Category: Stories, Language & Media

  • Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Does Star Trek’s worldview coincide with the unbridled high-tech enthusiasm of recent years? Or is there a tension between the show’s originality and the Borg-like assimilation of its creativity by the Star Trek industry? Focusing on the stories themselves, the author reveals the basic principles behind Star Trek that contest the ideology of mainstream technoscience.

  • Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

    The basic situation of Robinson Crusoe’s early life was that of a young man who did not want to get a job. Robinson was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family. His father was a successful businessman, a trader in “merchandise.”

  • From Sociology to Media Studies to Software Studies, part two

    Kittler opposes the so-called discourse analysis of the study of media practiced in much of the humanities, which he sees as deriving its methods from hermeneutics and literary criticism. He instead advocates a technical materialism of data storage devices, data transmission, processors, automatic writing systems, and so forth.

  • Fiktion ist der Schlüssel zu kreativen Lösungen, von Alan N. Shapiro

    Die Beschäftigung mit Fiktionen und Utopien ist nicht gerade en vogue. Erfolgreiche Transformationsbewegungen haben jedoch als Ausgangspunkt, dass ein anderes als das gegenwärtige Leben gewünscht wird oder vorstellbar ist – statt wie zur Zeit eine Hyperrealität als Zukunft zu akzeptieren.

  • What is hyper-modernism?, by Alan N. Shapiro

    In the age that we are living in of new media, new technologies, and the information society, we find ourselves to be in a very new situation in our social and individual existence. As opposed to the previous historical periods of modernity/modernism and post-modernity/post-modernism, I call this new historical situation: hyper-modernity or hyper-modernism.

  • Homage to Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism and George Orwell’s 1984, by Alan N. Shapiro

    On April 4th of a year that he presumes to be 1984, Winston Smith positions himself in a small recessed space in his apartment, the only spot from which he cannot be observed by the telescreen. He begins to tranfer his “interminable restless monologue” onto the pages of a clandestinely procured hardbound writing tablet.