Associate Professor of Media, Data & Society
CNET recently published an article on how ‘Bots now running the Internet with 61 percent of Web traffic‘. Such bots include search engine crawlers or automated search engine optimization tools but also what I refer to as tools enabling the circulation of zombie content. XKCD illustrates this with an image that draws our attention to… Read more Zombie accounts clogging the tubes of the interwebs
My article “The Algorithmization of the Hyperlink” has just been published in the third issue of Computational Culture: a journal of software studies. Abstract This study looks at the history of the hyperlink from a medium-specific perspective by analyzing the technical reconfiguration of the hyperlink by engines and platforms over time. Hyperlinks may be seen… Read more The Algorithmization of the Hyperlink
[slideshare id=20725582&doc=mit8webecologies-130507073144-phpapp01] Slides and notes from my conference presentation “Exploring the Boundaries of a Website. Using the Internet Archive to Study Historical Web Ecologies” at MiT8: public media, private media. May 3-5, 2013 at MIT, Cambridge, MA. 1. I’m Anne, a PhD candidate and lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam.… Read more MIT8 Talk: Exploring the Boundaries of a Website. Using the Internet Archive to Study Historical Web Ecologies
While I was updating my DevonThink today I visited their blog Devonian Times and noticed I missed one of the best April Fools’ jokes related to my research: CareTaker for Facebook is here! Some people say that our apps are not “social†enough now with Facebook and Twitter being still the main trends in the industry.… Read more On algorithmic friendship, a belated April Fools’ joke
My co-authored article, with colleague Carolin Gerlitz, has been published in New Media & Society in Online First on February 4, 2013. Abstract The paper examines Facebook’s ambition to extend into the entire web by focusing on social buttons and developing a medium-specific platform critique. It contextualises the rise of buttons and counters as metrics… Read more The Like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web
This short paper was written for the BOBCATSSS 2012 conference proceedings. Republished here with permission. Download as PDF: The Like Economy: The Politics of Data and Dataflows in the Social Web. Helmond, Anne. 2012. “The Like Economy: The Politics of Data and Dataflows in the Social Web.†In Proceedings BOBCATSSS 2012 – 20th International Conference on… Read more Paper: The Like Economy. The Politics of Data and Dataflows in the Social Web