Category: Media Studies

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • How can we redefine information in the age of social media?, 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.

  • 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.

  • “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.