Jeremy J. Shapiro

Jeremy J. Shapiro

Dr. Jeremy J. Shapiro (born 1940), is an American academic, a professor at Fielding Graduate University who works in the area of critical social theory with emphasis on the social and cultural effects of information technology and systems, social change, and the aesthetics of music. His main intellectual products/innovations include

• the concept of the universal semiotic of technological experience: a language of images, symbols, and technologies that integrates the conscious and unconscious, the public and the private, in advanced industrial civilization;
• zen socialism, an approach to socialism that focuses on the need for simultaneous change at the personal, interpersonal and social levels, blends activism and non-attachment, and aims at the minimally, rather than maximally rational society;
• mindful inquiry in social research (developed together with Valerie Malhotra Bentz), which integrates phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and Buddhism as a framework for research;
• metaphorical metadata, amplifying standard analytical and conceptual classification schemes through classification based on metaphors, symbols, and analogies;
• an expanded conception of information literacy as a liberal art (developed together with Shelley K. Hughes); and
• the notion of the streaming body (developed together with Linda F. Crafts);
• the notion that the philosopher/musicologist Theodor W. Adorno's model of how to listen to modern music based on his analysis of the individuated nature of a modern musical work is a model for how to be an individuated person in contemporary society.

In addition he works in the following areas: the sociology of digital simulation and of on-line environments; the experience of multiple identities and multiple realities among users of information and communication technologies; and enhancing the experience of music listening. He has worked as a computer programmer/analyst, as a director of academic computing and networking, and as a computer journalist. At Fielding Graduate University he is also senior consultant for academic information projects.

He studied at Harvard with Robert Paul Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr.; at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main with Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas; at Brandeis University with Maurice Stein and Kurt H. Wolff; and at the City University of New York with Abbe Mowshowitz. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis in 1976. Through his translations he introduced Habermas's work (Toward a Rational Society and Knowledge and Human Interests) and Marcuse's early work (Negations) to the English-speaking world. He has been corresponding editor for the journals Theory and Society and Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie and also writes cultural criticism and reviews.