Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
with Bernhard Rieder: Beyond Engineering. Software Design as as Bridge over the Culture / Technology Dichotomy.
Paper, presented at SPT Conference: Technology and Designing. TU Delft (NL), July 22 2005
download paper: Beyond Engineering
An overwhelming majority of the EU Parliament's members rejected the directive "on the patentability of computer implemented inventions", also known as the software patent directive.
Thanks to the information campaigns of concerned citizens and responsible politicians Europe's IT companies and software developing communities are able to proceed providing innovation and building up a growing cultural ressource.
More at FFII
During the last semester I was supervising a group of new media students. They work on various topics related to new media and computer technology. As different as their interest are their papers; they cover a dazzling array of topics and all of them bring up important issues. Here is a selection of the papers I found most interesting.
Koen Leurs: Exploring pedophilia: a pragmatic inventory of the pedophilic discourse observed from a digital media perspective (bachelor thesis)
Koen Leurs provides a foucauldian analysis of the discourse on paedophilia. He identifies the different participants and actors within this discourse and the various strategies and technologies they use. The paper was presented on the Netporn Conference.
Download the thesis as pdf.
Bram Timmers: Netlabels and Open Content (master thesis)
In his thesis Bram Timmers maps the emerging cultural production of netlabels and analyzes production and distribution processes online as an alternative mode of the culture industry. Download the thesis as pdf.