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
YouTube made a profound impact on digital culture owing to its vast number of users, and enormous and continuous repository of on-demand-video. Commentators praised it as democratizing media use, facilitating the revolution that turns the user into the producer and changes everything, or condemned it for the same or many other reasons. The popular discourse has often simultaneously overestimated and underestimated YouTube in the many often hasty and superficial statements. Few attempts have been made so far to approach YouTube critically and analytically. A first collection of articles has been provided by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer in their 2008 publication Video Vortext Reader: Responses to YouTube.
With the recently published YouTube Reader, edited by Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, a comprehensive book is available that attempts to go beyond mere description to theorize an emerging media phenomenon from different perspectives.
Date April 2009 / Category News
On May 15th 2009 the Utrecht New Media Studies program will celebrate its 10th something anniversay.
The book launch takes place on May 15th 2009 at Studio T, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20, Utrecht (NL). On this day we want to reflect on what we have achieved in the last ten years and how we have developed into a full-fledged and indispensable field of study. The day will be kicked off with a series of presentations of former student who will tell us about their professional careers after their study. In the afternoon our book Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology will be launched (AUP, eds. M. van den Boomen, S. Lammes, A.-S. Lehmann, J. Raessens and M.T. Schäfer). Lectures will be held by Geert Lovink (Institute for Network Cultures) and Florian Cramer (Piet Zwart Institute). During the day Studio T exhibits two installations: nOtbOt by Walter Langelaar and threads/ by audrey samson. Both artists will also give talks on their approach to working with 'digital material'.
Date March 2009 / Category News
Forthcoming MIT6 conference focuses on structural changes in media practices related to storage and transmission. Referring to Harold Innis' notion of time-based media such as stone or clay, and space-based media such as paper, the conference revolves around the current transformations in archiving, communication, and social organization. My contribution will analyze explicit and implicit participation in online data collections and discuss the implementation of media practices into new business models.
MIedia In Transition 6: Stone and papyrus, storage and transmission
April 24-26, MIT, Boston
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/index.html
Date October 2008 / Category News
For the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers in Copenhagen I have written a paper on explicit and implicit participation. The paper is part of a panel assembled by Kim de Vries on Community, Privacy, and Power: The Complex Relationships of Web 2.0. The panel revolves around social networking sites. Elfi Ettinger presents a research on e-recruiting platforms and the problem of out-dated data, Anders Fagerjord speaks on practices of self-representation on Facebook, Christian Ulrik Andersen focuses on games played on Facebook, and Kim de Vries discusses ephemeral communication unfolding on Facebook.
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Date August 2008 / Category News
An often recurring motif in many films and stories is a character carrying a bag or a suitcase whose content is rather mysterious, unknown or of shady nature as purloined information, stolen goods or pornography. Inspired by these underworld milieu characters, Nancy Mauro-Flude aka sister0 conceived the performance "Bag Lady 2.0", for which she designed a bag, that is able to record, store and broadcast information in real time. Images can be taken with a camera attached to the bag, a microphone records sounds, even a GPS device can apply geographical data to identify the geographical location of the recorded sites. The functions of the bag can be controlled through a small keyboard attached to the bag. Equipped with that bag sister0 roams through urban spaces to collect images and impressions, that are then transmitted through open WLANs to a server. The bag is not only an item for collecting, but also for broadcasting gathered information in realtime.
After more than a decade of the World Wide Web, the binary concept of a real and virtual worlds is finally obsolete, and global networked computers are recognized as common aspects of everyday life. Furthermore, networks and software applications constitute ecosystems intrinsically intertwined with their users' social contexts. As heterogeneous as the plurality of users and as vast as their cultural production, the Web calls for interdisciplinary approaches to tackle the many issues emerging through using and simultaneously expanding the web.
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Date March 2009 / Category News
While Amazon's Kindle is a bestseller in the United States, Europe seems still a bit slow in taking up e-readers. Producers prepare for conquering the European market. The introduction of e-book readers and their eventual effective diffusion will transform the publishing industry. An international conference organized by Florian Cramer from Rotterdam-based Piet Zwart Institute revolves around the future of publishing, paper and the transformation of reading and the book in the digital age. The program is packed with exceedingly interesting presentations by designers, publishing experts, and researchers from the cutting-edge front of media development.
PRINT/pixel, May 12-13, Willem de Kooning Akademie, Blaak 10, Rotterdam
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Date November 2008 / Category News
On Monday December 1 2008, I will defend my dissertation "Bastard Culture! User participation and the extension of cultural industries" at the University of Utrecht. The thesis supervisors are Frank Kessler and Joost Raessens. Seating on the reading committee are José van Dijck, Frank Hartmann, Toby Miller, Paul Rutten, and William Uricchio.
Date October 2008 / Category News
The annual conference of the German association for media studies (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft) hosts a panel with scholars from Utrecht University. Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Eggo Müller, Martina Roepke and MTS present four papers on amateurs and media practice.
"Hands On. Das wertvolle Wissen der Amateure. Kollaboration, Konvention und Tacit Knowledge in den digitalen Medien." This panel presents concepts for analysing media practice without following the moral framework that usually celebrates enthusiastically the alleged user participation as revolutionary change in cultural production. User activities are analysed in context of social interaction, power relations, and hands-on skills as well as the role of shaping and sharing knowledge of technology. Using case examples from P2P file sharing, Flickr and YouTube, the four presentations discuss user activities as practice of design appropriation and as implementation into commercial applications.
Jahrestagung 2008, "Was wissen Medien?", October 2-4 2008, Institute for Media Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft
Tags conference German
Date August 2008 / Category News
While so far Europe's politicians have luckily been unable to install a centrally organized police authority that spies on its citizens and strips them of their citizens rights, the United States has witnessed the emergence of a powerful and frightening authority that threatens to invade all areas of private life and monitor all citizens. The Department for Homeland Security seems to top all Orwellian nightmares.
How unbalanced and unquestioned power, paired with the excessive use of information technology for surveillance and pattern recognition is undermining democracy and constituting repression is described in a timely novel by Cory Doctorow.
Tags Review