Shoords Spaceless Place

Although the book still remains (unread) in my Amazon Wishlist, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains has been thoughtfully scrutinized by assistant professor Zeynep Tufekci. Here’s one of the memorable paragraphs from the review in which Tufekci discusses (or rather contests) contemporary online pop-culture (or ‘memetics’) as the evidence [...]

There’s currently an interesting discussion going on on Ian Bogost’s blog about academic clichés like “I’d like to argue..”:
“Mumblespeak makes potentially interesting works unreadable, contributing to their esotericism. Good editing does not involve cutting material, but cutting chaff. I’d wager that the average scholarly book’s length could be reduced by 1/3 to [...]

With weeks of social isolation, and an increasing amount of repetitive strain injuries, last week was finally the time to hand in the New Media master thesis! After having the essential meetings and discussions with UvA professor R. Rogers (honestly, planning is still not my strongest point), I finally got some grip on the main [...]

Since the release of the popular music streaming service Spotify in The Netherlands this week, my Twitter-stream exploded with messages from enthusiasts who were waiting for months for Spotify to expand its streaming empire. So now the application’s here, along with a massive database of music, and localized advertising for – for example – (in)famous bourgeoise singers, [...]

The Dutch consumers union, the ‘Consumentenbond’, wants to reach new audiences. With their monthly magazine, readers can figure out which broom or coffee machine is the best buy, often leaving out impurities of production methods (well, not always). This time, noticed by a friend, they announced a debate to be held on Twitter. The topic would [...]

Whenever there’s something happening in the Massive-Multiplayer Online RPG field, I find myself searching for what all the fuzz is about. This time it was with Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO). In this case, especially as D&D newbie, it is again very hard to find the significances. But hey, I take it as a challenge.
Not [...]

A while ago, when hanging out at my place with a few friends, we we’re checking out the different games I had download on my Playstation 3. As I eagerly demonstrated them one by one, I didn’t really succeed at enthusing Battlefield 1943 (BF1943) for what I think it is: a blend between an arcade [...]

The following article was also posted on the Masters of Media blog:
Over the years Twitter has gradually developed, meanwhile its practices have also changed drastically. The contemporary celebrities took their places, the early adopters started exploring the potentials while lobbying about it and ultimately the platform rapidly started to expand in terms of functionality. Although [...]

The following article was also posted on the Masters of Media blog:
Nowadays, many of the popular social network sites are advanced platforms that more or less evolved from simple community platforms or fora. Where Myspace, Friendster and The WELL (later the Dutch De Digitale Stad popped up as a similar landmark) took off during the [...]

The following article was also posted on the Masters of Media blog:
From the day of birth of the Wikipedia project, the online encyclopedia has been a highly controversial case. The debates range from information accuracy (including the inquiry of the information-knowledge relation once again) to the pyramidic usermodel (often undermined as too free or too [...]