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
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Date December 2011 / Category News
The latest report of the United Nation's special rapporteur Frank La Rue clearly condemns Internet censorship. The report strongly emphasises the right of all citizens to freedom of opinion and expression.
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.
Date August 2011 / Category News
Social media platforms have inappropriately been celebrated as enabling technologies that promote passive consumers to active producers of media content. However, this enthusiasm neglects that most social media platforms are designed for commercial means and that almost any aspect of their graphic user interface, application software design and terms of use is rendered to serve efficiently exactly these ends.
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.