Wrapped kitteh.

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 topic of life-streams (such as fast-paced update and comment environments like Twitter or the Facebook News Feed). With an theoretical inquiry I looked into existing models of surveillance, and specifically how they are imposed, reinvented, or modified in the life-stream services. Eventually I coined the term ‘mixed surveillance’ to describe the popularization of tracking tools aimed at ‘the crowd’ while at the same time companies mine large amounts of personal data. Here, openness has thus become a commodity for both companies as well as individuals. The piece is titled as ‘Persistence in Life-streams: An Inquiry Into The Implications of Mixed Surveillance’.

I will publish my thesis on the blog once it’s graded and (when necessary) corrected. For the time being, here’s a tag cloud to get a general idea of the text: