On being seen naked in the bathroom by his pet cat, Derrida likens the feline’s stare to “… the gaze of a seer, visionary, or extra-lucid blind person,” (372). I am compelled to thwart such clairvoyance by putting my laptop to “sleep” before lying down myself, often as surprised at my self-consciousness before this medium as Derrida before his cat.…
Media mention the term frequently: virtual. Think of virtual worlds (Second Life), gaming environments (World of Warcraft) or simply social network sites (Facebook). Those are places that don’t exist in a physical, touchable form, except from the hosting servers. But how virtual are those virtual places?
I came up with this question while writing my BA thesis on an augmented…
My first blogpost on the Masters of Media blog should be about a topic I’m interested in., but that’s not as easy as it looks, because my interests are very wide spread. The reason why I’m following the master program of New Media at the University of Amsterdam is my interest in the use of new media in theatre and…
Do you remember the good old days? Back then, journalism used to be a respected profession. Crowned by the rhetoric of popular culture as a sort of ‘champions of truth’ (Superman, His Girl Friday, All the President’s Men), reporters played a leading role in the capitalist western democracies during the 20th century. As the saying goes, Today’s
…
The first week at the Master New Media was interesting and it gave a good view of what we will do in the upcoming year. It is nice to see that the classes consist of so many students from different nationalities and disciplines. It will be a whole new experience for me as a BA student Media en Culture. Although…
As any illustrator should be, I am obsessed by visual culture, art, design and media. The way contemporary creative conception and expression takes on new shapes and forms, catapulted through the fibre-optic network and available for all to consume, is interesting and exciting. New media have provided our visual culture with an array of new tools (hard- and software), new…
The humankind is moving online. Our work, relationships, communications, banking and even shopping can be done online today, and where possible we’ll happily take the easy ‘one click away’ shortcut, because it’s faster, more efficient and more convenient. For most, the internet is comfortable. But it’s not all so beneficial after all. Elias Aboujaoude, MD writes in his book ‘Virtually…
It is often the narcissistic tendencies of academics which alienates a much wider potential readership of their work. A use of language and content that predicates a certain level of cultural capital renders many articles inaccessible to a number of those who may of found their work illuminating. A second tendency that can turn people off academic work is…
Most people just aren’t interested in watching videogames. They’d rather be playing them. That may be the case in Europe or in the United States but not in South Korea. In South Korea watching videogames is a national pastime, millions of people watch games at enormous events, on television and online, but why?
On July 27th 2010…
The Filter Bubbler refers to the personalization processes taking place on the Web, which shape what content you see and more important what content you don't get to see. Big players like Google and Facebook feed you what they think you want, based on secret profiles of you to which you have no access. In short, you may end up in a bubble of fabricated interest, based on your personal profile of which you have no control and which you cannot correct. This book addresses these personalization processes and what their future implications might be, ranging from the doing of good to the pure evil.
What does Google know of us? Since search engines are able to track the user’s search queries, personal information can be gathered in order to improve the engine’s accuracy and provide better results. In De macht van Google (The power of Google), Peter Olsthoorn analyses the pros and cons of Google’s increasing influence on the internet.
Since the foundation in…
As a follow up of his first book, Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky now present to us the concept of Cognitive Surplus.
In previous years of this so called “new world”, criticizing the Television became a common thing. The critics are well founded since only in the U.S, 200 billion hours…
The book is recommended for people who start their new media education and/or want to get introduced to some pioneering digital artists in the Netherlands, Brazil, China, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine.
More and more often I find on Facebook things which I would rather never want to find. Sonograms of unborn children of people who I know from high school and
…
One of my favorite moments of all is when I open my mailbox and find there a letter waiting for me. I don’t mean my emai box, but the traditional letterbox. It’s always full of advertisements and bills which have to be paid but when in-between them there is a postcard or an envelope with my handwritten name on it,…
Nicolas Thély published in 2002 his PhD thesis on web intimacy. As he started doing research on webcams, Nicolas Thély was surprised to find so few (if any) specialized literature on the subject of webcams.
The book presents and analyses websites where couples broadcast a webcam image/stream to the World Wide Web.
Nicolas analyses different…
In The Murmuring of the Artistic multitude, art-sociologist Pascal Gielen reflects on the increasing co-incidence of, and structural similarities between, the mode of production and work ethos essential…
Using public transport, we leave digital traces when checking in and out with our OV chip cards. Once our Bonus Card at Albert Heijn got scanned over the counter, we provide Albert with valuable information about what we like to buy and how often we do so. Even when getting our morning Cappuccino at Starbucks and using a discount coupon on our mobile phone, it's all about moving data from one spot to another. In other words: we live in data-rich environments and our cities are gradually turning into 'readable cities'. All that, based on the vast amounts of data which we ourselves perpetually produce.
“Space: the final frontier – to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
This may be the answer Kelly was looking for when he set out to answer his own question, the title of his book and thesis. Let’s not get carried away here – I have chosen the above quote in all seriousness. The infamous Star Trek phrase…
The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading. Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine is a brilliant piece written by UCLA professor and digital media theorist Peter Lunenfeld, in which he sets out to explain his envisioning of the 21st century by analyzing the growth and fall of the dominant media and answering one, apparently easy, question:
“Who is
…