Masters of Media

In today’s highly competitive market companies are increasingly turning to look at how to best attract one of their most valuable resources: people (Wilson and Sayers, 1997). Facing the troubles concerned with the phenomenon of ‘jobhopping’, the tendency of young professionals to switch jobs at a higher rate than previous generations (Leader-Chivée & Cowan, 2008), companies feel the

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I’ve always thought that in order to understand a network, like the web, better, we should be able to understand as much of the objects and actors that the network itself is made of, as possible. Whilst finishing my BA in Communication and Media Studies, I wanted to write my thesis about how/whether the structure of

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Video games have changed dramatically over the last decades. There is obviously a big gap between 1958’s Tennis For Two and the games we play now on our consoles or PC. Of course, the rapid evolution of new technology is one of the most important factors for today’s variety of games. Another wave of opportunities came when the Internet…

For our next Blog we were given the assignment to write a proposal for a social media research. Social media, a term Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content”. Social media are…

Despite having over 100 friends and former classmates in my friends list on a popular Russian social networking site Odnoklassniki.ru, I left it following a brief Russian-Georgian war in August 2008 and joined an increasing number of people in Georgia who preferred to stick to other popular social networking website Facebook only. “I am…

Social networking sites allow a user to have all the combined knowledge of their social groups at their fingertips. It is no wonder that the Facebook status tool, for example, has been re-appropriated for question asking purposes.

Even outside the designated question tool, a brief scroll through my feed throws up numerous questions being asked by friends in order…

The growth of the Internet has made us reconsider concepts that stood strong for decades. Boundaries that we knew have disappeared or shifted to an extend we could not have imagined in the early 80’s. What is private and what is public? We share much more information freely, with a larger audience which we canno see. What happens to our…

In this postmodern age, McLuhan’s thoughts about medium as an extension of ourselves seems more and more accurate. However, if the medium is us and we are the medium, how we can detach from it?

Nowadays, social media is one of the main examples of how integrated we can be. With every information just…

First of all, let me warn you that this week's blog post is a bit more personal than my previous entries. Furthermore, I also fall victim to relating everything I write about social networking sites to Facebook, Twitter and Google+. This said, please join me on my journey through social networking land, towards a possibly clouded future.

Writings on the value of user generated content tend to stress the (market) value users produce for companies such as Facebook by adding content, labeling these activities as "free labor". Assuming that there must also be something in it for the users generating the content, this text proposes ways to assess the amount of monetary and social value users gain from engaging in these activities.

According to McLuhan’s ‘medium in the message’ concept, the medium influences how the message is perceived. Besides of light bulbs, this idea functions also in social media that happen to extend relations between not only people, but companies and other subjects of communication and often this is the medium what makes the process more interesting and engaging.

In this research…

I love statistics. I love seeing my Facebook friend count increase. I love looking at what songs I played most in my iTunes. (Unless it is an artist that is too embarrassing to love. Luckily you can reset this statistic.) Loving statistics is really great nowadays, since our computers and the internet are keeping track of everything. On Twitter, every…

Last monday, just after the first lecture, I went home sick. Not that much of a problem, thank God, but I forgot to ask about the assignment at all. Luckily, Geert was so kind as to send me an e-mail in which he asked me to write about ‘why I hate Social Media’. At first, I was a bit confused…

As the fever of Geolocation apps continues, Waze seems to stand out with integration in different medias and personal communication among their users.

Waze is a GPS application available for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Nokia and Windows Mobile that blended geolocation with crowdsourcing. Waze is a GPS system that uses people’s input to create the maps. With…

‘The most fun thing about going out is when you run into friends unexpectedly. With Hangouts, this sort of meeting becomes possible on the internet for the first time. Let your friends know you’re available and find out who will join your video chat. Until we perfect teleportation, this is the best option.’ (Translation of the Dutch introduction to

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Today was the official release of Iphone 5. Oops, IPhone 4S I mean.

I followed through the NY Times and The Guardian’s  live blogs and Twitter. While I was overwhelmed with an incredible amount of data, #letstalkiphone quickly become the number one worldwide trend topics with 40 tweets per minute,…

I am a part of a small group of new media students who have set the wheels in motion on a practical project designed to study the affect that anonymity has in regards to honestly online. We intend to investigate how people responded to anonymity on social platforms online by giving users the agency to choose how…

The Question

Academic research on Twitter has been rife since it hit off in 2006, with significant focus on two topics in particular- that of privacy and identity. Much that has been written by scholars of Twitter has generally been cautious, negative (labeling privacy as a problem) or positive in the sense of data accumulation (i.e what can be inferred…

In my first post I shared my primary interest: Governments & New Media. For this particular research, I propose to look into a very specific part of government’s new media use: recruiting for the military. As most Western countries got rid of the draft, recruiting an all volunteer military force is a significant challenge. In the old days,…

There is no doubt about the impact of social media in the last years. More than a half of the total Internet users have active profiles in networks like Facebook, Google+ and Diaspora* in the near future, hopefully. What makes these webs important is not the model of communication they try to impose, but the…