Category: Stories, Language & Media
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Improving the Information Society Through Awareness of Languages, by Alan N. Shapiro
On January 24, 2012, I was a keynote speaker at the BOBCATSSS conference on Information Management of the organization of European university libraries in Amsterdam. On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, BOBCATSSS 2012 was organised by students from three universities of applied sciences.
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International Flusser Lecture, by Alan N. Shapiro
On July 10, 2012, I gave the International Flusser Lecture at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Related to this lecture, a small book by me in German will be published in the International Flusser Lecture series by the Walther Koenig Verlag.
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“Mad Men” and the Sociology of Advertising Consumer Culture, by Venecia Suriel de Häusler
Mad Men is a complex TV show in which topics like gender, race relations, alcoholism and chain smoking, as well as homosexuality in 1960s American society are depicted. However, the main topic of the series revolves around the strategies of advertising. Through the years, the advertising industry has promoted mass consumption.
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Macht- und Hierarchieverhältnisse am Beispiel von „The Wire“, von Jaška Klocke
Im folgenden Essay möchte ich den Versuch unternehmen, auf unterschiedliche Machtstrukturen in der ersten Staffel der US amerikanischen Fernsehserie The Wire, die von 2002 bis 2008 im Privatsender HBO („Home Box Office“) ausgestrahlt wurde, einzugehen und diese miteinander zu vergleichen.
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“The Wire” and Luhmann’s Systems Theory, by Yara Scholtis
This essay will examine the television series The Wire from a sociological point of view. There have not only been entire university seminars taught on sociological themes in The Wire, but there have also been plenty of books, essays, etc., published which focus on various topics of the TV show that are of sociological nature.
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Reality and Simulation in “The Prisoner,” by Caroline Fuchs
Number 6 is being held hostage in “The Village” for only one reason: to answer the question why did he resign. But Number 6 did not resign for personal gain (to sell the valuable information he has) but for personal reasons, rebels against his prison and refuses to cooperate.
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“Out of thin air” – Mask and Representation in “Mad Men,” by Marten Weise
The TV Show Mad Men, first broadcast in July 2007, has received a lot of positive critique and has been awarded many well-known prizes. In three consecutive years (2007, 2008 and 2009) it won the Golden Globe for The Best Television Series in the category Drama. It investigates many different topics on a televisual level.
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Time-Memory-Experience (part 4 of 4), by Anja Wiesinger and Alan N. Shapiro
We would like to look into the timeliness of the computer, the rhythm created by the machine and by the user, and the perception of time produced in the interaction between user and machine. Computers don’t have a concept of time as we know it.
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Time-Memory-Experience (part 2 of 4), by Anja Wiesinger
The object of analysis is a digital image archive. I chose ARTstor, the biggest online image library for research and education. ARTstor collaborates worldwide with other institutions to include as many collections as possible. The non-profit organization was founded in 2003, out of the urgency to make image material available by the Internet.
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Time, Memory, Experience (part 1 of 4), by Anja Wiesinger
In my Master’s Thesis in Art History, done at the Technical University of Berlin in 2011, I attempted to revise the theories and concepts that arose in the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s, when the Internet emerged from a blank canvas and served as a projection for dreams about utopian cyberspace.