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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The Future of the Image (part one), by Alan N. Shapiro

February 1st, 2013 in Category: Marshall McLuhan, Vilem Flusser

Marshall McLuhan believed in a certain historical sequence, an episodic history, a radical break between book culture and the newer electronic era. However, when we start to seriously read the works of another great media theorist, Vilém Flusser, we start to see that McLuhan was, in some ways, incorrect.
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The Car of the Future, by Alan N. Shapiro and Alan Cholodenko

February 15th, 2012 in Category: Car of the Future, Donna Haraway, Future Design, Gregory Bateson, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio, Real/Virtual Reality

In November 2008, Alan N. Shapiro was invited by Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany to speak about his ideas about "the car of the future." He spoke in front of an audience of people from the Human-Machine Interface Dept. and and the Infotainment Dept. This text was written as accompaniment to that presentation.
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McLuhan and Baudrillard: Making Science Fiction a Lot More Real

February 5th, 2011 in Category: Jean Baudrillard, Marshall McLuhan

In Douglas Coupland's recent book on McLuhan, it says that Baudrillard is McLuhan's "rightful successor." I see futurism as being the grounds where this great Canadian thinker and this great European thinker meet.