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
Date April 2011 / Category News
The recent edition of the Newmediastudies.nl magazine features a collection of brief articles discussing some of the topics students dealt with in their research projects about new media and participatory culture. All projects were interested in aspects of user participation and convergence.
Date November 2010 / Category News
The so-called Web 2.0 and social media are enthusiastically embraced as enabling technologies turning alienated couch potatoes into active producers of media content. But what is actually so social about 'social media'?
From the outside it looks like an oversized camping tent, from the inside it is more like a space station. World in a Shell is a complete high-tech living environment that perfectly fits into a standard freight container.
Monday, June 14 at 17.00, well-known media theorist and founder of the Software Studies Initiative Lev Manovich will visit Utrecht to give a lecture on Cultural Analytics, his ongoing project aimed at using interactive visualisations to analyse massive cultural data sets.
Date April 2010 / Category News
Hosted by the Institute for Network Cultures a conference focused on Wikipedia from a critical point of view. Core issues were the politics behind the collective encyclopaedia, the processes of collaboration, the unfolding power structures and the creation of knowledge. A group of students affiliated with Utrecht's New Media and Digital Culture covered talks and interviewed speakers.
Report on the conference Wikipedia. A Critical Point of View (pdf; in Dutch)
Conference summary, resources and videos at the Institute for Network Cultures
Date February 2011 / Category News
Last week Amsterdam University Press released my book Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production. Published under a Creative Commons license, the entire book is available as download. The book is an updated and expanded version of my 2008 dissertation and includes a new chapter on the discourse on 'social media'. My aim in this project has been to deconstruct the ideological connotation of participation and to offer a pragmatic view on technology and media practices in digital culture.
Tags Book publication
While the new materiality of digitized media content has radically challenged the music and film industry, the publishing industry seemed to feel comfortable neglecting the changing reality of the media business. But then major news papers blamed their decreasing revenues on freely accessible web content, and paint a dark picture of a future lacking proper journalism and diverse media, most ominously, the vanishing of printed papers and magazines. Time for a reality check: It appears that there is not only a demand for print but there are also smart publishers producing innovative print products.
'Safe Passage' is an online game that demonstrates how the Israelian blockade of Gaza affects civil life, confining citizens to a limited space, depriving them of education, the freedom to chose a job, an appartment or to travel to visit relatives and friends.
While other newspapers have recently decided to lock their content behind paid-access gates or even exclude it from search engines, the Guardian chooses a timely approach for its archive. With the Guardian Open Platform, the British newspaper makes its archive accessible for users who can integrate the content into all kinds of mash-up sites and web applications. The benefits are mutual, of course: while users gain access to a large archive of newspaper content, the Guardian turns dead data into a dynamic resource that will thrive on the labour of others and simultaneously reach audiences for advertising.
Date April 2010 / Category News
SetUp is an initiative that aims at establishing a permanent medialab in Utrecht. For the next three month the abandoned ABN Amro building at the Neude serves as playground, work space and meeting place for the various stakeholders and participants in new media development in Utrecht.