Masters of Media

The praxis and technology of photography has seen dramatic transformations over the last century. The most obvious transformations taking place in the last decade of the 20th century, marking the shift from analog to digital photography. Yet another shift is surfacing all over the web, a shift that has been initiated a few years ago with the introduction of the…

The Find Magazine is a global collective of music lovers dedicated to promoting the diffusion of hip hop, jazz, funk, soul, and related genres. We are inspired by the culture of ‘crate digging’ and thus constantly scour the dusty corners of record shops and outskirts of the internet to find the best music for you.

The Find…

Robot butlers, flying cars, invisibility cloaks, super powers, nutrition through pills, teleportation, time travelling; we all know these future predictions from the movies and comic books. Some developments seem plausible, others improbable. They play roles in our daydreams and in fictive stories. Part of them probably won’t be around any time soon, part of them might never be invented by…

In her 2010 TED speechJane McGonigal states that an average we invest 3 billion hours weekly playing online games. Also, Nick Yee (2006, 70) estimates that the MMORPG player spends on average 22 hours a week playing the game. Considering that this player has an average of 26, it can be argued that they have…

When the new media law for Hungary was passed on 21st of December 2010, many people were outraged at how much of a setback it was for press freedom in Hungary. A Facebook page named “One million people for the freedom of the Hungarian press” gained huge attention when it organized its first protest on 14th of January 2011…

How about an introduction: *Scroll down for the interview!

The Hype Machine is a website that keeps track of what music bloggers post on their blogs. A selection of blogs are selected by the makers of the website. The careful selection of the blogs is what makes the quality of the website: official labels, Dj blogs with their own…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tuesday 25th of October I went to see a conference in Brussels of The Netexplorateur Observatory at Institut des Hautes Etudes des Communications Sociales (IHECS). This observatory is formed of sociologists that analyse hundreds of innovation in the area of new media. Every year international experts select the 100 most interesting…

“Knowledge sharing and creation is at the heart of innovation in all fields – science, art and business – and innovation is the driving force for wealth creation... Information can be transferred in great torrents, without any understanding or knowledge being generated. Knowledge cannot be transferred; it can only be enacted, through a process of understanding, through which people interpret information and make judgements on the basis of it. ... Great tides of information wash over us every day. We do not need more information, we need more understanding.” Charles Leadbeater, Living on Thin Air, 2000.

With new smart phones and GPS tracking, it’s possible to find and locate the position of other smart phones and the human body that goes with it. But is this legal? Does privacy still exist? Japanese women apparently don’t care about privacy; they just want to know why their boyfriend is late for dinner for the fourth time…

What is Hack de Overheid (hack the government)?

Hack de Overheid is an event where hackers, government officials and journalists come together to work with government data. Hack de Overheid thinks that at this moment there are a lot of government bodies who are not working with open data and are missing out on some very good ways to…

In yesterday’s class we discussed the development of free software and open source. A major shift has been taking place, albeit in a slow pace, from proprietary software to a more open and free form. This change is described by the likes of Eric S. Raymond in his seminal paper “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. In it Raymond makes an…

The following is an interview with the founder of dutchdamage, Matthijs van der Meulen, currently head of the digital media department at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Q: How did Dutchdamage come into being?

A: In 1996 I started taking pictures with an analog compact camera of my…

The computational era we currently live in overwhelms us with the latest gadgetry, fidgets and means of communications. It is a tidal wave of new media micro-evolutions which we engulf ourselves in every day. Its innovational force moves so fast that it cannot be properly studied; by the time a new product comes on the market, it…

On Saturday 5 November, the Wikimedia foundation held a conference in Utrecht. I took the opportunity to go there and write this report about it. Because of the size I decided to split it in two parts. The first is mainly about Cultural heritage and Creative Commons, the second part is about Wikipedia itself. 

The Wikimedia foundation…

This is part 2 of my report on the Wikimedia conference 2011. The first part can be found here

Teun Lucassen – Wikipedia is reliable [Citation needed]

Almost all the sessions in the cultural heritage track were presentations about a certain project. This was interesting but not something I had not heard yet. It therefore chose to go…

Note: This posting will continue in Dutch. This because translating the interview would be a waste of fine Dutch language, used by the interviewee – believe me, I’ve tried. Also, he is a Dutch celebrity who appears on Dutch TV and talks in Dutch about and with other Dutch people who happen to live in Holland. ‘Nough said.

Click here…

In the current literary landscape of mobile phones and mobile culture it’s rare to find a title that’s both playful and insightful. In fact, most titles concerning mobile-mediated communication are text tomes: although interesting, also dense. Occasionally you’ll come across a paper or article describing an art project using mobile phones that is usually delightful and sadly almost always on the periphery of major journal literature. That’s why Dis Connecting Media elbows its way into a unique position.

For those of you interested in Commercials and marketing:

The Marketing Association Amsterdam organizes the Amsterdam Commercial Night on Friday the 18 November 2011.

This year’s theme is “Interactivity Brings People Together”. The evening will be filled with (inter)national commercials and interesting speakers from Wash&Coffee by Henkel, Heineken & De Telefoongids.

This year, visitors will play an important…

The world-renown International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam officially kicks off its 10 day program today, permeating itself across theaters around the city . Perhaps less known but more exciting for the ‘new media crowd’ is IDFA DocLab, a unique division and platform dedicated to showcasing innovation in digital documentary storytelling.

Whether termed ‘new media film projects’,…

Weibo is the chinese name for “Micro blog”, which was born two years ago, but now has already reached millions of users. Because of the strict censorship in China, the birth of weibo is the same as the birth of “Xiaonei”, “kaixin”, which fills the vacancy of international social network sites like “

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