Refreshing

By Matthijs Rotte on 24 February 2012

When I was younger, I used too feel I had to go out. I had to meet my friends in bars, parks and squares to have a drink and socialize. I felt this way because I had the feeling that when I was not there, I was missing out. This feeling of not wanting to miss out was so powerful that for some time I argued with my parents in the middle of the night, because they were not agreeing with me going out yet again. This is called puberty.

tagged with: curiosity, social network sites, facebook

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The filter bubble

By Matthijs Rotte on 19 September 2011

The amount of information available to us has exploded in the last couple of decades. With the enormous amount available comes the need to filter this information. Filtering the information we want to have has become big business. Just look at Google or Facebook. These information giants control a lot of what we see online. Of course we have some influence on what we see. But it’s just the illusion of that total control that’s the problem.
We’ve been talking about media literacy for a couple of years now, and what strikes me is that a lot of people that consider themselves media literate, don’t even know that Google arranges their ads and results based on your previous searches and visited websites. The same thing counts for Facebook. Facebook looks at what friends you interact most with, and puts them on the top of the list. Pretty nifty, and handy. But there’s a problem. If the company’s that control the filters filter everything they presume you like. How are you supposed to get balanced information. In other words, it seems that everyone online surrounding me is talking about the same thing. This is what’s come to be known as the “filter bubble”. Your online life is in a bubble created by filters. This phenomenon is not new. In a way it’s a form of censorship, I believe. Just imagine that a government decided what we find if we search. I bet the American Tea Party would be quite upset if it was the federal government filtering their search results. I imagine some comparisons to socialist regimes, and a couple of Nazi comparisons as a result. I wonder what Glenn Beck would have to say about that. Wonder if he filters information…
I assume that these filters are in place to make our lives easier, to find the information, we probably want to find, faster. And I for one do not object to that. As long as I know that I’m in my bubble. And as long as I can get out of the bubble, there’s no problem, is there?
Ah well, probably only the people interested in the CrossmediaLab will find this blog in their bubble.

tagged with: filter bubble, google, facebook

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Like! part deux

By Matthijs Rotte on 16 June 2011

As I promised, I’d think about liking. And so it came to pass that I did. For weeks I pondered about liking. I have come to realize that the “like” has a lot of aspects to it. I’ve been thinking about liking. How liking things helps us make sense of the world surrounding us. In a way, what we like defines us. If you are surrounded by things that you like, does it make you happy? I can imagine it will, so we tend to collect likable things and people around us. So we can create a personal utopia, built out of the things we like. We teach our kids to like certain things, so that we can share the pleasure of our liking. We meet new people and friends in places we like. Or we go to places people we like, like. Liking is emotion. 

tagged with: emotions, social media, like, facebook

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Like!

By Matthijs Rotte on 23 May 2011

I like a lot of things. I like snowboarding, I like to have a drink with friends, I like to have a good conversation, I like lobster, I like good wine, and so on and so on. People that know me well, know what I like. The basis of friendship is liking each other and doing things together you both like or love doing. Friendship starts when you’re doing something you like doing and meet someone with the same “likes”, we call the “interests” mostly. The same counts for doing things you loathe doing as well. This of course fits in the day and night equation(if there’s nothing to loathe, there’s nothing to like). This is the basis for fraternity or sorority initiation, make a bunch of people do stuff they loathe and the start liking eachother. This is also known as teambuilding. My point? Liking or loathing is a very big part of our social life, maybe even the very base of having one.

tagged with: like, social network sites, facebook, social media

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Hello, I'm the Mayor

By Matthijs Rotte on 6 April 2011

A year ago now, I started using foursquare, just to see what it is all about. Let’s call it a professional interest. I was the only one I knew who used it, expect for the guy who introduced me to the service. Nowadays my colleagues started using it and it’s become great fun. At least, I think so. Just this morning I ousted one of our graduate students who got to be the mayor of the University in my weeks absence when in Africa. A couple of weeks later I got it back. And it brings me joy…

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Life's a Pitch

By Matthijs Rotte on 13 January 2011

Yesterday the new batch of graduate students pitched for a place in the CrossmediaLab graduate program. There was some sweat, some anxiety and some stuttering, but all in all the students did good presentations. But now! Now the work starts, sculpting the students into researchers is a painstaking process. I know, I once was a graduate student at the crossmedialab. Frustration, tons of literature and blank sheets of paper (that always seem to be winning the staring contest) are just a couple of the things waiting for them. But as I recall from my own time as a graduate student at the Lab, I learned a lot and I had a lot of fun.

tagged with: usability, pitch, graduation, social, mobile, Marketing

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Video: Merry Xmas!

By Matthijs Rotte on 17 December 2010

tagged with: gelukkig nieuwjaar, vakantie, holiday, xmas, chrismas, kerst

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The Privacy issue

By Matthijs Rotte on 14 June 2010

,,Google is watching you”, is a phrase you hear more and more often. A lot of people tend to get more and more afraid of Google. Reason? They know what you search for, if you have a Gmail account they know what you are emailing about and so on. Google logs your data in order to improve their service to their customers. We all want better service, but we are afraid of giving information to Google. There is an option to opt out though.

tagged with: google, privacy, facebook

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Unpredictability

By Matthijs Rotte on 21 April 2010

As I’m writing this blog I’m looking out my window. I see grass and think: ,,aaaah, Fresh air, nature..” minutes after that I realize that it is not. This is manmade nature. Nature is not something we want to have outside my window. Nature is unorganized and unpredictable. So we cultivated it and brought a small part of manmade nature between four walls, so we can enjoy nature without the nasty side effects like bugs, rodents, mud and unexpected tree trunks we can fall over. That last case by the way is never our own fault, somehow it’s the tree’s. We’ve cultivated everything to such extent that we banned nature from our lands. We let it on there in tiny controllable bits; we don’t like to be surprised by an unexpected flower.

tagged with: realism, nature, unexpected, social media

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Mediabattle

By Matthijs Rotte on 13 February 2010

Last week students of the Universities of applied sciences Utrecht and Enschede took part in a media battle. The concept of the battle was quite simple; Five companies presented a real life case before the students which they had to find a solution to. The companies presented them with cases varying from funeral services to branding of a region. All this in only two and a half days time whilst working in teams of three or four. The challenge was on.

tagged with: target group, mediabattle, crossmedia

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