Alan N. Shapiro, Technologist and Futurist

Blog and text archive about media theory, science fiction theory, future design, social choreography, Computer Science 2.0, new media art, robots and androids, Star Trek, The Prisoner, Jean Baudrillard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Marshall McLuhan

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How can we redefine information in the age of social media?, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Information Society, Social Media

On January 24, 2012, I was a keynote speaker at the BOBCATSSS conference on Information Management in Amsterdam. The conference was organised by students from 3 universities of applied sciences, namely Hogeschool van Amsterdam (NL), Hanze Hogeschool Groningen (NL), and Stuttgart Media University (GER).
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Improving the Information Society Through Awareness of Languages, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Information Society, Language

This is the text of a paper that I presented at the ISEA2011 festival of new media, electronic and digital arts in Istanbul, Turkey on September 21, 2011.
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Jean Baudrillard and Consumer Objects, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Consumer Culture, Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard sets out to "classify a world of objects." He wants to go beyond a strictly "technological" analysis of how ordinary objects are intended - by the companies that manufacture them - to operate and to be used. He will instead study the "directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects."
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Cultural Citizenship in Contemporary America, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 12th, 2013 in Category: Consumer Culture, Jean Baudrillard

The damaged life of the fragmented individual, performing his duties in the system of production, is circumscribed by a universe of self-referential images and solipsistic spaces which sustain his socialization in that system.
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Diary of a Young Wikipedian, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 11th, 2013 in Category: Wikipedia

The great 19th century French writer Gustave Flaubert made fun of 18th and 19th century attempts to catalogue, classify, list, and record all of scientific and historical knowledge. To what extent is Wikipedia an unaware continuation of the “Enlightenment” projects that Flaubert so brilliantly mocked?
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Political Philosophy of the Information Society, by Alan N. Shapiro

February 10th, 2013 in Category: Information Society

So far in our history there is no Political Philosophy of the Information Society. We have had a Political Philosophy of liberal democracy, a Political Philosophy of capitalism, a Political Philosophy of the various historical forms of totalitarianism: Nazism, Stalinism, fascism.
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General Patton Memorial Museum

June 30th, 2011 in Category: Museum of the Future, War & Peace

I felt that the General Patton Memorial Museum, and especially the "Ed Hastey Military Vehicle Park" next to it, has some elements embodying the basic principle of the "Museum of the Future" as I conceive it.
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West Coast Vietnam Wall

June 30th, 2011 in Category: War & Peace

West Coast Vietnam Wall, Chiriaco Summit, California
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New Book Published by Geert Lovink’s Institute of Network Cultures

April 30th, 2011 in Category: Wikipedia

The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March 2010) and Leipzig (September 2010).
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Multimedia Real-Time Live In-Play Sports Gambling

April 21st, 2011 in Category: Information Society, Sports Gambling

Sports gambling at the MGM Grand Casino-Hotel, Las Vegas
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Learning to Love Androids: The Wondrous World of the Universal Scholar Alan Shapiro, by Florian Fricke

December 14th, 2010 in Category: Quantum Physics Sociology

The journalist Florian Fricke is the winner of the 2010 German Environmental Media Prize.
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A Critique of the Idea of Neutral Language, by Marc Silver

May 26th, 2010 in Category: Chaim Perelman, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, Wikipedia

There has been intense scrutiny brought to bear upon the ways in which various disciplines deploy rhetorical devices to “argue their case,” as well as to consolidate their identities and maintain them intact. Marc Silver builds his argument upon such topical foundations, but also shifts the ground in new and original ways.
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Interview about Wikipedia

April 15th, 2010 in Category: Wikipedia

I studied European Intellectual History with Dominick LaCapra at Cornell University, and I am interested in ambitious systems of knowledge classification in the West starting from the French Encyclopédistes in the 18th century and scientific positivism in the 19th century.
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Europe at War in Serbia and Kosovo, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Information Society, War & Peace

On March 24, 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization initiated a bombing campaign from 15,000 feet vectored towards designated targets inside the territory of Yugoslavia.
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Consumer Culture and Naming the Animals, by Alan N. Shapiro

April 14th, 2010 in Category: Consumer Culture, New American Studies, Roland Barthes

In his famous essay "Myth Today," published in 1957, Roland Barthes added a second dimension to the semiotic analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure, to the insight of the Swiss linguist that language is a social institution. Barthes added a social theory of culture to the social theory of language.
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