Sixty-five years ago the Second World War ended, but it is still with us today. Especially in the Netherlands, grandchildren (like me) listen to their grandparents telling stories about “The War”. For me, and many others for that matter, World War Two has a special meaning as well. For decades now, war (and WW2) has been a pervasive theme in game culture. And when the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport approached me to contribute to a magazine marking the end of WW2, I combined the memories of my grandmother with my own view on virtual war. The result is an article titled “De strijd gaat virtueel verder”. The 34-paged book/magazine, titled “Voorbij maar niet verdwenen”, is freely downloadable here as a .pdf (7MB). The project has its own special website, keep an eye on it because mid-March there will an interactive version of the book (including videos, music etc.). For anybody even remotely interested in WW2, I recommend you to pick up, or download, a copy. There are high quality contributions by renowned Dutch journalists, historians and academics. On top of that, the magazine just looks great.

Utrecht University (my alma mater) has a vibrant (new media) student community and a very good student magazine called BLIK. I sat down with the magazine’s editor and had a long conversation about my views on social politics, the Obama campaign and new media in general (of course, in Dutch). The result is a 6-page interview, you can download the .pdf here. I had a decent amount of interviews on this subject but I think this interview captures my recent thinking on this subject really well! Also, the magazine looks great.

Summary from BLIK’s website:

Alhoewel het voorheen een onderbelicht thema bleek in BLIK komt in beide interviews van deze uitgave de wisselwerking tussen politiek en nieuwe media uitgebreid aan bod. Toepasselijk, want precies een jaar geleden behaalde de Amerikaanse presidentskandidaat Barack Obama een historische overwinning die ten minste ten dele te danken was aan een innovatieve inzet van nieuwe media tijdens diens verkiezingscampagne. UU alumnus en nu docent Nieuwe Media aan de UvA David Nieborg ervoer als vrijwilliger in het campagneteam van Obama van dichtbij de politieke bevlogenheid van de Amerikaanse burger. In ons openingsinterview vertelt hij hoe hij in Nederland die bezieling voor politiek en nieuwe media vooralsnog mist.

Last Tuesday (January 26), I participated in a debate on “Individu 2.0”. The debate was hosted by Christian student organizations to prepare for their Easter gathering where they will tackle religious and societal issues. As an outsider/expert I was asked to share my thoughts on the mediatization of everyday life, together with Jan van der Stoep (affiliated with the Christelijke Hogeschool Ede). It was an insightful debate. Jan and I agreed on many counts which made the debate a little bit less spectacular, but for me it was good to have some outsider conformation on some deep felt thoughts and opinions on new media.

What I did not expect was that the debate would spark the interest of two attending journalists of the two leading Dutch Christian newspapers. At the end of the debate the students asked about my views on (Dutch) politics and new media, as well as the rise of the Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders. In a nutshell, I think social networks (Youtube, Facebook, Hyves, Twitter etc), could be a valuable (additional!) avenue to discuss politics and to voice one’s concerns about the deep seated fear (and sometimes hatred) towards “others” (i.e. non-native Dutch citizens). I might be hopelessly naive here, but I think engaging in a debate in this particular case (through movies, pictures, blogs, etc), and taking the concerns of those-who-fear very seriously (instead of trivializing the Wilders supports’ genuinely felt fear-of-others) could be one way out of a xenophobic, divided political future. There’s way more to this issue, and my argument is much more nuanced, but this is one of the points I made during the debate.

The debate’s media fallout was illustrative and focused on my views on social networks and politics and used my quotes in their headlines. The best article ended up in the newspaper (first link). The two other articles surfaced immediately after the debates on the newspapers’s websites.

- ‘Gebruikers netwerksites zijn machthebbers’. Nederlands Dagblad. January 28, 2010, page 6.
- „Twitter en Facebook zijn machtige wapens”. Reformatorisch Dagblad. January 27, 2010.
- ‘Netwerksites gaan Wilders stemmen kosten’. Nederlands Dagblad. January 27, 2010.

My research school is offering three PhD Fellowships starting in September 2010. Application deadline is February 8th, 2010. If you need tips / feedback on a proposal or something like that, you know where to find me. More information here.

Located at the Faculty of Humanities at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) brings together scholars active in literature, philosophy, visual culture, religious studies, film and media studies, and argumentation theory. Specialists in their own respective fields, they share a commitment to working within an interdisciplinary framework and to maintaining a close connection with contemporary cultural and political debates within society at large and with the cultural institutions outside of the narrow confines of the academic world. Within ASCA they have joined forces to provide a stimulating environment for scholars, professionals, and graduate students both from the Netherlands and abroad.

Good day to you from beautiful Minneapolis! The coming months (October and November) will be busy in terms of presentations, lectures and talk. All of them will be in The Netherlands. This is an additional set of talks I will be doing, the complete list is here. There might be one or two more but they are not confirmed yet. I’ll update the list with links and titles the coming weeks. Most of these talks are public, so if you want more information, drop me an email!

- 2009. (Oktober 23, 24). “Workshop Game Journalistiek”. (Working title). GameXperience 2009. Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Hilversum.

