In my final blog post, I will be discussing motivations. What are some of peoples’ motivations in consuming digital media? People use digital media for various reasons. Let’s take email as an example. These days, people use email on an extremely regular basis as part of work, where email is the main communication function. Emailing serves as a way to communicate with…
Not so very long ago most computer users printed everything. They held onto their paper texts, probably also because the average pre-millennium (Windows) computer was quite unreliable and crashes happened frequently. Files were much easier damaged than nowadays. Making backups was easily forgotten, so a printed hardcopy was something to rely on. The ‘paperless office’ existed in theory, but not in practice.…
Usually I write this really upbeat blog, but today will be different. So prepare yourself for a change of pace. Normally I talk about all the advantages that the digital world entails, but for today I would like to focus on the downside of the digital world (when it comes to history). But why is the digital world bad for history? In…
‘Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.’ This was just the beginning of the fairytale of Pinocchio, an animated wooden marionette dreaming of becoming a real boy and his father, a poor woodcarver named Geppetto. One night, this old woodworker, who didn’t have a family but only a cat, Figaro, and a fish, Cleo, wished to transform his Pinocchio…
Computers can do anything or almost anything. They can even read books with the help of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Images from printed pages are converted into searchable and editable digital text. OCR has become better, that is: more accurate, over the years. Text collections like Google Books (over 25 million book titles), Project Gutenberg (57.000 free eBooks) and Delpher (in the…
During the process of writing blogs I realized that there is so much that we take for granted nowadays. Several pieces of digital structure have been normalized, people don’t think about them anymore. Additional to the fact that we don’t think about them anymore, we can also no longer imagine our lives without them. This is what I thought when I was…
I remember watching an animation film ‘Wall-E’ a few years ago. To be honest, I do not perfectly remember the full story. This one scene, however, was strong enough to linger in my memory until now. This scene depicted people sitting on advanced technology chairs, which provided humans with everything from food to clothing. It did not let humans to have any…
The time I spent on Facebook was mainly used to look at recipe GIFS and memes. The Facebook algorithm however infered I was very fond of Thierry Baudet and his political party Forum voor Democratie. Every day his face would pop up on my wall, accompanied by short clip of his most recent school visit or presentation in the parliamentary room. Sometimes…
The language of digital communication is changing over time, especially in this last decade, in which many “accessories” have been created so as to make digital spaces even more interesting. Through digital media, people can discover something new every day, something that costantly attracts their attention and that they can use with the possibility to express, or better ‘represent’, their own feelings,…
Nowadays, as media exposure to children is reaching its highest peak with the rise of digital media, media violence is often used to attract audiences. As studies proceed on media violence, it is slowly being proved that the media programs that contain violence can negatively affect children’s well-being. When children are exposed to violence continuously, their sympathy towards victims gets less intense.…