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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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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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.