov, a digital-scepticist so to say, argues that digital…

Drawing on the works of David Bolter and Richard Grusin and their seminal work – “Remediation: Understanding New Media”, Leah Lievrouw analyses in ‘Alternative and Activist New Media’ (Polity Press, 2011) a series of new media activism practices. Offering a wide set of study cases and examples of such…

Wikileaks has become, in the last years, the symbol of transparency in the 21st Century. The efforts of the organization founded by Julian Assange to offer public access to relevant information about politicians, bankers and rulers of the world are reshaping not only the journalism, but also democracies and dictatorial regimes. Wikileaks, Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy…

I’m a so-called Google poweruser. Not only do I use the world’s biggest search engine for my daily queries like millions of ‘normal’ mortals do, I also use Google for my pictures (Picasa), my agenda (Google Agenda), video’s (YouTube), documents (Google Docs) and, most importantly: my e-mail (Gmail). So when a book comes along entitled: The Googlization of Everything (And…

Fig.1. Television as Digital Media book cover. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/3d3g2ly.

Have you ever wondered how remote controls have influences television viewers’ patterns across the years, or how the original Star Trek series has forever changed production patterns within the industry? If you have, then the 2011 Television as Digital Media book is for you. And if your…

When I visited Jakarta a couple of years ago I was astound by the number of mobile phones that everybody used. My aunt actually owns five different phones that all are used on a daily basis. My family has been living in Jakarta for more than forty years and they witnessed Jakarta growing into the capital city of…

Mark Deuze starts, in the introduction of his book, to argue that most students that follow studies like; journalism, advertising, games, film and television have lack of knowledge on managing their media work and industry. They know, for instance, exactly how to design a new game but ‘they are not empowered to understand how and why the industry works the…

This week I made a new (dutch) Wikipedia page about ‘Source Festival’, this is a music festival which has two editions  a year, one in July and one in February . Wikipedia Source Festival

Because this festival has had a lot visitors in the past 5 years and it’s grown larger each year,…

opaque presence instructs toward a mythology of suspended origin. Such a creation myth is necessarily one of destruction. Fully actualized, opaque presence could deposit the naked and the clothed in the Garden of Eden as a garden, an unbroken sanctuary, not a place, but a nothingness. However, the world turns more like a city. opaque…

For anyone interested in affect, mobile phones or both, my masters thesis (completed this year) is available for download.

Wendy Chun’s Programmed Visions book is the third published in a software studies book series initiated by MIT professor Matthew Fuller. Software studies is a relatively young discipine in digital humanities. Yet, it’s an emerging field, gaining momentum from the overall intrusion of software in our public spaces. As Fuller observes; “few parts of human culture remain untouched by…

A development towards the wireless is in full effect. Take for instance video game consoles like the Nintendo Wii or PlayStation 3, which make use of wireless controllers. Add the Wi-Fi for internet connectivity and the gamer is set to go and lose his or herself in an immersive experience. Or take a look at your smartphone for example, that’s…

I wrote a thesis about the new trend of gamification and specifically the gamification of the social networking site. With the gamification of the social network I am not speaking about the invasion of social games like FarmVille, but that the act of social networking itself has become game-like. For who is interested, it is available here.…

Contrary to many stories I heard before attempting to make my first contributions to Wikipedia, the actual process was not that much of a hassle at all. I made three (albeit minor) contributions, namely editing two existing entries and adding one new entry. All of my contributions are still there, in their original unedited form. Did I get lucky?

“Programming is fun” is what the artist and professor Douglas Edric Stanley declares in the book Art ++. This motto is not only an invitation to play but also the definition of the art-oriented programming.

Art++ is a recent published book that aims to demonstrate this statement. David-Olivier Lartigaud – professor in plastic art and art science…

I never thought one Wikipedia entry could go as wrong as mine has. Although it was quite easy and interesting to write such an article, keeping it turned into a true challenge. Yet, I am sad to say, it will be deleted any way on Friday, September 30th, in spite of my efforts to save it.

I thought it…