- 2009. (November 4). “Follow the money: New Media and Politics”. (Working title). Talk at: Het mes in de democratie, Studium Generale, Hogeschool van Utrecht.

- 2009. (November 27). “The Cultural Games Industry” (Working title). Paper to be presented at: Participating in a mediated world. Platform for Communication, Media, and Information (CMI) within the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Amsterdam.

- 2009. (November 30). “Nieuwe Media: An Introduction” (Working title). Lecture for the course Mediageschiedenis.

My talk on New Media & Politics – “Obama’s campagne. Tussen hoop en hype” – for Studium Generale Universiteit Utrecht (SGUU) was a big success! The room (or lecture hall) was packed with about 100 people attending and 140 people tuned into the live stream. As I said, I was very honored to open such a promising lineup. The questions from the audience were very good and provided me with a lot of food for thought.

But even better, you can watch the entire talk online (with slides!), including the Q&A session, here. You have to have Silverlight installed (with is a OS independent plug-in). If you look on Twitter (using the #sguu tag) you can see some commentary there as well.

Something completely different; I wrote a short bit on America’s Army for the STT newsletter. Download the article’s pdf here. STT (De Stichting Toekomstbeeld der Techniek) is a non-profit think tank where Jacco van Uden is working on a white paper on serious gaming, hence my article on America’s Army. If you have not met him and you are working in the field of serious gaming you might want to contact him, he is working on some great stuff!

Tomorrow at 11.30 (am) Tanja Sihvonen and I will do our presentation on game journalism at DiGRA09 (Digital Games Research Association). Paper is titled: “The New Gatekeepers? On the occopational ideology of game journalists”. You can download the paper here. If you’re at DiGRA, do come by! If you have any questions about the paper, you know where to find me.

Even though book reading season might be over for many of us, Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games seems essential reading for those scholars interested in war & games. As blogged below, the book is available at Amazon or at the publisher’s homepage. For Dutch/Europeans, Bookdepository.co.uk, as always, has the best deal, 21.50 euro for the paperback (free shipping), I have good experiences with them.

There’s more official info at the publisher’s webpage. I contributed the third chapter. The table of contents is after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am very humbled and proud to present “Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos”. An article I co-authored with my professor José Van Dijck, it appeared in New Media & Society (vol 11, no. 5). It is an article (and an argument) I deeply care about, it took some time (two years) to get published but now it’s finally here. I think I am allowed to share the proofs. Here’s the abstract:

‘Collaborative culture’, ‘mass creativity’ and ‘co-creation’ appear to be contagious buzzwords that are rapidly infecting economic and cultural discourse on Web 2.0. Allegedly, peer production models will replace opaque, top-down business models, yielding to transparent, democratic structures where power is in the shared hands of responsible companies and skilled, qualified users. Manifestos such as Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) and ‘We-Think’ (Leadbeater, 2007) argue collective culture to be the basis for digital commerce. This article analyzes the assumptions behind this Web 2.0 newspeak and unravels how business gurus try to argue the universal benefits of a democratized and collectivist digital space. They implicitly endorse a notion of public collectivism that functions entirely inside commodity culture. The logic of Wikinomics and ‘We-Think’ urgently begs for deconstruction, especially since it is increasingly steering mainstream cultural theory on digital culture.

So, yeah, long time no blogpost. It’s not that it is that much work, but, you know…

For those who are wondering what I’ve been up to, let me lay out my agenda here. My main goal for the summer is to work on my PhD. It is coming along nicely and it is as much a process of redrafting as it is writing new stuff. As I’m writing this I’m once again at Schiphol Airport on my way to the US of A to spend some days in Minneapolis. Very much look forward to it, making new friends, BBQ’ing, roadtripping etc. This month I will wrap up our paper (co-writer is the beloved Tanja Sihvonen) for the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) 09 conference in London early September. The essay is titled “The new gatekeepers: The occupational ideology of game journalism” and reflects on the current status of game journalism. Much of the essay is based on our work as journalists (me in the Netherlands, Tanja in Finland). The line-up for the DiGRA conference looks quite packed but when I glanced over it I saw we were the only ones talking about game journalism, so I hope we can break some new ground here.

Talking about journalism, you might have heard my work for Dagblad De Pers has ended for the time being. I might pick up some special projects or small reviews, but for now I will not fill a page every Monday. De Pers is kinda broke and they could not afford me anymore. My editor will pick up where I left off. In the end it’s a good thing, I need to fully focus on my PhD and after 2.5 years (and 80+ articles later) it’s time to move on.

August will all about my PhD. In addition, I will work on two (academic) book chapters; one for a Dutch book on the game industry; my chapter will be, again, about game journalism (how to become one and how to navigate through the minefield that it is). The second book chapter will be for a book called “CounterPlay: Playing games against the rules”, edited by Jack Post and Jan Simons (to be published by Amsterdam University Press). A third project I will wrap up this summer is a short non-academic book chapter on war games. The book is titled “Oorlog. Voorbij maar niet verdwenen” (working title) and is kind of a neat project commemorating World War II. The line-up of authors is impressive and the foreword might be written by a very (VERY) famous Dutch VIP. Would be kinda cool to be in the same book as Them (yes, that’s a hint).

That is it for now, enjoy your summer!